Winsome Pinnock’s eccentric and occasionally confounding new play follows Abi (Rakie Ayola) and Marva (Cherrelle Skeete), two Black female historians who have secured access to the recently unearthed daily records of an eighteenth century Jamaican plantation. It belonged to Henry Harford, ancestor to Fenella Harford (Sylvestra le Touzel), an eccentric older lady who now lives in a splendid country pile built by the gargantuan sums Henry was paid as compensation for Britain’s abolition of slavery.
One might well expect the exuberantly free spirited younger Marva and her more reserved, more prickly mentor Abi to come into some sort of predictable conflict with Fenella (aka Fen) over the latter’s handwringing over the connection between her family wealth and the trade.
Actually it all gets a lot more complicated than that. Pinnock is here deeply interested in the extent to which one’s ancestry constitutes one’s identity. This is of course most obviously manifest in Fen – she cannot escape the spectre of Henry without physically abandoning the wealth and building she ultimately inherited from him.
But then again, Pinnock makes the point that as individuals, Black Britons are not monolithic in their historical relationship to slavery. Abi has written about how she’s from slave owning Nigerian nobility (who she points out treated their slaves better than the British did); Marva, meanwhile, is descended from enslaved Ghanaians who were shipped out to the West Indies.
But how ‘real’ is the past? What if the facts about your past abruptly change? What if you suddenly find you’re not sure what your past actually is? Who does that make you? This is the meat of the play, as all three women find that Henry’s ledgers contain new information that radically reframes who they believe themselves to be and they struggle to know what to do with it.
It’s a fascinating subject that Pinnock approaches mischievously: there are some much bigger laughs in the final third than one might envisage.
As underscored by the campy haunted house horror notes of Miranda Cromwell’s production – and Jon Bausor’s groaning, wheezing house set, almost a fourth character – Pinnock asks some very clever questions in an often very goofy manner. I have mixed feelings: The Authenticator is funny and smart and likeable but despite a trio of exuberant acting performances, the characters aren’t especially believable. It’s hard to actually believe any of this would actually happen, or at least, not in this way. And the plot often advances in wild, abrupt lurches. It sits at an awkward generic crossroads – it would have flowed better if it was either a lot funnier or or a lot more serious.
Still, whatever contrivances there may be to get there, the questions The Authenticator asks are salient enough to justify it all, and it’s an enjoyable – if bumpy – ride to get some answers.
