FringeReview UK 2025
Alterations
National Theatre, London
Genre: Adaptation, Drama, Historical, Live Music, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Short Plays, Theatre
Venue: National Theatre, Lyttelton
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
“Doesn’t matter if you’re black or white. Being young you’ve no hope.” A young man punctures even the solidarity-in-adversity many Windrush people felt for thirty years in a defining speech. Michael Abbensetts’ 1978 Alterations – with deft amplifications and rewrites by and Trish Cooke, is revived for the first time at the National Theatre’s Lyttelton. Directed by Lynette Linton it runs till April 5th.
We must be grateful for this compelling revival, and wait for more from the National’s Black archive.
Review
“Doesn’t matter if you’re black or white. Being young you’ve no hope.” A young man punctures even the solidarity-in-adversity many Windrush people felt for thirty years in a defining speech. Michael Abbensetts’ 1978 Alterations – with deft amplifications and rewrites by and Trish Cooke, is revived for the first time at the National Theatre’s Lyttelton. Directed by Lynette Linton it runs till April 5th.
First produced at the long-gone New End Theatre, Alterations – which swiftly vanished – seems a tailor-made Dorfman play; it still feels like that. But there’s two reasons for staging it at the Lyttelton First, the far larger auditorium is gratifyingly almost sold out. Second, because of what Cooke and Linton do with expanded dream sequences, in this two-hour straight-through staging.
Abbensetts (1938-2016), best-known for his pioneering Black-led TV series Empire Road from the same period, has written an intimate 24-hour drama of 65b Carnaby Street. Walker Holt (Arinzé Kene), a Guyanese tailor desperate to own his own shop in London, is proportionately neglectful of his wife Darlene, whilst parrying phone-calls from “jealous blonde” Liz – with whom he’s conducting an affair – due to work pressure.
Walker’s had a break too. Mr Nat (Colin Mace) an older German Jewish immigrant who sees himself in Walker has given him a shopful of trousers to alter. Enough to buy him a deposit. For a man who declares he arrived with “nothing but a needle and know-how” owning his own shop is the biggest opportunity Walker’s known since arriving. No more alterations for others. Walker could craft and alter his own destiny.
Towards the end Mace’s sad, occasionally furious but benign Mr Nat tells Walker what the struggle’s been, how it feels on the other side. How he’s fared with his wife, his friends. It’s a telling moment, overcoming class and racial oppression. But at what cost? Often comedic, even affirmative as Alterations is, we never lose sight of loss.
Wearily loyal Buster (Gershwyn Eustache Jnr) denies he’s a partner. Walker’s commanding and Kene charms with it; Buster can only feel junior. Though he’s expecting a call of his own about his wife giving birth. Eustache balances amiability with peacekeeping between competing egos in the shop, and world outside.
This is amplified in Cooke’s and Linton’s decisions: at moments, the past in a dignified Guyanese couple (Samuel Nunes de Souza and Yolanda Ovide from the ensemble) walk on several times in colonial-style costume. More pointedly Joshua John’s hip, head-phoned vision of the future eyeballs Walker as he continually passes.
Threat or promise, nostalgia or mocking fate, it’s augmented by moments when Frankie Bradshaw’s set and (the set overwhelmingly being) costumes suddenly expands. Look out for the Guyanese flag, flourished twice in the guise of a shirt. It almost resembles another flag’s colours. More spectrally lit by Oliver Fenwick, a revolve with a central clothes aisle densely packed with tailoring props, desks and phones, doubles itself with the full ensemble (including Tyler Fayose, Richard Emerson Gould) like some dream prosperity. That prospect hangs in the balance here.
Courtney (Raphel Famotibe), the teenage spark of a van-driver chafes at his position.With a London accent he shows generational shifts away from the warm hug of patois into an alien landscape. Prescient, funny, impatient, Famotibe’s Courtney is a study of the future in the instant. It’s painful, unappeased and (almost) unappeasable.
Walker muses with Buster of them only ever being seen as “the black problem”: Walker more keenly aware of how much he’s been impeded, Buster making the best of it. They’re not prepared for Courtney’s excoriating prophesy of the 1980s. Walker’s resort is to blame white people for turning a new Black generation into “every man for himself”. Which begs wider questions of the corrosion of a huge metropolis and capitalism. To which Walker might aptly riposte those are white things too. Abbensetts’ foil to that, Mr Nat, nuances the wisest, saddest reflections of all: bar one.
It’s complicated by suave purple-suited Horace (Karl Collins), hired and almost immediately fired for sewing up the trousers wrongly, and crafting a crisis Walker averts by pleading with the exasperated, but ever-patient Mr Nat. You wonder at Horace’s being re-hired; more, how he bumbled in the first place. Collins elsewhere glows with Horace’s hyper-efficiency. Not least in charming Walker’s wife Darlene.
Cherrelle Skeete’s Darlene is the heart of this play, alongside Kene’s Walker. She matches him -ratcheting up remonstrance and regret – and love. Kene’s particularly effective at showing how seductive Walker still is. Not just (apparently) with Liz, but manoeuvring Darlene to an intimate rapprochement. It’s momentary, but telling, as Kene flexes and unflexes, squares up or subsides, fires with rage or flops down with exhaustion. Till Skeete he’s dominated, and their exchange is riveting.
“You know how hard it is for a black man in this kiss me arse country to get ahead,” Walker rails at Darlene. “And how do you think it is for a black woman?” she fires back, “No one’s got my damn back.” Skeete’s absorbing, simmering Darlene can spin indecision into resolve as we watch: her own entrepreneurial dreams thwarted by love, her desire by neglect. Walker and Darlene can still save their marriage: but Walker doesn’t even credit it’s in peril. Darlene can still help Walker save his order and pitch in. He dismisses a woman helping. When he relents, things are different.
Composer XANA’s tangy period inflections flicker decades through the live ensemble. Alterations too seems pitched between slice-of-life drama and say Alexander Zeldin’s micro-detailed traversals. So the plot’s more storytelling than drama. And that works. Abbensetts’ characterisations allow the cast to give uniformly exhilarating performances. Kene and Skeete though almost raise Alterations to another level of pathos, an unexplored region.
As it is, this play in its new guise still feels like an absorbing episode in a magnificent, unwritten pageant. It’s a pity Abbensetts was never given the chance to shape this and other dramas to write decades of Windrush experience; a little like August Wilson. We must though, be grateful for this compelling revival, and wait for more from the National’s Black archive.
Musicians Shaz (Guitar), Isabella Burnham (Bass Guitar), Ebow “LOX” Mensah (Drums), Grifton (Trumpet).
Movement Director Shelley Maxwell, Sound Designer George Dennis, Hair, Wigs and Make-up Designer Cynthia De La Rosa, Fight Director Kate Waters, Casting Naomi Downham CDG, Voice and Dialect Coach Hazel Holder, Dramatherapist Wabriya King, Associate Set and Costume Designer Natalie Johnson, Staff Director Keleya Baxe.
