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Theatre Review Salutary significance in this Shebeen

Set in a 1950s Nottingham drinking den, Mufaro Makubika's play on the Windrush generation's experience has an acute contemporary relevance, says MAYER WAKEFIELD

Shebeen
Theatre Royal Stratford East, London

IN HIS programme notes, writer Mufaro Makubika claims that Shebeen “was written in Nottingham for Nottingham” and, although you can understand his sentiment, it’s impossible not to read a wider significance into his debut play.

Set in the St Ann’s neighbourhood of the city in 1958 on the eve of the often overlooked riots and 10 years after the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury, Pearl (Martina Laird) and her ex-boxer husband “the Kingston bomber” George (Karl Collins) are making a living by opening up their home as place of merriment for the community.

Unwelcome in traditional drinking establishments, such “shebeens” became what would now be referred to as safe spaces for the Caribbean community and some of their more open-minded neighbours.

One such is the young Mary (Chloe Harris), who has fallen for the ambitious sweet-talker Linford (Theo Soloman) and the complications of a mixed-race relationship stir tensions in the room in which a photo of the Queen adorns the peeling wall.

Sacked for “sewing too fast” in her job as a seamstress, Pearl’s niece Gayle — an exuberant Danielle Walters — arrives in a feisty mood and inadvertently sparks a series of events that lead to tragedy. But there’s no doubt where the real blame lies. When the affable but dubious “good cop” Sergeant Williams (Karl Haynes) arrives to take Linford to the nick for no good reason, his openly racist deputy runs amok.

“Hot summers mean hot tempers,” according to Williams and, in the case of the Nottinghamshire constabulary, they certainly do. But, as the play snaps to a sudden conclusion, it seems fire will meet fire underneath a burning red sky, much to Pearl’s distress.

Laird’s performance as the alluring yet steely matriarch dazzles and the rest of the cast are highly competent, while Matthew Xia’s assertive direction astutely charts the ebb and flow of energy.

Despite a somewhat predictable plot, Makubika’s ability to tune into the repercussions of the subtle, and not remotely subtle, prejudices that hampered the lives of a recently arrived Caribbean community within the four walls of Pearl’s home is what makes this play so vital.

Shebeen is an urgent reminder that a hostile environment was, and remains, a daily reality for Caribbean migrants in Britain, long before Theresa May constituted it as an immigration policy.

Runs until July, box office: stratfordeast.com

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