Trouble in Butetown: smart writing and two terrific debuts in this tale of racial tension
Diana Nneka Atuona’s lauded 2015 debut Liberian Girl confronted Royal Court audiences with the traumatising life of a child soldier in the Liberian civil war. Her painstakingly wrought but light-touch follow-up wings us to another conflict further away in time but closer to home.
We’re in teeming Butetown, Cardiff, 1943 as the “Jerries” menace the “Tiger Bay” community by sea and sky while American GIs mount their own amicable social invasion, a de facto battle occurring, all the same, as segregationist US army attitudes clash with the city’s multiculturalism.
Touchingly conjuring a bygone, valiant era, Trouble in Butetown is a smartly researched and imagined play of a sort I’d worried was going the way of the dodo. Allied to an old-fashioned relish for casually well-rounded character and page-turning plot, the British-Nigerian playwright offers a corrective to the vogue for framing our social history in crude terms of racial antagonism. Atuona seeks out the melting-pot.
The action compactly and atmospherically takes place, mainly, in an illicit guest-house run by Sarah Parish’s stiffly no-nonsense matriarch Gwyneth, her frocks floral, her mood prickly. She lives with two mixed-race daughters by her Nigerian husband, lost to the war, her rundown abode a port of call for seafarers: a gruff old Welshman called Patsy; an insouciant Jamaican, Norman; and Abdullah, a non-teetotal Muslim. They’re first seen on the eve of St David’s Day, drinking the house hooch (awful) with a sozzled amity redolent of Belch and co in Twelfth Night.
Into the backyard of this shebeen lands a fugitive African American GI called Nate, the grave extent of whose misdemeanour becomes clear after a local detective and US police-officer, aggressively prejudiced, come a-knocking. The 21-year-old from Georgia is dazedly astonished by the absence of a “colour bar” in this area, deemed out of bounds for his kind.
With blood on his brow, fear in his face but no little charm in his manner, Nate enlists the support first of Gwyneth’s impressionable young daughter Georgina, and then the grown-ups, including older daughter Connie, a restless spirit and would-be crooning forces’ sweetheart.
Though it errs on being too neat at times, the overall effect is of something warm, spontaneous and true, the ensemble – directed by Tinuke Craig – beautifully serving low-key moments and high-stakes shifts. Commendable though a gradually softening Parish is, the night belongs to two professional stage debutants: Samuel Adewunmi’s Nate and Rita Bernard-Shaw’s Connie, who, coyly flirting and dancing, seem to fall in love before your eyes – the fragility of their young lives, amid unbearable uncertainty, almost topically eloquent.
Until March 25. Tickets: 020 3282 3808; donmarwarehouse.com
