The Clinic could not be less clinical. In Dipo Baruwa-Etti’s tremendously enjoyable new play, the word is applied to a rumbustiously opinionated, middle-class, British-Nigerian household. The action begins on the 60th birthday of Segun, the father of the family. Segun is a therapist, entertainingly played with a nimble self-importance by Maynard Eziashi, who churns out lucrative self-help books. His wife, Tiwa, is played by Donna Berlin, who wonderfully mixes complacency with an oppressed air. She is a dispenser of legendarily stimulating tea, a wannabe therapist herself, and about to be supplied with a patient: Wunmi, a young mother who, after her husband’s death, feels suicidal and is offered shelter. “We have influence,” Tiwa swanks privately. “Between us, we’re like a clinic.”
It is Ore, Tiwa’s daughter and a junior doctor, who has brought Wumni into her mother’s life (she worked at the hospital where Wumni’s husband died, a victim of institutional racism). She is excellently played by Gloria Obianyo with a rebellious grace that cannot conceal her default conformity. Ore is at odds with her policeman brother, Bayo (a lively Simon Manyonda), and his wife, Amina (conflicted Mercy Ojelade), a Labour MP. But it is Wumni who will prove the wildest card in the pack, an activist scandalised to discover herself among Tory voters. She is played with oscillating power – bashful and bold – by Toyin Ayedun-Alase.
The characterisation is deep but the plot soon thins; the sudden amour between Segun and Wunmi seems shallow-rooted, the political debate perfunctory, and the fire symbolism (designer Paul Wills’s swish kitchen includes flashing light strips) overworked. Yet the play’s strengths far exceed its faults. It is satisfying to watch Segun, metaphorically speaking, have his birthday cake and choke on it. And whatever the secret ingredient in Tiwa’s energising tea, it has found its way into director Monique Touko’s warm, absorbing, not-to-be-missed production.
Another family row is brewing on a father’s birthday in Richard Eyre’s debut play, The Snail House, which he also directs. We’re in a collegiate room, a gallery of worthies (faithfully rendered by Tim Hatley). Neil is a senior paediatrician throwing a party to celebrate his recent knighthood (Vincent Franklin gives a splendidly nuanced interpretation as an establishment figure starting to erode). Eva Pope plays his immaculately coiffed wife, Val, and gives a masterclass on smiling on through. Patrick Walshe McBride swaggers into the role of Hugo, their tiresomely debonair son, a political adviser, with aplomb. And Grace Hogg-Robinson is vivid as their bolshie, passionate, 18-year-old daughter, Sarah, who has left home and defied her parents by failing to go to university. Her birthday present to her dad is a poster of Greta Thunberg.
This is an honourable, polished play with a fine grip on the contemporary moment, expertly directed (as you’d expect) and with a first-rate cast, so it is not immediately obvious why it should fall flat. You might pounce on the jokes (wet matchbox) or blame the extended preamble that is slow (as befits a snail), during which Wynona, a maddening young Irish waitress (fearless Megan McDonnell), sings Diana Ross numbers, unrolls the tablecloth and bangs on about Ireland until you wish someone would let the dinner and drama be served. The adversarial dialogue is unnatural, partly because it contains too much information that is obviously grafted on, rather than organic. And the scene with Florence, the Nigerian catering manager, a woman Neil wronged in court (played with dignity by Amanda Bright), in particular needs a rewrite. As it stands, it is unbelievably stagey.
Hans Kesting is an actor of outstanding brilliance from the Internationaal Theater Amsterdam company, who stars at the Young Vic in an unusually short Ivo van Hove production, Who Killed My Father, based on an autobiographical novel by the French writer Édouard Louis. This is a violently populated one-man show. Kesting (speaking English throughout) plays a middle-aged man from northern France who carries his troubled family within him. Jan Versweyveld’s set is a charcoal cell, its walls pockmarked by fists and a television screen usually blank – a prison of sorts.
The man’s father was gay but lived in violent denial – a defensive bigot. Unsurprisingly, he could not face his son’s homosexuality. The man’s mother lived a lie too, determined to keep up appearances and contriving, without a sou, to have a Christmas complete with oysters. A flailing alcoholic brother completed the picture. Kesting proves a master of seamlessly disconcerting transitions as, stooping and burrowing hands under his jumper, he becomes his paunchy, breathless, suffering father.
The transition between memoir and drama is less satisfactory in Van Hove’s adaptation – there are stretches that seem too written through, as if they had not fully succeeded in coming away from the page. And the piece goes into an awkwardly different gear when it becomes a protest against French politicians lacking an understanding of poverty (think gilets jaunes). But the end is a triumph as Kesting moves towards the open doorway, his cigarette a smoke signal, and lets slip a single word about what France needs.
When Gabriel Byrne returned to Dublin – he is now 72 – he felt an impostor. His solo show Walking With Ghosts, based on his 2020 memoir and directed by Lonny Price, is a reinhabiting of the city of Byrne’s birth – A Portrait of the Actor as a Young Man. This is an entertaining, moving, accomplished show. I loved Byrne’s impersonation of his working-class Catholic mother in the Shelbourne hotel, marvelling at silver sugar tongs while dragging on a fag; his account of his ineptitude as a trainee plumber, and his childhood reliance on a book of a thousand jokes.
Darker material is skilfully broached too: the tragedy of a mentally ill sister, his struggle with alcohol, the horror of being abused at an English seminary beside a fire of collapsing coals. Byrne’s default expression is of modest dejection belied only by shining eyes – he reminds us of how much understated acting can deliver.
Star ratings (out of five)
The Clinic ★★★★
The Snail House ★★
Who Killed My Father ★★★★
Walking with Ghosts ★★★
