Theatre review: After Sunday

Sophia Griffin's debut play After Sunday takes place in the kitchen of a secure hospital, where men with a violent past are held: Some are there directly from prison, like Ty (Corey Weekes,) who just wants to pass his psychiatric evaluation and return to finish his sentence. Others spend much longer there, like Leroy (David Webber,) who seems to have been there for years, and is hoping to finally have made enough progress to be let out to a halfway house. They're among four "service users" who've taken up occupational therapist Naomi's (Aimée Powell) offer of a weekly session - not a class, as they all seem to know what they're doing - of cooking for men from an Afro-Caribbean background. It aims to help their progress by reconnecting them with smells, flavours and routines from their childhoods.

The group gets off to a bad start though as the fourth member never turns up - the only one who seems to have been universally liked by his fellow patients, the unit goes into lockdown when his body is found following his suicide.

It's one of the things casting a shadow over the course in the following weeks, and Naomi tries to offset it by suggesting they cater the upcoming Friends and Family visit day. For Daniel (Darrel Bailey) this gives him the additional motivation that his young children might finally be allowed to visit him. Although their relationships can be abrasive there's something sympathetic to be found in all three men, with Griffin deliberately holding back information about just how egregious their crimes were until we've already formed a connection with them.

Corey Campbell's production takes us through the story gently and sympathetically, although perhaps a bit too much so, as my attention wandered more than once. And the deliberate vagueness around some of the details might be taken a bit too far: I'll say this for Bush audiences, they always have a lot to say about what they've just watched on the way back to the Tube station, and this time what I overheard was mostly people who felt they were missing a lot of context and background to the men's relationships.

The play also attempts to give us the effect of all of this on the NHS worker who's putting her own personal life on the back burner to try and help the men, but again this doesn't quite feel fully developed. Still, if she doesn't hit quite every point she's trying to make cleanly you can't fault Griffin for ambition, and the play's rough edges are made up for in humour, warmth, realism and a sense of redemption even as prospects seem bleak.

After Sunday by Sophia Griffin is booking until the 20th of December at the Bush Theatre's Holloway.

Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Nicola Young.