Who Killed My Father review — grief and poverty furiously warp a father-son relationship

Who Killed My Father

Young Vic, London

Grief has given us some of the most moving plays in the dramatic canon and this week’s London openings bring three new works about loss, all of them tying personal grief into a highly charged political milieu.

Who Killed My Father at London’s Young Vic (in association with Internationaal Theater Amsterdam) is a reckoning not so much with a death but with a death-in-life, as a man struggles to reconcile his conflicting feelings about his dying father and the poverty that robbed him of a better life. Adapted and directed for stage by director Ivo van Hove from the autobiographical book Qui a tué mon père by Édouard Louis, it’s a one-man show. But in Hans Kesting’s superb performance, there seem to be constantly two people on stage as he slips with a dancer’s precision from father to son.

A slight shift of the shoulders, leaning against the doorframe sucking on a cigarette, and Kesting becomes the father, old before his time, hunched over, wreathed in smoke, weighed down by deprivation. A lift in energy and a bounce of the feet and he is the son in childhood, desperate to please his father with a dance routine at a social gathering, pained and perplexed when his efforts are pointedly ignored.

We expect anger towards a father who, conforming to a stridently macho expectation of masculinity, rejected his homosexual son. We get that anger, but it is tempered with insight and fierce condemnation of the system that shaped his father’s life and thinking. There’s a stark assessment of the working-class orthodoxy that conditions his father and limits his prospects: school is a place to leave as early as possible; work is grinding, poorly paid and causes, in his father’s case, an industrial accident that wrecks his health. We see a dour man, hardened by circumstance, but both Louis and Kesting offer flashes of something gentler: the father who defends his son to the police, the father who buys him a collector’s edition of the film Titanic.

Politicians and a political system that condemns some to an early death are the real focus of Louis’s wrath. The shift in register as the son starts to voice that criticism feels a bit stilted, given how subtle and powerful the rest of the work has been. That message is already built into van Hove’s taut production and into Jan Versweyveld’s sparse, dark, prison-like set. Above all, it is built into Kesting’s performance. Sturdy yet light, raw yet controlled, it’s a beautifully executed physical demonstration of the empathy at the heart of theatre, bringing an undertow of love to a furious account of a blunted life.

★★★★☆

To September 24, youngvic.org

The Clinic

Almeida, London

Death is closely bound up with politics too in The Clinic at the Almeida. Here a young black man has died of endocarditis, his symptoms not having been taken seriously by the medical establishment. So horrified is Ore (Gloria Obianyo), an already disillusioned young black doctor, that she invites Wunmi (Toyin Ayedun-Alase), the traumatised widow, and their infant child round to her parents’ swish home for respite.

You’re expecting a drama about racial inequalities in healthcare — and we do get some shocking statistics — but playwright Dipo Baruwa-Etti delivers something much more expansive, unpredictable and fantastical. The arrival of Wunmi, an exhausted political activist, in this well-off British-Nigerian family, fundamentally disrupts an already shaky set-up.

They seem, at first glance, to be the epitome of success and a sign that Britain is putting structural racism behind it. Ore’s father, Segun, is a wealthy psychotherapist, his wife Tiwa volunteers in a women’s shelter, his son Bayo is a police officer and his daughter-in-law Amina, a Labour politician, their jobs deliberately representative. Together, suggests Tiwa, they make up a sort of “clinic”: a sanctuary for Wunmi that can offer help and support.

But the doubts and accusations are already breaking through. At a 60th birthday dinner for Segun (Maynard Eziashi), arguments rage about effective change, about class, about superficial improvements and deep structural inequalities. And Wunmi’s arrival sets a blazing question ripping through the piece: can you really reform the system from within or do you need to burn it down to start again? Will she break apart this metaphorical “clinic” or will it seduce her into accepting the status quo?

It’s a thrilling set-up, with echoes of both J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview. Baruwa-Etti writes with zip, wit and elastic energy, switch-backing through styles and plot twists so that you keep losing your footing. The brutal comedy of a domestic squabble takes on a surreal edge as the electricity crackles; Wunmi’s enigmatic behaviour draws us into magical realism then thriller territory; fire becomes a recurring symbol.

Monique Touko’s darting, funny, production handles these changes of register skilfully and the performances are razor-sharp, particularly Obianyo’s quietly raging Ore, Ayedun-Alase’s charismatic Wunmi and Simon Manyonda’s defensive Bayo. But the second act loses its way. Rather than dig more deeply into the issues by bringing us closer to the characters and their huge and complex dilemmas, Baruwa-Etti introduces a whole new subplot that is hard to believe and it all starts to feel stretched and splintered, the symbolism overwhelming and upending the drama. That’s a pity as this is fiercely political, ambitious writing.

★★★☆☆

To October 1, almeida.co.uk

Antigone

Open Air Theatre, London

At the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park, Inua Ellams reaches back more than 2,000 years to bring us a burningly topical play. Antigone is the first Greek tragedy this theatre has staged — surprising, given how good a fit the space is — and Ellams makes good that match by bringing Sophocles’s great tragedy blazing into the present day.

Again death becomes political; again compromise and principle, expediency and experience fight it out on stage; again prejudice looms over the action. Antigone’s family are modern British Muslims: her uncle has become the country’s first Muslim prime minister, her sister Ismene is a political aide, her brother Eteocles is a police officer. But her younger brother Polyneices has been radicalised. When he commits an atrocity, both brothers die: Eteocles (Abe Jarman) is buried with full official honours; Polyneices (Nadeem Islam) is stripped of British citizenship and his body detained in a secure facility. Antigone (Zainab Hasan), horrified at this contravention of holy law, determines to wash and bury him.

It’s a great premise, bringing the issues in Sophocles’s play to immediate political and spiritual life. The script bristles with topical references and running through it is a plea for nuance and understanding in a world of loud, clashing opinions.

Less good, however, is characterisation: individuals tend to tell you rather than show you their dilemmas; relationships between them lack depth and subtlety. The writing too is uneven: richly poetic and profound in places; awkwardly polemic and stiff in others. Max Webster and Jo Tyabji’s staging is most potent in its choral work, matching Ellams’s lyrical gift with stark and often beautiful movement (choreography by Carrie-Anne Ingrouille) and bringing great care for spiritual ritual and a still sense of love, loss and contemplation to the centre of this whirling, highly-charged play.

★★★☆☆

To September 24, openairtheatre.com