Lyttelton theatre, LondonIn Michael Abbensetts’ play, elegantly directed by Lynette Linton, characters work, dream, horse around and question the nature of home.
This breezy comedy by the Guyana-born British playwright Michael Abbensetts was first staged in 1978, the same year that his soap opera Empire Road was broadcast. That TV show featured the comings and goings of a racially diverse street and made him the first Black British writer to have a series commissioned by the BBC. This play featuring the comings and goings of a tailor’s shop appears heavily influenced by the sitcom format.
Excavated from the National Theatre’s Black Plays Archive, with additional material contributed by Trish Cooke, the play is entirely set within the scruffy upstairs shop, crammed with clothes racks (set design by Frankie Bradshaw). The characters are racing to finish a large sewing order so are forced together overnight in the premises which is also their safe space from a racially hostile Britain, it seems. So they work, talk, dream, fight, horse around – and bet on the horses. They are a few steps up the economic ladder from Sam Selvon’s lonely Londoners and Abbensetts’ tone is more comic, but with the same undertow of meditative questioning about a sense of “home”.
