Theatre review: August In England

Sir Lenny Henry has a couple of high-profile careers under his belt, with decades as a popular comedian followed by a move to classical acting later in life. Both feed into his playwrighting debut August In England, a monologue he also stars in and which opens with Henry arriving on stage to calypso music, pouring drinks for himself and the front row, and generally working the audience like a seasoned comic. It's perhaps not too surprising for an actor writing his first play to stick to a familiar persona, but I think there's something else going on here as well: In a sold-out show people have booked for its star power, he's reminding us that he's someone considered part of the fabric of this country, and his character August Henderson (I did wonder if the name was a tribute to the August Wilson plays Henry's appeared in) is very similar to his creator, with the crucial difference that Henry was born in the UK.

He's also a grocer not a performer, and without the profile, the fanbase and the knighthood he's more vulnerable than he realises in the country he's always thought of as home. August tells the story of his arrival with his mother from Jamaica aged 8 in the 1960s, via Peckham to West Bromwich where he's originally made to feel his skin colour very overtly. By his teens though he's found friends and started a family, and we follow his ups and downs, including a betrayal of his first partner while she was dying that he's never forgiven himself for, and his falling in love with someone new (despite the fact that she's from Dudley.)

It's a life story so it's inevitably one of ups and downs, and Lynette Linton and Daniel Bailey's production allows Henry to lay on the charm as he tells it, but we keep flashing forward to quick video sequences of August in a cell, and as the play progresses Natalie Pryce's cosy front room set slowly gets stripped back to something starker. While he should be planning his wedding August is receiving threatening letters demanding he produce impossible amounts of documentation to prove he belongs in the UK.

For the benefit of the international reader, the Windrush Scandal was probably the most perfectly distilled example of the current Government's trademark mix of racism, casual cruelty and dribbling incompetence, and as the video interviews that serve as a postscript remind us, there's no knowing how many older people's lives were shortened or otherwise damaged by the stress and its lasting effects. In this context the humour and life are an important counterbalance to what is a very angry play - Henry isn't afraid to name and shame Theresa May and Capita as the villains of the piece.

Henry hasn't spent the last 15 years in Shakespeare, Brecht, The Masked Singer and Wilson without picking up a thing or two about high drama, and I liked the understated mirroring of invisibility: In the 1970s racists overtly pretend he isn't there, in the 2010s he feels like the Government's doing the same. I'm sure there'll be more stories to come about the Windrush Scandal and what it says about the wider world, but there's something about this one that feels like only Henry could have told it - the embodiment of Caribbean Britishness, delivering something of a "there but for the grace of god" story.

August In England by Lenny Henry is booking until the 10th of June at the Bush Theatre's Holloway (returns and rush tickets only.)

Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Tristram Kenton.