Twenty-five years after their last meeting, five former school friends – four black and one mixed-race: skin colour is definitely an issue here – gather to celebrate the fortieth birthday of lawyer Carol. ‘Through thick and thin’ is their Musketeer-like cry of undimmed sisterhood and they are soon nostalgically grooving to New Edition’s ‘Candy Girl’. But that doesn’t mean that old playground gripes and grumbles won’t re-emerge to spoil the party atmosphere as the evening wears on. Will they all still be friends in the morning?
Homosexuality, domestic violence, teenage pregnancy: there’s a bit of everything in this formulaic but ultimately rather moving play by Angie Le Mar, aka (according to the programme) ‘Britain’s First Lady of Black Comedy’. The plotting is distinctly wonky. It’s hard to cover so many issues so briskly without forcing the action down some unlikely but mighty convenient side streets.
Le Mar has done a lot of stand-up and sometimes her handling of more delicate matters smacks of the gladiatorial approach of solo comedy performance – platitudes with strong humour, essentially. If you stage a fight between two characters and the audience starts cheering for the boozing, tell-it-like-it-is character to wipe the floor with her rival, you know the writing lacks a bit of balance.
That said, the performances in Karena Johnson’s production are all excellent. Carol Moses attractively suggests both the feistiness and fragility of former political radical but now downtrodden mother-of-two Jennifer, while Catherine Hammond’s Joyce makes expressive use of silence to suggest that happiness is an option, even for school misfits.
