Astonishing star turn boosts this conventional culture-clash play
Bush Theatre, London W12 House of Ife
Playing Lethal Bizzle at a wake is unlikely to go down well with the mother of the departed – everyone knows that. But as far as the siblings are concerned, losing yourself in rap music is so much more in the spirit of their late older brother than all the keening going on in the garden by elders who barely knew him. Eventually, their despairing mother concedes their way may be more genuine after all. “Fake!” she spits at an unseen guest she barely knows. “Some of these people: they think they’re in an American church, eh!”
Beru Tessema’s new play about a British-ethiopian family struggling in the aftermath of son Ife’s fatal drug addiction, and part of the Bush’s 50th-anniversary season, rips through largely familiar territory. The intergenerational culture clashes, the pull of the motherland versus the adopted homeland, the odd buried family secret, the rituals of community: all are a bit too neatly present and correct in this immigrant family drama as Ife’s twin Aida and siblings Tsion and Yosi affectionately grapple with the inchoate guilt and anger alongside the grief they feel in the wake of Ife’s ugly death. Underlying tensions are amplified further by the arrival of their adored but semi-estranged father, who lives as a preacher with his second family in Addis Ababa, safe from if not entirely unaffected by the civil war, and who still professes to prioritise his firstborn children, even if he’s a bit unsure what each of them does for a living.
What’s beyond doubt in his mind is that all three have squandered the opportunities he’s given them by bringing the family to England. Yet as Tessema strips away the illusions the characters cling to about themselves and each other, it’s clear his wife and children see their story differently.
Still, if Tessema’s play breaks little new ground in terms of content, he’s absolutely terrific at dialogue, fittingly so given the play’s interest in words as authenticity-markers in the ever complex cultural identity wars. Yosi, an endearingly directionless wannabe rapper whose chat is littered with “yo” and “bruv”, yet who hastily pulls up his low-slung jeans whenever his mum walks into the room, dismisses Aida, a promising art student, for talking like a white “hippie”. She in turn ribs him for “chatting like you’re [American rapper] Nipsey Hussle”. When his dad objects to him using the N-word, telling him sternly “there are no n-----s in Ethiopia,” Yosi decides that the line would make a brilliant lyric, humming it, to uneasy audience laughter, under his breath. Lynette Linton’s production similarly radiates an easy, lived-in naturalism, characters talking across each other the way people do, the audience feeling like bystanders in another family’s living room, albeit one depicted in somewhat rudimentary style in Frankie Bradshaw’s workaday set. Amid the witty, slang-heavy verbal cut and thrust there’s the very rare sense that these characters have indeed known each other all their lives. And it produces a truly exceptional performance from Michael Workeye as the charismatically truculent Yosi, whose thoroughly seductive extemporised style was born out on press night when his father unexpectedly knocked his beanie into the audience. “Embarrassing, man,” he muttered as he retrieved it. He’s a rising star.