The Comeuppance
ALMEIDA THEATRE, LONDON
★★★★★
With his biting racial satire
An Octoroon (2014), American playwright Branden JacobsJenkins announced himself as a vital new voice in contemporary drama. His work examines heritage, legacy and society from bracing new angles, meaning that playgoers on both sides of the Atlantic eagerly await fresh bulletins from him.
This latest piece finds JacobsJenkins in more contemplative and elegiac vein than usual, as he revisits the always fruitful terrain of a high school reunion.
Drama has taught us to expect myriad things when family members or old friends gather after a hiatus of many years, yet one element that will always be lacking is calm predictability.
So it proves here, as the old gang of Merg – the selfdeprecatingly named MultiEthnic Rejects’ Group – assemble ahead of their 20-year reunion at a school outside Washington, DC.
They gather for cocktails on Ursula’s (Tamara Lawrance) front porch; Ursula has recently lost an eye to diabetes, the most visible manifestation of time catching up with these not-yet-forty-somethings.
Caitlin (the effervescent Yolanda Kettle) is married to a much older man with dubious politics and Paco (Ferdinand Kingsley) is visibly traumatised after his military service. Artist Emilio (Anthony Welsh) is ostensibly the most successful, but his brusque and distant manner suggests that he is also the least satisfied.
Despite the all-round excellence of the five-person cast – Katie Leung has a speech of comical drunken self-pity as an egregiously overworked doctor and mother of five – we spend too much of the two-hour running time waiting for Eric Ting’s production to shake itself out of a state of suspended animation and hit full flow. Between scenes there are monologues, spoken by each actor with voices eerily echoed and amplified, the sinister import of which gradually becomes clear: an unwelcome visitation is imminent for the group.
Yet this somewhat hackneyed supernatural element has less impact than Jacobs-Jenkins’ eloquently rueful meditation on how briskly and brutally youthful dreams evaporate, of how we shift seemingly overnight from dreaming of the future to living in the past.
Jacob-Jenkins is sharply perceptive in his depiction of the subtle shaping influence of world events on individual lives. These friends’ schooldays incorporated the Columbine High School massacre and 9/11; in their adulthood, there has been war in Afghanistan and the Covid pandemic.
As old alliances and tensions emerge and reframe on Ursula’s porch (we hear too little, too late from the coolly poised Lawrance), they are refracted through the prism of global geopolitics. “I feel so far from what I understood about myself,” says Kristina (Leung) piteously. Merg has emerged into the wider world, but still hankers after the certainties of its high school self.
And with that universally recognisable sentiment, JacobsJenkins hits both a nerve and a belated emotional jackpot.
To 18 May (020 7359 4404, almeida.co.uk)
FIONA MOUNTFORD