The Darkest Part of the Night
The Kiln

ANOTHER world premiere at the Kiln before a diverse and powerfully engaged audience confirms this theatre’s serious bid in the cultural leadership stakes. Storytelling is the name of their game, and though The Darkest Part of the Night feels less like a constructed narrative and more like a slice of life, its authenticity is its outstanding feature.  

In fact, so convincing is the detail that you imagine the writer, Zodwa Nyoni, must be recalling her own personal past.

The action is set in a run-down part of Leeds where the playwright herself spent school and university days. She also shared this family’s struggle for survival in a world where to be black and first/second generation immigrant means to be bullied and kept firmly in your place.

Nyoni – already an award-winning playwright – hails originally from Zimbabwe; the people of the play come from Jamaica.

But this is not only about the battle for black equality. Dwight, who is 11 in 1981, suffers from autism – a condition barely acknowledged at the time. He becomes the focus for a range of outside agencies by whom he is treated either as an out-and-out mental case or as a deliberate misfit.

His school, the police, the medical profession and even at first his newly qualified social worker (all white-run agencies) intervene with disastrous results, causing his mother to say: “You don’t offer help; you want control.”

Dwight’s mother and sister know and love him entirely; his father — weakened by the long battle of being black in a hostile world — tells him to stop “doing all this screaming” and get his act together.

It’s a heartrending tale, bringing us the reality of how public agencies can fail to support and end up, conversely, compounding the woes of those at the bottom of the pecking order.

Lee Philips plays the lost and wounded Dwight in 1981 and 2022 with utter conviction and Brianna Douglas is splendidly intelligent and vivacious as his sister, Shirley.

Nadia Williams, as the present-day Shirley (when she has become head teacher of a secondary school), shows a convincingly refined, composed veneer, but excels when she also plays the mother Josephine in 1981, fighting with passion for her son and raising both her children with the kind of strength only the maternal spirit can summon.

Andrew French, too, immaculately defines the roles of both Leroy, the dad, in 1981 and Calvin, Shirley’s eventual husband.  

Nancy Medina’s production is fast and furious with rotating sets, fizzing lights and snatches of stirring music that take us into the brain of poor, confused, misunderstood Dwight better than any words.

There is never a moment when these hugely real characters falter and the packed audience are with them all the way. So… what is lost in structure and clear story progression, is gained in human empathy. A delightfully truthful picture of reality.

Until August 13 2022. Box office: Phone: 020 7328 1000, kilntheatre.com