Theatre review: Clyde's

Lynn Nottage is having a fairly high-profile year in London - we've had The Secret Life of Bees, and hot on the heels of Mlima's Tale at the Kiln, it's back to the Donald and Margot Warehouse where Sweat was staged in 2019. Clyde's takes place in a shared universe with the latter play, as well as sharing a director in Lynette Linton, and while it shows the American playwright to have lost none of her enthusiasm for tackling a heavy subject, it also displays much more of a light touch. The titular establishment is a truck stop diner run by ex-con Clyde (Gbemisola Ikumelo,) who exclusively hires other former inmates who can't find work anywhere else. Although to what extent this is her attempting to help them is a different story, as her managerial style is full supervillain - she likes to keep them terrified of her and remind them that if they don't toe the line and she fires them, nobody else will give them a job.

But when the boss is away the kitchen staff actually find the job fulfilling, largely because of Montrellous (Giles Terera,) who has a genuine passion for making sandwiches just right.

Letitia (Ronkẹ Adékọluẹ́jọ́) and Rafael (Sebastian Orozco) see Montrellous as the Buddha of sandwich-making, and when they're not fantasising about their dream sandwich, they're actually trying to create the perfect combination out of the dubious ingredients in Clyde's kitchen. The connection to Sweat comes in Jason, who in the earlier play we saw both before and after he did time, and it's good to see Patrick Gibson return to the role, for reasons of acting.

This is a character piece more than a narrative, with Nottage, Lynton and their cast sympathetically teasing out everyone's backstory and the damage it's left them in today. Letitia is the one who's found it hardest to believe she can be worthy of love, and keeps going back to the abusive father of her child, unable to accept that the sweet Rafael can have genuinely fallen for her. As the only white person in the kitchen, Jason has to convince both his co-workers and the audience that he's left behind the racist past his facial gang tattoos are a constant reminder of.

The most enigmatic characters are Montrellous, whose grim background is something he's dealt with by cultivating his own brand of serenity that gets him through, and Clyde herself, who the play does have some sympathy for, suggesting her abuse of her staff is misdirected self-loathing. But this is a spin-off from a play about industrial disputes, and Nottage is on the side of the workers: In a way this is a microcosm of the earlier play's situation, asking why the people doing thw work should be responsible for the bosses' bad decisions, and celebrating the contribution the people on the ground make.

Which isn't to say this is a dry affair, and all this character work comes with a lot of humour, from running jokes to snappy one-liners. Linton deals with what could be a visually boring single set by intermittently moving the worktops into different configurations, with the cast dancing them around Frankie Bradshaw's set to Kane Husbands' movement direction. Overall a really entertaining show that manages to merge optimism with grittiness. (I just hope at least some of the food being thrown around the stage is fake or this run's going to be a horrible waste. And no, those sandwiches aren't getting eaten afterwards, not by anyone who's watched them being prepared, anyway.)

Clyde's by Lynn Nottage is booking until the 2nd of December at the Donmar Warehouse.

Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner (I don't usually review production photos but wow, these are gorgeous. And not just because they've got Paddy Gibson and Sebastian Orozco to work with.)