This co-production from Talawa Theatre Company, Soho Theatre and the Albany is a sharply written, thoughtful look at reconciling our collective past.
Ellen Cairn's set for God's Property rips off a corner of a house and places before us two walls of a nostalgic kitchen. The back door leads onto Deptford in 1982, a year or so after the Brixton riot, and the rest of the quiet, empty house is never forgotten.
Like its set, God's Property never really allows us to ignore what surrounds this snapshot of history: what's come before it and what's to come later. This pondering on identity is weaved into a crime story that hinges on a funny, awkward sexual encounter between two sixteen year-olds. It's written with humour and poetry and an understanding of the vulnerability and the fallibility of youth. But even sharper is the way it captures how we often look to barely formed, ever-changing young adults for a concrete understanding of race relations.
Into Cairn's kitchen walks Chima, a wise, measured, Kingsley Ben-Adir. He carries with him ten years of prison time and his understanding of the world circa 1972. His sixteen year-old brother, Onochie (Ash Hunter), greets him with a knife. Dressed in Doc Martens, braces and buttoned up shirt, Ono's head is shaved, his walk a little awkward and his speech mostly about how the brothers from an Irish mother and Nigerian father have nothing in common anymore. “We don't need yer sashaying through Deptford dressed in yer long humiliations, thank yer very much,” he tells him.
Elbowing his way back into Ono's life, Chima promises redolent Nigerian dinners and bonds with him over girls. But Ono's skinhead alliances and forced, defensive ideas on his identity make no room for him to remember his dad or his childhood with Chima. Instead, the brothers find themselves in a battle to reconcile their memories of the past as well as their place in the present.
Tensions are heightened when Onochie's suspect white girlfriend (a near-perfect Ria Zmitrowicz in an outstanding performance) makes an appearance and reveals why dating Ono isn't as simple as he might have believed. But her revelations are triggered by an all too predictable scene about spicy Nigerian food and eating with one's hands. This scene is both precise and disappointing because it feels so old hat. As soon as it begins, you'll find yourself waiting for the speech about the lack of cutlery. It cropped up in Bola Agbaje's Belong and countless times in TV and film. It's useful to demonstrate slow changing attitudes, but it's not original.
Regardless of whether a story of mixed-race kids and far right thuggery has been told before (memorably in Yousaf Ali Khan's Skin Deep), Kene tells it with admirable poetry and a clear reminder to consider the whole story and its many angles. It's telling that Chima has ten years on his brother. Ten years of hurt, discrimination and, as we find out, betrayal. With those years, he reminds us there's no getting over the past but there is a way of dealing with it.
God's Property runs at Soho Theatre until 23rd March.
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