Theatre review: Ilford Boy

Queer actors turning playwright seem to be having a moment, and after the mixed bag of his debut BLACK SUPERHERO Danny Lee Wynter follows it up with a major step up that suggests he's as much of a natural writer as Jack Holden and Jordan Luke Gage. The titular character of the semi-autobiographical Ilford Boy is 14-year-old Ted (Leo Whitfield Harris,) who lives in East London in the middle of a multicultural family. It's 1996 and he and his mum Tillie (Ria Zmitrowicz) have been staying at the old family home, looking after her mother during her last days. Streisand-loving Nan has just died as the play starts, so the whole family is around arranging the funeral: His aunts Jackie (Jodie McNee) and her monosyllabic husband Trevor (Cary Crankson,) and heavily pregnant Ann (Charlotte Jaconelli,) married to the much more opinionated Raj (Aaron Gill.)

Returning to pay his respects to a woman who was always kind to him is someone Ted's less familiar with, Tillie's best friend from her teenage years Pat (Craig Stein,) now a dancer who mostly works on cruise ships.

The arrival of the flamboyant Pat provides a different kind of role model for a teenager just starting to get his head around his own sexuality, and a particularly striking change from Kenny (Gershwyn Eustache Jnr,) the father who's not quite absent but certainly not really present in his son's life, and whose determination not to be like his own abusive father only seems to make it more inevitable that he slip into the same toxic behaviours.

In his professional debut Whitfield Harris impressively holds his own opposite a cast full of established and popular actors, giving us a vulnerable teenager with a steely backbone just waiting for the opportunity to show it. Around him Wynter has built a recognisable family, the three sisters similar in their sharp and witty banter but distinct - Zmitrowicz the one who in 1996 would still have been called "brassy," McNee the Thatcherite and Jaconelli the outwardly confident one who's been bullied so much about her weight all her life she's ended up marrying a man who doesn't quite respect her.

With the men in the family either controlling or controlled, Stein brings in a new energy as Pat, in a scene-stealing, tap-dancing performance. This still being in the middle of the AIDS pandemic there's something defiant about his flamboyance, and his life outside the house is as much about attending friends' funerals as it is their shows.

For a coming-of-age drama with themes of illness and abuse this is regularly laugh-out-loud funny; on top of the quips there's also a running theme of the family coming up with bizarre aphorisms like 'a small hook can swing a big door" or "you can't turn a dog into a chair, or if you do it won't be comfortable." It's also got its moments of meta humour - Pat takes Ted to see Adrian Lester in Company at the Donald and Margot Warehouse and they've got thoughts on the venue's bare brick walls (which Peter McKintosh's design keeps visible here as well.)

The undertones of social commentary are subtly done - flashbacks to the early eighties when Tillie's mother Eileen (Lindsey Coulson) more or less kept an open house for anyone struggling at home, and we see a much warmer relationship between Kenny and Pat that suggests not only expectations of black masculinity but also the way AIDS was weaponised to turn back queer rights are behind the straight man's distaste for the gay one in the main timeline.

Tim Sheader's production teeters on the edge of overstaying its welcome but just about avoids it, and in keeping with my regular grumble about the Donmar it turns out even ending up in the side Stalls doesn't mean an important scene won't be staged somewhere you can't see it. But overall this is well worth catching, very funny, moving without going in for manipulation, and universal in its specificity.

Ilford Boy by Danny Lee Wynter is booking until the 28th of November at the Donmar Warehouse.

Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Helen Murray.