Guyanese tailor Walker Holt (Arinzé Kene) rents this upstairs space where he makes alterations, but dreams of buying the property and eventually expanding it into a business selling his own suits. It's taken him years to get to that point but he might make the last push sooner than expected: Local businessman Mr Nat (Colin Mace) has a job that would pay enough for the deposit.
The catch is the job isn't just huge, it's got a tight deadline: A seemingly endless supply of sacks full of trousers, all of which need to be shortened in two days, keep being brought up the stairs. To help him get the job done he enlists not only his best friend and assistant Buster (Gershwyn Eustache Jnr) and his teenage van driver Courtney (Raphel Famotibe) but also the laid-back freelance tailor Horace (Karl Collins.)
At its core Alterations is about different ways of surviving the challenges of being black in 1970s England: While Courtney represents an angry younger generation that want to make something of themselves but see no way to do so (and is very pointed about the fact that this isn't something he sees as an exclusively black problem,) Walker is determined to play the capitalist game he's found himself in and win it. But if his efforts seem about to pay off he's been willing to lose a lot in his personal life: The way he talks to the people helping him make his dream come true suggest he'll alienate them all sooner or later - even the fiercely loyal Buster only puts up with him because he's quietly resigned to the fact that he's not really Walker's business partner but his subordinate.
Most of all Walker's taken his eye off the ball with regard to his family, and has no idea how neglected his wife Darlene (Cherrelle Skeete) feels. Having just lost her job because she spends so much time looking after a daughter who barely knows her father, Horace has a proposition for her that'll make her set her sights on change. Although there are some funny conversations along the way, Alterations has at its core a pretty downbeat message about the real cost of making a single, ambitious dream come true.
Lynette Linton's production uses a version of the text that includes new additional material by Trish Cooke, which as far as I can tell fits into the dialogue pretty seamlessly. I'm not familiar with the original, which isn't surprising - this is the first-ever revival of a fringe play that would likely have been completely forgotten if the NT didn't have a dedicated Black Plays Archive. So I don't know which parts of the play are Cooke's own alterations, but it does definitely feel like it's a bit stretched beyond what it really has to say, and Frankie Bradshaw's designs (which include a revolve and descending racks of clothes that make up Walker's dream shop) are putting a lot of work into setting an intimate play on a huge stage.
So there are ways in which the play outstays its welcome, and others in which it leaves us hanging - if Buster's extreme, undisguised dislike of the Jewish Mr Nat isn't explored we have to assume the worst of him. Meanwhile Walker himself is so single-minded in his ambition it's hard to sympathise too much with him when everything he's neglected for it is lost. Abbensetts' is definitely an interesting voice it's good to have revived, but the attempts to make the play fit into its new home do stretch it a bit - next time more padding on the seats, less on the script.
Alterations by Michael Abbensetts with additional material by Trish Cooke is booking until the 5th of April at the National Theatre's Lyttelton.
Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes straight through.
Photo credit: Marc Brenner.
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