The week’s big news was the announcement that, after 11 spectacular years, Rupert Goold is leaving the Almeida. In 2026 he will bring his sizzle to the Old Vic, taking over from Matthew Warchus. The implications reach beyond one building. In two years’ time, all three big south London theatres will have new artistic directors, with Indhu Rubasingham at the National and Nadia Fall at the Young Vic. Here is a theatrical alternative to the West End: a sunrise boulevard.
Meanwhile, smaller spaces are busy provoking. Not least the Bush, run by Lynette (come on, Almeida) Linton. Eleanor Tindall’s new play should have been called Tenderised. There are a few softly romantic passages in Tender, but the most striking moments are to do not with sweet exchanges but with being painfully prepped for a new love.
Annabel Baldwin’s Ash, sharp in denim, has given up dating men. Bright and alert as a robin, she has been darting around at Aphrodyki club nights when she meets Nadi Kemp-Sayfi’s Ivy, serving up an almond croissant and a flat white for £8.75 (that got an audience gasp). Kemp-Sayfi – slightly messy in a cardy and with a vague aspect – has a resident boyfriend and a background of buried secrets and self-harm. There is a sanguinary thread to the ensuing on-off love affair, and a threatening undertone; in a coincidence-stuffed plot, the two women turn out to have an overlapping past and future.
The plot goes off at, mmm, half-cock, with too many unintegrated events. Yet the detail in Emily Aboud’s production is sensational. In the tiny Bush Studio a spectator is so close to the stage, she might be watching with a magnifying glass, listening with amplifiers. Tindall’s dialogue is light on its feet, rhythmic, true: that is apparent from the opening seconds, when she manages to smuggle into Ash’s speech both description and imitation of an aftershave-saturated estate agent. Baldwin and Kemp-Sayfi are exact and delicate. Inflecting the dialogue with tiny grimaces, quizzical winces, they don’t so much interrupt as scamper over each other.
Alys Whitehead, who designed the unobtrusive but spot-on costumes, has created the yellowest set I have ever seen: a yolky-coloured pouffe with detachable sections and, at the back of the stage, buttercup curtains. These curtains ripple and bulge at crucial moments, seeming to melt the walls. Accompanied by the whine and thrum of Ellie Isherwood’s sound design, they wrap the romance in strangeness; on occasion, we might be in the weird world of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 19th-century feminist sensation The Yellow Wallpaper. Other touches are so small that it is a wonder they register: a wonder, really, that they are performed at all. As Ash dreams of Ivy, she talks of the ring she wears on the thumb; on the far side of the stage Kemp-Sayfi sits quietly, absolutely still, but gently turns that ring.
It is hard to fault the impetus behind Emteaz Hussain’s new play. It is also hard to miss it. Set in the autumn of 2011 in a deindustrialised town in the north of England, Expendable looks at a family caught up in accusations of sexual grooming and assault. The family is British-Pakistani; the preyed-on girls are mostly (not exclusively) white; the action, characters and setting are fictional but draw on circumstances in Rochdale and Rotherham. The particular interest is its unusual focus: events are seen through the eyes of accidentally implicated British-Pakistani women.
Esther Richardson’s deliberate production points to a knot of difficulties: easily aroused racism (when a young boy is wrongly accused of grooming, shit is regularly posted through his mother’s letterbox); misogyny in the besieged families, where a woman cowers under her kitchen table at a knock on the door; inflammatory sectarian rallying. The intertwined horrors are completely convincing, as is the argument that towns were less racially divided than claimed. Lena Kaur gives a strong rebellious performance; Natasha Jenkins provides a solid kitchen-sink design, punctured with doors and windows, none of which offer escape until the very end. Yet too many attitudes are simply handed over as debating points. The evening promises more urgency than it delivers. Still, not expendable.
Star ratings (out of five)
Tender ★★★
Expendable ★★★
