A powder keg waiting to explode
Shebeen Theatre Royal Stratford
Derived from the Irish síbín (meaning “illicit whiskey”), a shebeen is the evocative, widely used slang for an unlicensed drinking den. In Mufaro Makubika’s astute, absorbing and timely new play set in the St Ann’s district of Nottingham
– on the eve of the race riots that engulfed the area in August 1958 – the shebeen isn’t just a hang-out, it’s a keenly needed sanctuary.
The wallpaper is peeling away in the front room of Pearl and George, a hard-up Jamaican couple. By night, the lights dim, the record-player spins calypso discs and with a glitterball overhead, a humble abode turns into a fun palace, to which members of the African-caribbean community repair for liquor and love, escaping the cares of dead-end jobs and menacing prejudice from local whites.
Even if some residents are getting narked at the noise, the law is trying to turn a blind eye. In the opening scene, Martina Laird’s fierce, charismatic, quietly sorrowful Pearl – who depends on the trickle of income from the gatherings – mock-seduces the visiting, gauche bobby, plying him with rum and dismissing the suggestion that they’re up to anything.
But this fragile accord, and comic levity, is tested to breaking point as the action progresses from Saturday night to Sunday morning. Zimbabwe-born, Nottingham-based Makubika doesn’t over-sentimentalise the affectionately recreated scene. We delight in the warm jocularity and jaunty dancing, but we notice that tempers are fraying, pressures – psychological, social, economic – building. A Jamaican lad (Theo Solomon’s Linford) is stepping out with a white lass (Chloe Harris’s Mary) – enough, as happened with the riots, to set off the powder keg.
The second half slightly suffers from an overload of fast and furious dramatic climaxes, yet the third act also contains a searing exchange that deftly encapsulates the crucial formative encounter between an older population, given scant preparation for the multicultural age, and the Windrush generation, and in so doing speaks to the hurt surrounding the recent scandal over British citizenship, and belonging.
Hazel Ellerby’s Mrs Clark, Mary’s bewildered mother, respectability nestling with ingrained racism, begs Pearl to part the Romeo and Julietstyle lovebirds. “No one will touch her now,” she bitterly pleads. The night I attended, the audience at this famously diverse theatre reacted with vocal outrage at her words, and yet Makubika’s achievement is to set us in the presence of flawed human beings, not cut-and-paste mouthpieces.