A Place For We review, Park Theatre: Big on poignancy but low on tension

Change – or die out. That’s the Darwinian dilemma facing funeral parlour proprietor Clarence (David Webber), whose traditional Caribbean business is fighting for survival as Brixton gentrifies. Playwright Archie Maddocks’s intriguing, episodic look at gentrification and social change is set in a London where the Windrush Generation are being lost, fast – if they’re not being forcibly deported by the Home Office. And white gentrifiers are moving in just as quickly: an amusingly gauche Blake Harrison’s eagerness to support a local Trinidadian business quickly turns to fury when Clarence won’t support his request for “eco burial pods”.

Still, although Clarence rushes to the barricades against gentrification, looking on in approval as his eccentric mate wields improvised flamethrowers against property developers, Maddocks’s play is a bit more circumspect. His thesis is, broadly, that change is inevitable, a core part of London. This message is hammered home first by Clarence’s enterprising son Keron, who won’t take part in the festive Trinidadian mourning rituals his father hosts – he’s more interested in developing new pricing structures. Then it’s bolted down by the play’s second act shift back to the 1960s, where a working-class white couple are mourning the loss of the pub they’ve owned for generations. Brixton doesn’t feel like it’s “theirs” any more, they lament.

This sense of fatalism, of inevitable change, slightly hampers the momentum of a play that’s big on poignancy but low on tension. Clarence doesn’t change, and nor does anyone else: they just watch the streets around them change colour like autumn leaves, the things they love withering, the odd unfamiliar green shoot popping up in recompense.

Still, if A Place For We isn’t edge-of-your-seat-theatre (and it could certainly benefit from a stripped-down running time), director Michael Buffong’s production is full of charm and hilarity. Laurence Ubong Williams, playing mortician-in-training Keron, brings down the house as he clowns around with coffins and recoils in horror at the stench of the dead. Webber delivers a masterful performance as Clarence, switching effortlessly from Trinidadian accents to Cockney geezer to Jeeves the butler as the occasion demands. And Kirsty Oswald brings a lovely warmth, wit and pragmatism to her role as Keron’s pregnant girlfriend Tash, always ready to puncture her bumptious boyfriend’s ego. These working-class characters are drawn with rare accuracy and sympathy, even if there’s not much exploration of the pain inflicted by the racist slurs that get thrown as old and new ways collide.

open image in gallery

Gentrification might be inevitable, but it’s not inevitable like ageing. It’s inevitable like climate change: social factors are causing it, ones that could be prevented with collective action. A Place For We’s large cast of characters and locations sets it up as a study of gentrification, which makes it disappointing that it doesn’t try to explore how government, local councils and property developers have colluded to transform the social character of neighbourhoods like Brixton. But it succeeds as an elegy for things lost, shot through with humour, like a novelty lighter flickering in the dark.

‘A Place For We’ runs at the Park Theatre until 6 November