“In the wrong hands”, Amy Jephta’s new play could have become a “very conventional critique” of South Africa’s deeply divided society, said Clive Davis in The Times. Yet this “quirky” satire “sends you home with awkward questions buzzing around in your head”.
Unsurprisingly, race lies at the heart of the domestic drama, but the “mischievous” production also “homes in on subtle questions of class and money”, too. The story follows Bonolo (Mimî M Khayisa) and Sihle (Sifiso Mazibuko), a Black middle-class couple who have recently moved to a “manicured suburb” in South Africa.
When an unsightly tin shack appears on a nearby plot of land, “threatening to bring down property values”, white residents Lynette (Olivia Darnley) and Christopher (Scott Sparrow) “brazenly” recruit Bonolo and Sihle to a neighbourhood group tasked with getting rid of it.
The affluent residents’ “paranoid assumptions” about who built the shack “soon expose deep-rooted prejudices in this biting, subversive satire”, said Dave Fargnoli in The Stage. Director Nancy Medina “allows the conflict to escalate” slowly, with conversations gradually unfurling into “rapid-fire shouting matches”. This results in excellent “comic timing” as the neighbours “twist themselves into exquisitely awkward knots” in an attempt to conceal their “toxic entitlement”.
Jephta’s “richly drawn characters” are “intriguingly flawed”. Khayisa puts on a “gripping” performance as the “fabulously frosty” and “pretentious” Bonolo, who is always poised to “confront her neighbours over any perceived prejudice she detects”. As her husband Sihle, Mazibuko starts off “calm and contented”, but the white community’s “ignorant judgements” about the shack “soon prove too provoking, igniting eruptive anger”. And Darnley is “brilliantly subtle” as Lynette, “projecting guileless sweetness” that belies a “secret depth of manipulative malice”.
But the “jarring breakouts of didacticism”, where the characters spell out what is apparent in the “loaded exchanges between couples”, are unnecessary, said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. Still, the arguments between Bonolo and Sihle feel “real and complex”, and the “layers” to their questioning of “what it means to belong” give the play its “depth”.
Jephta “mercilessly skewers” middle-class prejudices and “latent racist white fears” with “panache”, added Lindsay Johns in The Telegraph. Her script “bristles with acutely observed racial and social tensions”, painting a “bleak” picture of a “Rainbow Nation ill at ease with itself”. In all, it’s a “morally nuanced, exhilarating and deeply humane work” that marks Jephta as one of South Africa’s “leading contemporary playwrights”.
At the Royal Court Theatre, London, until 8 February, then at Bristol Old Vic from 14 February to 8 March