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. 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.
Nancy Medina’s strongly-acted production – for Bristol Old Vic, where she is artistic director, the Royal Court Theatre, and Johannesburg’s Market Theatre – serves the play’s non-naturalistic structure well and papers over the moments when the characters are traduced in service to the issues.
The central messages come over strongly. Who is allowed to belong? What must they sacrifice to do so? And what, exactly, constitutes a “good house”?
In essence the plot is simple. 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.
But Jeptha adds layers of complexity. 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. The more alert and combative Bonolo grew up “bougie” in Cape Town: she never knew poverty, nor had a black boyfriend before Sihle.
Christopher and Lynette probably consider themselves liberal, but he fumes quietly about affirmative action and she, as an estate agent, is clearly engaged in social engineering in their area. In an apparently throwaway but significant line, Sihle wonders how sandwich shop manager Andrew and yoga teacher Jess could afford the house Lynette sold them.
Laced into this are questions of legacy and an inquiry into imbalances of power that go beyond race and income. At least two and possibly all three of the couples are childless. Jess dominates neurotic Andrew, while Sihle sometimes talks to Bonolo in Zulu, which she doesn’t understand. Bonolo seems strong but her pretentious delight in wine aerators and cheese knives is laughable. Even cakes baked for a neighbourhood chat become weaponised.
In scene changes the cast reorder ULTZ’s economical set into three different living rooms, while the rear-stage shack cartoonishly sprouts new extensions, windows and a satellite dish. Several times, Sihle and Bonolo break out of the action to make explicit what’s been unsaid or implied, the first time with an outburst of joyful hilarity.
All of the characters become at some point unconvincing as they contort to move the debate forward, but Mimî M Khayisa and Sifiso Mazibuko are impressive in the tricky roles of Bonolo and Sihle. Robyn Rainsford is very funny as Jess, constantly trying to rebalance her chakras in the face of excruciating social embarrassment. Scott Sparrow is an irredeemably boorish Boer as Christopher. This isn’t perfect but it’s perceptive, provoking fun.
Royal Court Theatre, to February 8, royalcourttheatre.com.
