Broad Essex accents fill the stage in Danny Lee Wynter’s sprawling family drama. The busy script from the Black Superhero playwright is crammed with a fractious extended family treading heavily over old arguments, but the production sings when an old friend swans back into town. Set across the 80s and 90s in the shadow of the Aids crisis, this story’s beating heart travels around on tap shoes.
Quiet teenager Ted (Leo Whitfield Harris in his stage debut) is surrounded by the loud swirl of his feuding family, with everyone’s rusty views on queerness, race and masculinity grating against each other as they clear out his showtune-loving nanna’s house in Ilford. His father (a bolshie Gershwyn Eustache Jr) is pushing him towards boxing and girls, so Ted grits his teeth and resists anything seen as weakness, but in doing so he resists kindness too. There is sharpness and humour within the core family’s spiky arguments, with an abundance of anguished love offered by Ted’s mum (Ria Zmitrowicz), though some of the wider family could have more substance.
Flashbacks build up backstory, enabling the creative team to have fun with costumes and hair. In both timelines, Tim Sheader’s direction scatters the family across Peter McKintosh’s surprisingly sparse double-decked neon home that doesn’t quite reflect the chaos – or the occasional warmth – within. But then there’s Pat, Ted’s mum’s old friend, played by the mercurial Craig Stein.
While everyone else is telling Ted how to be, here is a Black gay man showing him another way. As Ted is drawn in by Pat’s knowledge of Barbra Streisand, the play begins to move away from the more predictable father-son dynamics and towards something more effervescent. There’s a whole life in the way Pat looks with disgust at Ted’s father, in how he talks about his lost love, in the hand he stretches out to Ted when the teenager asks him to dance.
Illuminated in a brilliant moment of boldness from the script, with glorious movement by Ebony Molina, this is the image we’re left with long after Pat’s left the stage and the rest of the family have turned away: a beautiful man, up above the audience, leg kicked high in the air, radiant with life.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
