A tasty brew of tea, angst and muffins
OF ALL the great British institutions in decline, it’s the loss of afternoon tea that I lament the most.
Gone are the days when we downed tools between three and four to sip a milky brown brew from china cups, and eat a buttered teacake. Tepid green tea, drunk from a paper cup at your desk, doesn’t cut it for me.
Yet afternoon tea is the institution chosen by writer Janice Okoh to illustrate her delightful but at times perplexing play about racial conflicts in Victorian Britain and today.
Okoh starts with the real-life young black Nigerian woman Sarah Bonetta Davies, who was adopted by Queen Victoria. She is throwing a tea party in 19th-century Brighton for a vicar and a social-climbing parishioner.
We then shift to a modern Cheshire village, where a black couple with an adopted white daughter are visited by new neighbours bearing glutenfree muffins. It’s an exercise in traditional British awkwardness, as we learn the husband has been assaulted by police, who believed him to have kidnapped his own child.
And finally it’s back to Windsor Castle and the 1860s. Queen Victoria is taking tea with Sarah, as the 21stcentury woman urges her to avenge the legacy of colonialism, unseen.
Tea parties often mask murky undercurrents, but Okoh is more interested in using them to explore what it means to be black… and white. This is sometimes obvious, such as when it comes to adoption. But it is also sometimes so convoluted that I didn’t always get it.
EVEN so, the image of a modern black woman baffling her neighbours by saying that she identifies as white was one I will treasure for some time.
The pace of Dawn Walton’s production, on Simon Kenny’s chic, white-panelled set, can be too sedate, but there are some terrific performances.
Shannon Hayes is a model of grace as Sarah, while Donna Berlin blazes as her nervy maid, then as the Cheshire woman who’s being sent on a job to Lagos due to her race. Rebecca Charles is also gorgeously excruciating as her PC neighbour.
But Joanna Brookes took the rich tea biscuit by turning Queen Victoria into a fusion of Patricia Routledge and england rugby star Joe Marler. That alone was as satisfying as a builder’s cuppa and a bun.
THERE is time-travel, too, in the Lyric’s new show. This is not Doctor Faustus and his usual pact with Satan.
It’s more like Doctor Who, with Jodie Whittaker replaced by a 17th- century herbalist who hopes to see if her mother is in hell after she was hanged for witchcraft. Her mission is accomplished by summoning the Devil, and so to fill her 144year deal, Johanna Faustus (Jodie McNee) decides to do good by ending death.
Credit to writer Chris Bush — her play is ambitious. Our heroine is headstrong and, after revenge castrations and other assaults on men, founds a high-tech institute to procure universal immortality.
But there is a lot of woke piety along the way. Faustus expresses anachronistic disgust that it will be 200 years before there’s a woman doctor, and complains that Marie Curie isn’t allowed to vote. It’s the sort of history lesson my nine-year-old gets at school.
I tired of Bush’s sophomoric feminism hitching a ride on what should have been a more subversive romp. Nor is Faustus allowed to raise the personal stakes by getting emotionally involved with anyone. Still, McNee makes an engagingly wilful hellraiser, and has an amusingly camp, infernal sidekick in Danny Lee Wynter’s Mephistopheles.
Caroline Byrne’s production is not up to theatre company Headlong’s usual showy standards, with Ana Ines Jabares- Pita’s dingy set looking like a whale’s belly.
With an ending that appears to revoke the trip we’ve been on, I was left wishing Ms Bush had been more concerned with disturbing us than telling us what to think.
For tour details visit eclipsetheatre.org.uk for The Gift, and headlong. co.uk for Faustus.