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The Fellowship: incendiary material that doesn’t quite ignite

Yasmin Mwanza and Cherrelle Skeete in The Fellowship - Robert Day
Yasmin Mwanza and Cherrelle Skeete in The Fellowship - Robert Day

Roy Williams emerged in the mid-1990s on the margins of a writing boom defined by a blast of visceral confrontation (so-called “in-yer-face” theatre). Relatively prolific, he has patiently weighed the complexities and contradictions of multicultural England – delineating torn loyalties, confused identities and lurking prejudice.

In so doing, he has acquired a central position as our foremost Black British playwright; witness the way he set the agenda at the National either side of the first Covid wave with Death of England, two solos about black and white male experience.

He’s often dealing with incendiary material. What’s striking about The Fellowship is that by rights it should have audiences gasping, and prompt debate.

Contemporary American drama by writers of colour is almost becoming notorious for its confrontational approach to the subject of race. Here, while adopting the reassuring, conventional format of a family drama, Williams allows his central character, a tough but embittered matriarch called Dawn, to vent in unfiltered and arguably racist ways about white people. To sample just a handful of her angry outbursts: “Pick any war, and any strife you care to mention, and you will find a white man”… “I’ve always wanted to go one on with one of them, you know? A Karen. Fling them down… tump the life.”

She duly gets her moment, throttling a white teenager called Simone who has been dating her son Jermaine on the sly. The justification for that assault? Being goaded by Simone about her dead son, Jermaine’s brother (whom the girl also once dated); the youth was killed by a white gang, and Simone is implicated.

Trevor Laird and Cherrelle Skeetein The Fellowship - Robert Day
Trevor Laird and Cherrelle Skeetein The Fellowship - Robert Day

Even so, Williams is daring to hold a mirror up to prejudice within the so-called black community – a term he disdains. In the family, there’s a contrast between inveterate mistrust, also espoused by Dawn’s musician partner Tony, and a spirit of racial conciliation, evinced by Dawn’s lawyer sister Marcia, who risks her career to protect a colleague (a “pale skin”, as Dawn has it) who crashed her car while drunk.

Are some black Britons stuck in a groove of recrimination, needing to change the record? That thought is insinuated by making the Amazon listening device Alexa an intrusive thematic motif – playlist music is commanded at times, and Dawn has a complicating fondness for disco music, an old crush on John Travolta akin to her guilty secret.

There’s a patness to that, though, and a number of other factors work against this being one of Williams’s finest hours. In contrast with the tautness of his Death of England monologues, the characters chew things over at ponderous length, affecting pace and even plausibility. The generational contrasts feel schematic and, in the case of the sisters’ Windrush-era mother, who flits on as a posthumous figment of Dawn’s mourning, incongruously surreal. Their stand-off feels like it belongs to another play, as does the exposing design, dominated by a sweeping staircase the like of which very few living-rooms possess.

Oddly, one aspect that should hobble Paulette Randall’s production – Cherrelle Skeete has stepped in at short notice to replace an indisposed Lucy Vandi as Dawn – proves an unexpected boon. Even with a script in hand at points, Skeete’s impassioned presence enriches the character’s overtly baleful qualities, drawing out an under-developed layer of contained hurt and personability. I was impressed too by Suzette Llewellyn as the counter-assertive sibling Marcia, Yasmin Mwanza as a fair-minded black cop (and the self-possessed revenant mother), and Rosie Day as the single white female who’s no angel but doesn’t warrant the vilification heaped on her. Watchable, certainly – but missable, regrettably, too.

Until July 23. Tickets: 020 7722 9301; hampsteadtheatre.com