“A small hinge can swing a big door,” says Ted’s aunt Jackie, drawing on a cigarette and nodding sagely. It’s one of many delightful homespun maxims that pepper Danny Lee Wynter’s sizzingly funny new play. But it also drives neatly to the heart of the piece. The small hinge in this case is the unexpected arrival of family friend Patrick at a funeral.
His decision to attend will have a profound impact on 14-year-old Ted, who hovers nervously on the threshold between childhood and adulthood, and between his raucous east London family and the sense of a life elsewhere. When we first meet him in 1995, Ted is sullen, confused and grief-sodden, struggling to do up his tie for the burial of his beloved grandmother, Eileen. By the end, he has suffered another loss but has a clearer sense of who he might be.
It’s a rite-of-passage play, then, and one written from experience. Wynter draws on his own past, growing up gay and mixed-race in 1990s working-class Essex, and his dialogue crackles with life and authenticity. In Ted (played with lovely, wary precision by newcomer Leo Whitfield Harris), we see the emotional turbulence of a boy faced with unappealing examples of masculinity: his two uncles (the one henpecked, the other ambitious and chauvinistic) and his bullish, semi-present father Ken. His awkward interactions with Ken, who talks of girls, cars and boxing, contrast with the increasing fascination of Patrick, a proudly gay Black man who rocks up in heels and sequins and talks about theatre.
There are issues with the piece: it’s a little over-crammed, the uncles could be fleshed out more, and several arguments seem engineered to make a point. But it is marked out by its generosity of spirit. In Patrick, Wynter creates a gorgeous character — a defiantly flamboyant individual who stares down both prejudice and the terror of Aids, and who gently becomes an ersatz father to Ted. He’s played with fabulous drive and timing by Craig Stein, finishing the first act of Tim Sheader’s pulsating production with a knockout tap routine to “Don’t Rain on My Parade” that literally lights up Peter McKintosh’s domestic set as he dances across it.
But Ted’s mother, Tillie, and her sisters are likewise drawn with enormous affection and a keen understanding of how social expectations can damage a person. Ria Zmitrowicz’s Tillie is a bundle of contradictions: warm, impulsive, loving, but messed up by pinning herself to a man who can’t commit. Jodie McNee’s waspish Jackie and Charlotte Jaconelli’s plain-speaking Ann hide pain and frustration behind tough facades.
Loss and legacy snake through the piece, and Wynter adds depth through flashbacks to 1980 that explain the characters’ choices and relationships. We learn how brutal fathers shaped both Ken and Patrick. We glimpse a grief that affected Jackie. We meet family matriarch Eileen (Lindsey Coulson): a font of kindly wisdom but also a woman hemmed in by her gender, class and period.
In the end, it’s a play that takes on rather more than the structure can hold. But it honours both family and found family, cherishes the bravery of ordinary people in the face of adversity and prejudice, celebrates acceptance and is written with huge heart and wit.
★★★☆☆
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