Royal Court Theatre

The thrill of slogging up three flights of steps to the Royal Court’s tiny experimental Upstairs studio is that you never know what you’ll find at the top. Happily, debut playwright Joy Nesbitt’s excellent ancestry drama has a scenario that bites from the get-go, and never relaxes its grip. It unfolds in a slave cabin on a cotton plantation in South Carolina, which is now a trendy Airbnb complete with Live Laugh Love poster and a pregnant White superhost Nora, (‘I’m a sympathetic vomiter!’) who is painfully anxious to welcome Talulah, a young Black Londoner into this devastatingly awkward space. Tallulah claims she has come to the slave cabin to ‘really disconnect and, you know, find purpose I guess’. But actually she's here to commune with her ancestress, Ginnie Good, a slave who birthed eight children in this very cabin. In a stirring invocation, Tallullah hangs bottles on the blossoming tree in the dirt patch outside and summons her, chanting ‘I have a right to the tree of life’. Back in 1862, the US Civil War is raging audibly and Ginnie is trying to soothe her baby girl. The women face powerful dilemmas in different eras while briefly sharing the same space.  Nesbitt conjures up all the drama you can find in a slave cabin-turned Airbnb, which is a lot: cringe comedy; morally bankrupt personal drama; cultural satire; pathos and female heroism; hair-raising spiritual connections. Tonally that’s also a lot and, when I saw it early in the run, Tatenda Shamiso’s lively...

Ryan Calais Cameron looks set to further gild his reputation as Black British theatre’s brightest and most versatile commercial prospect with his latest play The Afronauts, which offers a look at a fascinating and – in the West at least – little remembered chapter in the Space Race of the 1960s. That is, Zambia’s contribution, wherein the modestly-sized southern African country nominally duelled the US and USSR to be the first to land a man on the moon. This quixotic endeavour wasn’t a state initiatuive but rather that of private citizen Edward Nkoloso, a school teacher, freedom fighter and local legend. Was it a serious endeavour? Or a sort of satirical prank? History seems divided on the matter, but you can be Cameron will get into it in this follow-up to his West End smashes For Black Boys… and Retrograde. In a tremendous piece of casting the great Lucian Msamati will play Edward.