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One of the weird things about theatre is that most plays have an initial run, then they’re never seen again. It’s an art form with a short memory. 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.
Even though it’s 47 years old, it couldn’t be less dusty, certainly not the way director Lynette Linton and additional writer Trish Cooke treat it. Colour, music, motion, loads of laughter: the whole thing feels completely alive from its first moment.
It plays out like a sitcom episode: Walker Holt (Arinzé Kene) is a Guyanese tailor desperate to own his own shop in London. If he can alter a huge batch of trousers in one night, he’ll get enough money to buy the lease. But his wife is annoyed at him, his assistant is useless, and the race against time becomes a reckoning. Without ever letting the humour drop, Abbensetts explores what success and ambition can look like for Walker in a society that’s stacked against him — i.e. deeply racist.
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If you didn’t know the play was written in 1978, the messy tailor’s shop with racks of clothes in various shades of seventies, as well as Oliver Fenwick’s sepia lighting, make it obvious. Orange abounds. And as you’d hope from a play about tailoring, the costumes by Frankie Bradshaw are immaculate. I mean, a crushed velvet suit in bright plum complete with a dusky green wide-brimmed hat? Yes please.
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. With a puppyish optimism and determination, whipping back and forth across his shop, he gives every line such exuberance, like he’s always on the point of singing and dancing.
But as the night goes on, that optimism and resilience crack. He questions whether all this effort is worth it. What was exuberance initially starts to look more like exasperation. His body stiffens. Sweat breaks out. Stress pokes through.
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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).
But it’s Cherrelle Skeete as wife Darlene who really matches Kene here. She wears her weariness much more heavily. ‘You know how hard it is for a black man in this kiss me arse country to get ahead,’ Walker snaps at her. ‘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.
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Linton keeps everything in a square patch on stage, which often revolves, with just a few dreamlike, fantasy-infused moments taking place outside the square. That little shop floor is Walker’s safe space, away from a society where - as he and Buster discuss - he’s only ever seen as ‘a problem’. And though a few threads could be snipped away here and there, Cooke and Linton don’t just revive this finely tailored play. They make it burst at its seams.
Alterations at the National Theatre, until April 5, nationaltheatre.org.uk
