Theatre review: The Authenticator

Crumbling country estates have in recent years been at the centre of controversy over the suggestion that maybe the visitors, whose tourist cash is pretty much keeping them standing, might want to know about the darker parts of the building's history, like how much its glory days were supported by the slave trade. They're also the setting for many a gothic mystery, and what Winsome Pinnock's new play The Authenticator does very effectively is bring those two elements together to touch on a hot-button topic in entertaining fashion. Eccentric aristocrat Fen (Sylvestra Le Touzel) is the last descendant of the Harford family, and the first woman to inherit the estate following centuries of male primogeniture. Digging through family history, she's unearthed the previously unseen diaries of 18th century ancestor Henry Harford, the founder of the family's wealth.

Although it was no great secret that he made his fortune in Jamaican plantations, he had later rather ostentatiously tried to distance himself from the slave trade, and allied himself with abolitionists. The diaries will need to be authenticated, and Fen is convinced to give the job to Abi (Rakie Ayola) in some part because of the enthusiasm of her protégée Marva (Cherrelle Skeete,) who remembers visiting the estate with her grandfather.

In fact Marva has a secret reason of her own for wanting to work in this house, and in among the dry lists in the documents the two academics are inspecting are little details that show Henry didn't leave his involvement in slavery as far behind him as he would have liked people to think. They also hint at a secret that changes everything about the Harford family and its history.

Pinnock's play is very nuanced and even-handed: Fen can be oblivious to quite how priviliged she's been and prone to cultural appropriation, but while she can be a comic foil at times she's never made a villain. Meanwhile there's a look at the fact that this kind of story doesn't come down to something as simple as black and white, and two modern black people's connection to the story can vary greatly: While Marva's family history is full of missing pieces and misfortune, Abi's own background includes Nigerian royalty who themselves facilitated the slave trade.

But all this is given in a play with a light touch and an admirable lack of overwriting (having seeded the idea that the twins who run through the Harford family are fraternal, there's questions to be asked about whether a pair of twins who were separated in the past were done so on the basis of skin colour; I could easily see some playwrights add an unnecessary half-hour of discussion here but Pinnock trusts the audience to go off and make connections ourselves.) It's also very funny, with its humour ranging from the clever to the silly, and some lines that are both (when the authenticators first arrive, the estate is being used to film a music video for a "grimy artist" called Phallus-E.)

Jon Bausor's set, meanwhile, is a big contributor to the way Miranda Cromwell's production adds in a touch of the gothic thriller - the various parts of the traverse set revolve and twist to create different parts of the old building the becomes the fourth character, with Aideen Malone's lighting giving us the requisite dark shadowy corners and Tingying Dong's sound design providing the creaks and cracks, and the sudden bursts of noise from forgotten ghost tours of the dungeon. The Authenticator knows when to be restrained and when to go all out, and as a result gets the balance just right between powerful drama and a lot of fun.

The Authenticator by Winsome Pinnock is booking until the 9th of May at the National Theatre's Dorfman.

Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.