House of Agnes

Published Friday 14 March 2008 at 16:05 by Mark Shenton

Young playwright Levi David Addai, with one play at the Royal Court already to his name, that was written there as part of the theatre’s Young Writers Programme and another due there in May, is coming up fast through the new writing ranks. Now Paines Plough offers a full production for a play first written as part of an attachment with the company last year that they subsequently commissioned and developed by them.

The investment in his talent pays off handsomely with this assured and compelling family drama, which offers a fully inhabited portrait of two adult sons trying but failing to shake off the iron-like grip that Agnes, their single parent Ghanian mother, continues to exert over both of their lives. Now that she’s about to retire and go back to Ghana, old conflicts between the brothers re-ignite as they jostle for position in the family home that they will be left behind in, but even more serious are the commands and demands she makes of them.

Twenty six-year-old Solomon, a supermarket shelf-stacker and 22-year-old city boy Caleb each have partners she won’t approve of. Agnes deliberately drives a wedge between Sol and girlfriend Davina, whom she won’t even allow into the house, while Caleb keeps his own, older white girlfriend from the office entirely secret.

But as the day she is due to depart for Ghana edges nearer, these tensions need to be resolved, and Addai brings them edgily to the boil. He is blessed by a production by George Perrin that keeps it bubbling with raw, exposed energy, in which Cecilia Noble brings a noble but misguided dignity to Agnes and Ludvig Bonin and Anwar Lynch beautifully register her sons’ painful journey towards asserting their independence.