You know what they say: they fuck you up, your mum and dad. And in Danny Lee Wynter’s new play, based on his own experiences, so do your sisters.
Here we are in a big, busy family home in Ilford – both in 1995 and in 1980 – effervescent with life. In the 90s, Ted (an impressive stage debut from Leo Whitfield Harris) is an awkward, mixed-race teen trying to work out his place in the world. He, along with his mother Tillie (Ria Zmitrowicz) and her dysfunctional family of sisters – the sour-tongued and fiercely loyal Jackie, and the youngest and feistiest, Anne – is off to the funeral of his grandmother Elaine, one of the few people who made him feel genuinely at home. Grief swells around the family, in shadows and memories, as they try to sift through the sadmin and prepare to put the house they grew up in on the market.
And then there’s Patrick (a sparkling Craig Stein), a former professional dancer known, not-so-affectionately, to some of the family as ‘Pat the poof’. Tillie’s childhood best friend, he shows up to pay his respects to her mother, who opened her heart and home to him when his own father beat him for his sexuality.
Wynter’s dialogue feels like it could be lifted straight from a sitcom; we get all the colour and expletives you’d expect from a close-knit family, fractured by clashing personalities and worldviews. But the play is at its best when Pat and Ted begin to form a bond. Pat – a Black gay man, and a fan of big show tunes like Elaine – opens up a whole new world to Ted, one filled with high kicks and theatre trips, where he doesn’t have to pretend to have a thick skin to fit in.
There are subtle differences, too, in the way Pat talks about his lost love and the contempt he feels for Ted’s own brash, emotionally repressed father, Ken. To Ted, Pat becomes a figure of magic and safety, particularly when he breaks into a spiralling, euphoric tap dance that bathes the stage in bright pink. Like his lover, though, Pat is also dying of Aids – and there’s a sense that the vitality he brings to both Ted and Tillie’s lives is running on borrowed time.
Directed by Tim Sheader, the production evokes the two different time frames specifically and vividly, with the 1980 scenes showing the older characters in their younger years. The script, too, is peppered with references to Thatcherism, Barbara Dickson and Streisand, The Body Shop and Michael Barrymore – all painting a picture of a richly realised time and place. Most of all, though, it is very, very funny, full of the kind of casual idioms that make up the easy way you speak to family and friends: ‘you can’t turn a dog into a chair, and if you do it won’t be comfy’.
Drawing the lines between the people we were in the past and the people we become, Wynter has written something wise, witty and packed with big feelings. But here, it is the little things that move you: having to hand back the keys to your family home or inheriting old cassette tapes that have been held by the people you love. It's good stuff.
