A Good House at the Royal Court Theatre review: perceptive and provoking fun 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.
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.
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.
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.
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