The appearance of a jerry-built shack on a vacant lot in a middle-class South African enclave causes ructions in Amy Jeptha’s raucously funny comedy of discomfiture. Her play belongs to a continuum of dramas that includes Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, and Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park, where property – and by extension, capitalism itself – is racially charged.
Nancy Medina’s strongly-acted production – for Bristol Old Vic, where she is artistic director, the Royal Court Theatre, and Johannesburg’s Market Theatre – serves the play’s non-naturalistic structure well and papers over the moments when the characters are traduced in service to the issues.
The central messages come over strongly. Who is allowed to belong? What must they sacrifice to do so? And what, exactly, constitutes a “good house”?. In essence the plot is simple. A middle-aged white couple, Christopher and Lynette, enlist wealthy black neighbours Sihle and Bonolo, who they’ve hitherto largely ignored, to improve the “optics” of their bid to remove the unauthorised dwelling, whose unseen inhabitants are presumed to be black and poor. A younger white couple, Andrew and Jess, who paid too much for a house that now overlooks the shack, feel oppressed and shut out by the older foursome.
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But Jeptha adds layers of complexity. Perma-smiling Sihle is a finance whizz apparently blind to overt or covert prejudice from his colleagues or neighbours but was raised in a shack similar to the one at issue. The more alert and combative Bonolo grew up “bougie” in Cape Town: she never knew poverty, nor had a black boyfriend before Sihle.
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