Theatre review: NW Trilogy

When Indhu Rubasingham took over what was then called the Tricycle Theatre, she did so with a manifesto of reflecting and celebrating the cultural diversity of its North London home. It's a promise her programming has kept to, and in my first trip back to what is now the Kiln she throws a lot of that diversity together in a single night, commissioning three playwrights to celebrate the history of three of the communities that have called Kilburn home in the last century. Directed by Susie McKenna and Taio Lawson, NW Trilogy has an overall epic scope, touching on a couple of events of cultural and political significance, but the individual stories are intimate and personal, and - whether this was a conscious part of the commission or a coincidence - all feature to a greater or lesser extent music and dance as a way of connecting the characters to their wider communities.

For example Moira Buffini's opener, Dance Floor, which follows Irish immigrants in the 1930s. Not that we see much song or dance in the ceilidh club where it's set, as we get the detritus of the night before, that new cleaner Aoife (Claire Keenan) has to clear up before the next customers arrive.

Having recently arrived in Kilburn after running away from home, she's a pregnant teenager who might have a partial solution for her money problems when she finds an expensive engagement ring on the floor. She's quickly faced with a dilemma when the owner, Sean (Emmet Byrne,) arrives looking for it, and she has to decide whether to tell him the truth. We're in the 1970s for the rest of the evening, with Roy Williams giving us West Indian musician Riley (Chris Tummings) in Life of Riley. His reggae record label has recently folded but music remains the love of his life, and even when his estranged daughter Paulette (Harmony Rose Bremner) comes looking for him he's unapologetic about the choices he made.

After the interval Suhayla El-Bushra's Waking/Walking takes us to the Grunwick dispute, in which a group of mainly South Asian female workers went on strike at a film processing factory. Anjali (Natasha Jayetileke) is a working mother whose wage helps save her husband Deepak's (Ronny Jhutty) wounded pride at losing out on a promotion, so she takes the difficult decision to go against her friends and not join the strike. It's tonally a bit of an uneven conclusion to the evening - the first scene, which also features Rina Fatania, fast becoming the Kiln's resident scene-stealer, as the strike's organiser - veers a little bit too close to sitcom, even before the jarring tonal shift to a sad monologue from Anjali, walking into work every day past her friends calling her a scab.

All three pieces have a lot of individual moments to enjoy, but for me the central story of a father and daughter whose most obvious similarity is their stubbornness, trying to find something else to connect over, is the strongest and most consistent; Dance Floor has an open ending that suggests a whole variety of possibilities, but it does make it feel like a bit of a non-sequitur that's stopped abruptly. As an evening the plays add up to a bit more than the sum of their parts, as themes swirl around showing the similarities between the communities - from the three ethnic groups sometimes dismissing, sometimes connecting with each other, to little visual continuities, like everyone in the Irish segment taking their shoes off to keep the floor clean, mirroring everyone in the South Asian segment taking them off to enter the flat. I'm not sure what we get is an epic journey through the last century in Kilburn, but we do get vivid snapshots of what makes up the area's personality.

NW Trilogy: Dance Floor by Moira Buffini, Life of Riley by Roy Williams and Waking/Walking by Suhayla El-Bushra is booking until the 9th of October at the Kiln Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.