Off the Endz at the Royal Court

Bola Agbaje appears to have taken a considerable step back from her flawed but intermittently exhilarating debut, Gone Too Far! Off The Endz, her third major work and second for the Royal Court, is a straightforward morality tale built seemingly with Duplo blocks.

The play deals in stock types. David and Kojo are friends from way back. David is the bad boy, always in and out of prison, exuding disdain for honest toil; while Kojo is hardworking and determined to get off the Endz (the estate on which they live) and make a better life for himself and his family.

David – having just been released after an indeterminate stretch inside for an indeterminate crime and needing a place to stay – heads straight to see his friend. There he finds that Kojo’s girlfriend, Sharon, with who he was once also romantically involved, is pregnant and that the couple have plans to buy a house together. Scornful of the way they live yet happy to sponge of them until he finds his feet, David shows no interest in getting a job of any kind; he sneers at the minimum wage positions offered to him at job centre, regarding such work as beneath him, and decides that drug dealing is the only way he can make the kind of money he wants without losing face.

Kojo’s attempts to convince him that hard work and slow slog are the better way to go are met with derision, especially when it transpires that, though Sharon doesn’t know it, the couple are deeply in debt, weighed down with unmanageable credit card bills, and that Kojo is on the verge of losing his job.

Where Agbaje succeeds is in showing the shifting bonds between the three main characters and showing how David subtly slides between Kojo and Sharon. The central dilemma, however, is set out in a very basic way and there’s a total lack of suspense in regards to which way David is going to turn. The fallout from the choices he makes is totally predictable.

Too often Agbaje resorts to interminable domestic scenes (with – faint – echoes of John Osborne) in which angry people shout over at each other over ironing boards, though she does deliver a few striking moments. The scene where David discovers that the estate is now apparently ruled by weapon-packing primary school kids is both amusing and unnerving, and a clash with Kojo’s receptionist succinctly illustrates how uneasy David is with normal social situations and how he compensates with aggression, making trouble for himself in the process.

The tone of the play is, at times, pretty condescending; the wants and needs and hopes of these characters are spelt out in the biggest block capitals and while there is such a thing as being elegantly economical in approach, this isn’t it. It’s all a bit simplistic and naive and feels overstretched at less than an hour and a half. Both world views presented are narrow in the extreme and the play seems closed off to any possible middle ground between Kojo and Sharon’s joyless, middle class aspirational grind and David’s murky criminal dealings.

Agbaje also leaves some potentially interesting avenues unexplored. David’s attitude to women is pretty repugnant: he expects Sharon to clean up after him and his attitude seems to infect Kojo, to some degree. The play even seems to lay the blame for their debt problems at Sharon’s door. Despite holding down a job herself, their situation appears to stem from her excessive spending on store cards and ignorance of their true financial state, though Kojo’s determination to be a man and provide for her and his child, things he sees as fundamentally intertwined, is also a factor. The subtle assertion that women and their material demands can force men into difficult corners and make them act against their better judgement is something it shares with The Wire (though sadly the comparison ends there).

Jeremy Herrin’s production is relatively punchy and the cast do a solid enough job, particularly Lorraine Boroughs as Sharon who seems to do the most to give some shape to her character. Ashley Walters gives a decent account of a man whose charm and easy manner masks a fairly unattractive personality and who can snap with little provocation. But none of this is sufficient compensation for a thinly written and unsatisfying play.

Reviewed for musicOMH

The Mountaintop at Theatre 503

The posters for James Dacre’s production of Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop at Theatre 503 make explicit the link between the present and the past: for they are of the face of Martin Luther King Jr. depicted in the familiar campaign colours of Barack Obama.

Hall’s play is set in the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. It is 3rd April 1968 - the last night of Dr King’s life. He has just delivered his "I’ve been to the mountaintop" speech at the Mason Temple, he is tired and his throat is hoarse from talking. Outside, the rain lashes against the motel window. He sends his aide out for a packet of Pall Mall cigarettes and settles down to work on another speech.

A maid brings him a cup of room service coffee. She is new; this is her first day and she is elated to have been sent to see Preacher King. She is further delighted when he cadges a cigarette. They talk about his work, his world, the road he has chosen. She is of a more militant leaning and questions the necessity of his commitment to peaceful protest; “fuck the white man,” she bellows, when challenged to display her oratorical skills. King finds this shocking but also funny. He is also not immune to her physical charms, for she is, as she tells him, so pretty that “even my uncle couldn’t resist.”

Hall’s play is compelling and energetic, at least to begin with. She successfully re-makes a man of this iconic figure through his chance casual encounter with a charismatic chamber maid. But then the play takes a sudden swerve – the rules are changed. Without revealing too much of this unexpected twist, it is enough to say that King is made aware of the imminence of his death. He comes to know that this is his last night on earth and accepts this information almost unquestioningly.

While he accepts it, he does still try and escape his fate: he still has a lot of work to do; he is nowhere near finished. He needs more time. But he can do nothing to change what is to come. All he can do is take solace in the fact that his work will continue after his death and that some of his dreams will, eventually, come to pass; and that in four decades time, the American landscape will have changed to the point where it is possible for Obama to be elected President.

Hall’s play is an attempt to examine both King’s legacy and the man himself; to make the audience see him as just that: a man. And she achieves this, to a degree. King is holed up in a scruffy motel, checking the furniture for bugs (of the surveillance variety – though given the grim brown and orange-dominated décor of Libby Watson’s set, he would also be wise to be wary of the real thing), his feet are ripe from marching and he has neglected to pack a toothbrush. His flirtatious interactions with Camae the maid, a rare moment of relaxation, go further to making him human, flawed. He loves his wife, his family, but he has been known to stray.

But then there comes this strange, forced, supernatural twist (one that owes a hefty debt to Kevin Smith’s Dogma) and Dacre’s production immediately loses focus. Its grip on its audience slackens and it becomes a much limper thing. It begins as a play with much power and charm but becomes something else altogether, something awkward and even rather silly in places.

David Harewood is quite excellent as King. His performance combines the stirring voice of the born orator with more human worries and frailties. But despite his best efforts and the snappy rapport that builds between him and Lorraine Borroughs’ Camae, the play sabotages itself and that initial potency is lost, returning only for a few brief flickering seconds in the final montage

Reviewed for musicOMH.