London round-up: A Good House, Kyoto, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Employees

I went to London, saw some shows and had some thoughts.

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A Good House, Royal Court, London

A Good House, Royal Court

Stillwater, the setting of Amy Jephta's play, is a gated suburban community within which Sihile and Bonolo (Sifiso Mazibuko and Mimî M Khayisa), have crafted themselves the perfect, tasteful abode complete with wet-bar and high-end cheese knives.

Their white neighbours, Chris and Lynn (Chris (Scott Sparrow and Olivia Darnley, big estate agent energy) are, , however, perturbed by the appearance of a tin-roofed shack on an empty plot of land. They're worried about what this might mean for the value of their homes. If the shack is allowed to stand, more could follow. Something has to be done. They want rid of this edifice - and its inhabitants - and feel that Sihile and Bonolo, as some of the community’s, presumably few, Black residents, should be the ones to serve the eviction papers.

Jephta's play consists of a series of encounters between Sihile and Bonolo, Chris and Lynn and a younger couple, Andrew and Jess (Kai Luke Brummer and Robyn Rainsford), a restaurant manager and yoga instructor. Everyone is highly aware of how much money they’ve sunk into their property, but for the younger couple, who seemingly spent the most, this is more acute. All of their interactions are awkward, all of them are freighted with unspoken – and sometimes – spoken assumptions. Race (and racism) plays a large part in this- Andrew initially mistakes Sihile and Bonolo for the shack-dwellers – but class and money are also significant factors. Everyone is aware of their respective income levels, and while Sihile clearly earns the most, he’s also the one who grew up in a shack not dissimilar to the one that everyone is fretting about.

There are nods to Raisin in the Sun and, by extension, Clybourne Park, in Jephta’s play which is as eloquent about what it is to be Black and middle class in today’s South Africa as it is about community dynamics, the desire to fit in, to be included. (The moment when Sihile and Bonolo realise they aren’t in the community WhatsApp group is brutal). The writing is at its sharpest when Sihile and Bonolo are dissecting the different narratives they’ve created for themselves about who they are and where they come from, wounding each other in the way couples can, and acknowledging that maybe they too are a little perturbed by the shack’s presence. The play is astute about home, and how it can be at once a status symbol, an investment, and a way of communicating who you are to the world.

Nancy Medina’s production is zippy and light-footed, eliciting gasps from the audience at key moments of revelation. The actors are uniformly great at conveying social status – the moment when Bonolo ostentatiously aerates the wine is hilarious (the spirit of Beverley from Abigail’s Party looming large).

Designer ULTZ places the shack in the background so that it’s present in every scene, but more prominent in the scenes which take place in the white people’s homes. Occasionally it sprouts a chimney or a satellite dish. Meanwhile, each couple fills the front of the stage with the furniture and objects that reflect their aspirations, the people they want to be seen as being. There are occasional moments when the characters over-explain themselves, but for the most this is tight, smart comedy - under which sit great lakes of historic pain.

Kyoto, @SohoPlace, London. Photo: Manuel Harlan

Kyoto, @SohoPlace

In 2015, British playwrights Joe Murphy and Joe Robinson visited the Calais refugee camp known as The Jungle. created a theatre there, a domed structure called the Good Chance, in which they hosted workshops and performances. When things became increasingly difficult in the camp, they relocated the theatre to the outskirts of Paris, near a centre for migrants (The Stage wrote about this here).

In 2017, Murphy and Robinson turned their experiences into a piece of theatre, also called The Jungle, which premiered at the Young Vic. The show was semi-immersive in nature, the theatre reconfigured into the camp’s make-shift kitchen, a space of plywood tables, wooden benches and colourful cushions.

The reviews were mostly glowing – Susannah Clapp, writing in the Observer called it “one of the most vital productions of the year”, Lyn Gardner called it “extraordinary” and the play went on to transfer to the Playhouse Theatre in the West End, with the plush space once again reconfigured to resemble the camp kitchen. According to many who saw it, it was a powerful and moving piece about the refugee experience, and yet the idea of two Oxford educated white men with the backing of some of the most influential people in the industry, including director Stephen Daldry and producer Sonia Friedman, using this material to create a West End sensation always made me a little uneasy. (This Exeunt review comes closest to articulating that unease while also being impressed by the play’s “rigour of conscience”). The two Joes had done the legwork as volunteers and they’d written this compassionate play that centres migrant stories, but instead of doing the sensible thing and actually watching the show, so I was in the position to make an informed argument, I let my reservations get in the way.

Murphy and Robertson have now written their second play, about the Kyoto UN climate change conference of 1997, at which every country in attendance agreed to curb its greenhouse emissions. The play premiered at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Swan Theatre last summer. This one I actually watched.