Theatre review: J'Ouvert

Second in the season of three new plays reopening the Harold Pinter Theatre is one that originally debuted in the much more intimate Theatre 503, where it must have felt pretty cramped as Yasmin Joseph's J'Ouvert tries to cram the whole Notting Hill Carnival on stage. It is, to start with at least, a pretty loose journey through the day with three young women: Nadine (Gabrielle Brooks) and Jade (Sapphire Joy) have known each other since they were children, while Nisha (Annice Boparai) is a newer friend who recruited them for a local activist group. Nadine is a bit cold and standoffish with Nisha, who she sees as a bit of a cultural tourist at an event with specifically Afro-Carribean roots, but Nisha believes it's an opportunity for women of colour to stand together and stand up for each other, and sees Jade as a potentially inspiring speaker for their cause.

The cast, along with onstage DJ Zuyane Russell, also take on various other characters the women encounter over the course of the day, and generally the character work is distinctive from the start, but in a wider sense J'Ouvert takes a while to find its focus.

One of the themes jostling for position is of the soul of Carnival itself, symbolised by Nadine - who uses the event as a release from her judgmental religious family, and hopes to become this year's face of the Carnival, a title that has tended to go to lighter-skinned women in the previous years - imagining conversations with "Mother of the Carnival" Claudia Jones, one of the people who set it up in response to racism in the 1950s. Are they dancing on bones, as Jade would have it, or, as Nadine counters, dancing with spirits of their ancestors? Elsewhere a worse-for-wear Nisha has a comic encounter with a pair of elderly West Indian men trying to sell overpriced whistles, while Jade and Nadine clash with one of the Notting Hill residents who's barred the gates against the annual influx of dancing bodies. There's also the shadow of Grenfell, never explicitly mentioned but alluded to a few times, in a story that's specifically set at the 2017 Carnival a few months after the fire.

So while individual scenes are entertaining and Rebekah Murrell's production manages a party atmosphere with an edge to it throughout, it's only when Nadine and Jade are approached by two men who make unwelcome advances, that the story really starts to coalesce. The play's climax takes a dark turn but Joseph resists the temptation to turn it into a tragedy at the last minute, giving her heroines a triumph and resolving the tension between Nadine and Nisha in the process. With naturalism weaving in and out of more florid monologues and magical realism, and some scenes having an almost sketch-like quality, J'Ouvert doesn't quite know what it wants to be a lot of the time; but it does find more of a focus as it goes on, and there's no question Joseph has a genuine love and respect for the central characters she's created.

J'Ouvert by Yasmin Joseph is booking until the 3rd of July at the Harold Pinter Theatre; a filmed version is streaming on BBC iPlayer until April 2022.

Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Helen Murray.