Heart of the matter

Lloyd Evans

Wednesday, 27th August 2008

Gone Too Far!
Hackney Empire

Eating Ice Cream on Gaza Beach
Soho

Piaf
Donmar

Anyone for a knife crime comedy? Bola Agbaje’s attempt to get laughs from our anxieties about blade-wielding teenagers might have been a disaster if the script hadn’t been so witty and its examination of the subdivisions within black culture so penetrating. The play starts out, rather improbably, with a Nigerian boy Ikudayesi arriving to spend time with his brother Yemi who has been brought up in Britain. Yemi has always posed as a fashionable Caribbean and suppressed his west African lineage from a misplaced sense of shame. As a mixed-race kid puts it, ‘The Africans sold us to the white man and stayed behind living like kings and queens in their palaces.’ Yemi is absurdly ignorant about Nigeria. Ikudayesi asks what time it is and Yemi says, ‘Can’t you tell by looking up at the sun?’ The themes of the play resonated so powerfully with the audience in Hackney, where I saw it, that the actors were thrown off balance. Great chunks of dialogue were inaudible because the audience was still howling with laughter and delight at the last bit. An argument between dark-skinned Paris and mixed-race Armani had the house gasping with shock and recognition. Armani accused Paris of envying her pale complexion. Paris blazed back angrily. ‘Trouble with you mixed-race girls. You’re confused! You don’t know whether to play the white side or the dark side.’ She derided Armani for knowing nothing of Jamaican cuisine because her white mother cooked only beans on toast. The play has room for pathos as well as satire. When Ikudayesi tries to help a white granny with her spilt shopping she mistakes his attention for an attempt to rob her and dashes away panicking. This sent a shiver of horror, pity and shame through the theatre.

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