Natasha, a beautiful 25-year-old Jamaican woman, has been seeing fellow lawyer David, a sensitive and politely spoken young Nigerian.
As the latter bellows at his family when finally pushed to the end of his tether, ‘What’s the fucking problem?’ In Femi Ogun’s pan-African, tragic-comic take on ‘Romeo and Juliet’, the answer is the deep-seated – if rarely interrogated – bigotry between Africans and Caribbeans in Britain’s black community.
To Natasha’s father, Nigerians are either fraudsters or witchdoctors. To David’s equally outspoken older sister, Jamaicans are all slovenly stoners. The prejudice doesn’t dissipate down the generations, although the reasoning does seem to become increasingly aesthetic. ‘You used to be the black Posh and Becks,’ spits Natasha’s mobile-toting mate, who can hardly look her in the face since she left her Jamaican ex for David. ‘Now you’re Beyoncé and Jay-Z!’
Decked out like a Diesel store with graffitied girders, gauze screens and a loud, hip soundtrack, the round space becomes a gladiatorial ring across which the excellent cast struts its family honour and hollers insults. Jocelyn Jee Esien (of cult BBC sketch show ‘Little Miss Jocelyn’) vacuums up the biggest laughs as David’s motor-mouthed battleaxe of a guardian.
Sadly, Ogun loses track entirely in the second act with an interfering plot-twist and naff metaphorical ruminations on the nature of love which fail to galvanise the relationship between his David and Kelle Bryan (ex-Eternal)’s radiant Natasha. The heart of his play lies in the quick-fire yet expertly inflected banter of the first act, where regular cries of ‘Oh my gosh!’ from the young audience members testify to both its humour and its hard-hitting truth.
