Let’s hear it for costume designers. The temptation for a reviewer has always been to regard their work as primarily decorative, not informative; seldom mentioned unless the stage is crammed with silken flounces. An old journalist friend told me that in the 50s, Queen magazine reviews had a formula: the cast was “beautifully gowned”. Imagine getting away with a description of an actor which said only that she spoke very nicely.
Yet costumes can tell the story of a play as surely as the dialogue. Never more so than in Alterations, the 1978 play by Michael Abbensetts, who came to Britain from Guyana in 1963, had his first play directed at the Royal Court by Stephen Frears, and was the first black British author commissioned to write a TV drama series in the UK: Empire Road ran on BBC Two from 1978 to 1979.
