[title]
Bola Agbaje’s ‘Gone Too Far!’ is a proper ’00s classic, the very name evocative of a previous Royal Court era where buzzy young Black and female playwriting prodigies popped up at the London institution on a seemingly monthly basis.
It’s never had a major revival, and this short-run National Youth Theatre production is great fun, and draws out both the play’s strengths and weaknesses.
The play remains laugh-out-loud funny, big-hearted and full of memorably drawn characters. But its take on simmering tensions between different Black diasporas in Peckham feels a bit dated. Not horribly so. But the engine of the play is the fact that Nigeria-raised Ikudayisi (Dalumuzi Moyo) has recently relocated to London to live with his mum and brother Yemi (Jerome Scott), who has grown up in London. There is a lot of humour based around second-generation Nigerian and West Indian migrants holding patronising and indeed outright racist views of Ikudayisi, and Africans generally. Clearly, these are not views shared by the author. But I think the discourse on this sort of thing has moved on a bit – it ultimately takes a jauntier view of this type of racism than you’d probably expect to see in a new play today (though the stinging microaggressions of the sundry incidental white characters remain wincing well-observed).
That’s not really to be critical, but just to note that elements of the play feel of their time. Elsewhere, some pains have been taken to update it, with reference to Covid, Ukraine and Karens inserted.
And Monique Touko’s revival for the most part zips along a treat, following Scott’s extremely cynical Yemi and Moyo’s extremely uncynical Ikudayisi on a long odyssey to buy their mum some milk, upon which they encounter numerous brightly drawn local characters. If it borders on glib at times, it’s also a tremendously fun romp, suffused with a deep love of diasporic London, with a likeable, attractive cast of characters.
The acting is a bit mixed in places, but Scott and Moyo are strong leads. A bizarre post-interval section in which a ‘busker’ plays us a series of very white indie songs is a perplexing drag on the show, but I suppose it must have something or other to do with trying to be inclusive of the whole company.
In general, it’s a delight: of its time, but far from obsolete.