It’s quite a title. Adrienne Kennedy – now a belatedly revered American playwright – impulsively came to London in 1966, young son in tow. She met John Lennon and sort of premiered a play at Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre. A fairytale becomes a devastating sliver of a fable about artistic greed.
In this short 2008 play, Kennedy recounts the events to her son and co-author Adam. Portrayed by Jack Benjamin, he strums a quietly insistent guitar and asks few but telling questions. Mostly, we’re enraptured by the superb Rakie Ayola as Adrienne, describing how a casual idea to base a play on Lennon’s nonsense poems gathers momentum when she arrives in London.
Initially the piece seems anecdotal – an artless memory plucked from the past. Names tumble out – of theatre stars, social butterflies, friends of friends and the places where they hang out. As Kennedy tells it, artistic circles in 1960s London seemed hospitable to Black American artists. James Earl Jones fetches up, as does Alex Haley, planning the book that will become Roots. James Baldwin swings by, and Adrienne throws him a party with “huge pans of spinach lasagne”.
It all sounds peachy – except Kennedy has already noted that “there was this big racial thing in London”. Visiting Black artists were chic; West Indians settling down, not. And maybe it was a big racial thing that derailed her play. Kennedy doesn’t define it directly: was it that she was Black, or female, or simply insufficiently famous? Whatever the motive, gradually Kennedy was sidelined and ghosted by her male collaborators. She remains starstruck by Olivier – but, as Adam shrewdly notes, he is the story’s “Don Corleone”, charming yet authorising the land grab of her cherished project.
Ayola’s shining eyes narrow, blinking back memories. “They had decided that I was expendable,” she says flatly, recalling dinners where the great and greedy intimidate her into silence. In Diyan Zora’s subtly paced production, a mosaic of improbable delights (“That was the summer that James Fox drove us home in his purple Lotus”) becomes a picture of disappointment and humiliation.
Kennedy had already written pieces far more daring than the Lennon play, and would do so again. But it was her idea, and it was snatched away – in golden months that tarnished as she watched.
• Mom, How Did You Meet the Beatles? is at Minerva, Chichester until 8 July
