Theatre review: The Fellowship

Roy Williams, whose Death of England trilogy inadvertently ended up bookending the Covid lockdowns, now turns his hand to a traditional intergenerational family drama at he continues to explore the tensions and contradictions of the children of the Windrush generation. The Fellowship, set in 2019, makes explicit reference to that generation, in the unseen 91-year-old mother of Dawn (Cherrelle Skeete.) She moved into her younger daughter's house when her health started to fail terminally - it's implied if never explicitly stated that her deterioration really began with the Home Office scandal that she got caught up in. Dawn's feelings about a mother who was physically and emotionally abusive are complicated at best, but she's still taken on most of her care compared to older sister Marcia (Suzette Llewellyn,) a barrister and one of a tiny minority of black QCs, whose career has always taken precedence.

The impending death brings together a family that always seems delicately balanced between love and explosive tensions. At the moment, what's causing the latter is Marcia's affair with a white, married, Conservative MP.

Dawn thinks her sister is being used as an exotic trophy by someone who'll let her take the fall at the first sign of trouble. Marcia thinks her sister has been turned fanatically against all white people by her partner Tony (Trevor Laird). These aggressive feelings aren't helped by her son Jermaine (Ethan Hazzard) secretly dating a white girl, Simone (Rosie Day.) She's someone he knew at school, and his mother wouldn't just object on the grounds of her race: For reasons that gradually become apparent, Dawn has a particular hatred of Simone, to the point that she can't even bear to say her name.

If Skeete seems a couple of decades too young for the role she's playing, it's a variation on a by-now familiar story: Originally cast in two small supporting roles (now played by Yasmin Mwanza,) she got promoted to the lead when another actor got sick. She's now almost off-book, and so good she almost makes you forget that she doesn't look that much older than her onstage son.

I always look forward to Williams' work; I don't know how much blood, sweat and tears it actually takes, but what ends up on stage always feels pretty effortlessly natural. Both the way his plays are highly political and racially charged, and the way his characters feel three-dimensional, are always unforced and remarkably balanced. Here, the sisters both grew up immersed in a culture of protests beginning with Brixton in the 1980s. They have, on the surface at least, taken very different paths and approaches to how that has shaped them as adults, but there's no easy wrong or right about it - everyone in the story at various points gets to be its hero or villain.

The contradictions in Dawn are symbolised by her taste in music - it's endlessly hilarious to her sister that while she puts on a militant front of hating everything white, in private she loves nothing better than to dance to Kylie, Culture Club and Take That. This contributes to a couple of striking moments: Pausing the action for a protracted time is an audacious move that often falls flat, but Paulette Randall's production handles a tense moment when the stage is left empty while "Could It Be Magic" plays perfectly. On a lighter note, a dramatic moment is perfectly punctured when Dawn relents and lists all the opinions she has that she feels black people aren't "supposed" to think, a scene which also serves to gauge where the audience's limits lie: "The next person to cook jerk chicken on Masterchef should be executed" and "I don't want Idris Elba to be James Bond" got big laughs, but "Viola Davis ain't Streep" was clearly a step too far.

One of the most memorable aspects of Randall's production is the set design: The story could easily have suggested the kind of naturalistic house set we've seen many times before, including on this stage, but Libby Watson instead has the action float in a blank space, dominated by a winding staircase leading up to the dying mother's bedroom. It's a brilliantly dramatic setting for a domestic story, and Watson even takes inspiration from the Alexa playlists that soundtrack many of the family's key moments, to set the living room inside an Echo tower. It's the kind of design conceit that could overwhelm a production, but ends up feeling like it reflects the rhythms of their 21st century daily life. (Other virtual personal assistants are available.)

The Fellowship has some of the drawbacks of any family drama, namely that with a number of plot strains being set up, they're not all equally interesting and some feel extraneous. It leads to a mild case of Multiple Ending Syndrome, with the audience launching into an ovation at what feels like a striking ending for Dawn, only for there to be another 10-15 minutes of loose ends to be tied up, and at this point the relationships between Tony, Jermaine and Simone don't feel as essential as the one between the sisters. The actual ending is a satisfying one though, and if a bit too long overall the play balances comedy and tragedy as successfully as it balances its characters' approaches to the world. It's also at its heart a serious political play about racial inequality and tension that makes its points in a spiky, rather than outright aggressive way.

The Fellowship by Roy Williams is booking until the 23rd of July at Hampstead Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Robert Day.