How refreshing to see a show about prejudice that barely mentions white people

Lynette Linton opens her stewardship of the Bush with a drama about racial and sexual bigotry. Four British women decide to start a girl band but only one of them, Yomi, happens to be straight. The script mixes confessional monologues with bitchy interactions over kitchen suppers.

Beth, whose parents are West Indian, once dreamed of living in suburban bliss with ‘a little concrete garage for my car’. She named her imaginary children ‘Pauline, Graham and Amanda’. But when she embraced black culture she threw out her Dostoevsky novels and her Dire Straits albums and invested in jazz-funk records and the works of Toni Morrison instead. Anyone with a lifelong allergy to Dostoevsky or Dire Straits will applaud this wise decision.

The show gets spicier when the women tackle interracial marriage. Beth’s mixed-race girlfriend, Opal, rejects the terms ‘coloured’ and ‘half-caste’ but Yomi, of Nigerian heritage, challenges her on logical grounds. ‘You’re half and half… Are you denying that one of your parents is white?’ Yomi says she feels ‘sorry for children of mixed marriages’. As the tensions deepen, Yomi gradually realises that her three band mates are lesbians and that two of them are romantically entangled. Yomi calls this ‘unnatural’ and suggests that homosexuality is ‘a phase’ one can choose to circumvent.

Throughout the show, the crowd fizzed and simmered with knowing laughter. It’s a cliché that west Africans are more socially conservative than their Caribbean sisters and yet these divisions are rarely aired in public. And the audience, mainly black, weren’t the only ones thrilled by this frank and tough-minded script. To me it was a relief to see a show about prejudice and bias that barely mentioned white people at all. The fact is that immigrant communities are perfectly capable of taking sides against each other without external help, and to suggest that whites are solely responsible for black-on-black disharmony is, paradoxically, an assertion of white superiority.