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From the moment Kene steps up onto the stage - the shop is at the top of several flights of stairs; even the puffing of the characters when they enter shows how everything is that bit harder for immigrants - he’s in motion and never stops until the final moment of the play.
‘And how do you think it is for a black woman?’ she snaps back, ‘No one’s got my damn back.’ Walker is all dreams and aspiration; Darlene has to deal with the realities of life away from the little top floor island.
It plays out like a sitcom episode: Walker Holt (Arinze Kene) is a Guyanese tailor desperate to own his own shop in London.
Watching this revival of Alterations by Michael Abbensetts, rediscovered as part of the Black Plays Archive at the National Theatre, you do wonder how many other great pieces of writing are gathering dust somewhere.
The people around him are more clear-eyed - and there isn’t a bad performance from the whole cast, whether it’s Gershwyn Eustache Jnr’s Buster, friend and employee, with his permanent Eeyorish glumness or Karl Collins’s caddish Horace (he of the purple suit).
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