“Alterations” at the National Theatre’s Lyttelton

Jeremy Malies on the South Bank
7 March 2024

Another play in a tailor’s shop, this one set (and written) in 1978. But I enjoyed A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Barbican more. The gags were funnier and the play ages better.

Colin Mace and Arinzé Kene.
Photo credit: Marc Brenner.

The setting here is Carnaby Street and the focus of Michael Abbensetts (better known for the sitcom Empire Road) is a rushed order. Several hundred pairs of trousers (every pair unaccountably too long by six inches) are dropped off at an upstairs workshop by Mr Nat, a prosperous Jewish German immigrant played by Colin Mace using a cod Jewish accent. Speedy alterations must be made to the trousers and, with a nod to classical Greek drama, the work must be done in 24 hours.

I am probably missing the point on both plot and dialogue; there is deliberate simplification here and the television comedy element runs throughout. But in fact, the piece had an initial run in 1978 at the now defunct 80-capacity New End Theatre in Hampstead and starred Don Warrington.

With the obvious exception of Mr Nat, all the adult characters are West Indians from the Windrush generation. They are all there to work on the trousers, deliver them, or encourage the others. The star (definitely not celebrity) casting is Arinzé Kene as the ultra-aspirational entrepreneur Walker. If the work is done on time, Mr Nat will pay Walker enough to make a down payment on a lease for the shop.

Abbensetts’ text has been bulked up with additional material by playwright Trish Cooke. It would be interesting to know which of them is responsible for some of the woeful jokes. Walker is cheating on his wife Darlene (brilliantly played by Cherrelle Skeete) with a white woman. One of his pals quips that he likes his coffee with a lot of milk. There are broad (incontestable) points about how hard it is for an immigrant to succeed in business, but I noted only two other specific mentions of the characters’ white neighbours. Courtney, the youthful van driver played by Raphel Famotibe, says that white estate residents have touched up two Caribbean boys. Buster, Walker’s sidekick played by Gershwyn Eustache Jnr, says that for the first few years after their boat docked from the Caribbean, these Guyanese immigrants showed group solidarity. But now they are no better than their white neighbours in terms of looking after each other’s interests. If specific socioeconomic points of this kind are going to be made, I should like the play to be less misty around the edges and more concrete in setting. As it is, the social critique struck me as gratuitous.

Karl Collins and Cherrelle Skeete.
Photo credit: Marc Brenner.

This is a really gloomy view of race relations at the time. The characters live on an estate that I intuit is in west London. They mention riots. (There were riots in Lewisham a year earlier and Southall a year later.) In the best speech of the night, wonderfully delivered by Famotibe, Courtney asks the characters to forget race for a moment and ponder how tough things are for youngsters of any ethnicity. I could almost see the green signage and gargantuan queues at job centres of the period. There is one other speech of note when Mr Nat says with tenderness that he can see his younger self in Walker. I thought of Lord Sugar bringing his taciturn guard down for once and saying the same thing to a candidate on The Apprentice.

At a physical level, the mistiness around the edges adds much. Walker sees characters in white linen clothes and with parasols from an earlier era (probably his parents checking on his progress) and there are flashforwards as a track-suited youngster dances to music from present-day headphones. His tracksuit is an irony; Kene’s many positives as Walker include expressing the character’s ardour for men’s fashion. You guess that he would have been crestfallen when the next generation of men reject the suits he will design and prefer tracksuits and shell suits. A liminal space stage-right shows Walker’s shop years later with what I took to be Nineties clothes, so we know he has survived.

It is another workplace drama for director Lynette Linton who excelled with Clyde’s at the Donmar Warehouse. Initially, she makes good use of the revolve to move through the gears in terms of how the scenes are paced so as to flesh this out from sitcom and studio theatre roots. But towards the end (the play is 120 minutes straight through) I wanted the revolve to just stop so that characters could interact as they do when Buster and Walker discuss their experience as immigrants. Linton and dialect coach Hazel Holder use just the right amount of Guyanese Creole – notably its pluralizations – as the characters bicker. There are bursts of music on vinyl from Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lead Belly, but the script cannot resist mentioning that the latter was (indisputably) exploited by managers. The tone of this is preachy as if shoehorned into the dialogue. Maybe at this distance of time and with the social history well documented we could have just enjoyed the music?

The side spaces are part of Frankie Bradshaw’s first-rate set. The ghostly figures from the other time schemes (almost in the wings) have a vapoury quality. In this she is helped by lighting designer Oliver Fenwick who uses lanterns and gels to fill the performing area with the powdery autumnal browns, oranges, and paprika that we associate with the seventies.

Costumes are also by Bradshaw. The dozens of suit jackets across a palette of primary colours are brought in and out using the vertical flies. Bradshaw captures the era with the cut of, say, Skeete’s sheepskin jacket or the spectacular plum velvet suit worn by one of the more decent characters, Horace. Played by Karl Collins, Horace rescues Darlene from a bad marriage, and the actor works subtly to portray a character who has some financial stability and can do the right thing about a woman he cares for. There is a “For what will it profit a man …” theme across the play. Walker is willing to neglect wife and child emotionally and financially while generally trampling on people to succeed in business.

Yes, I was often irritated. One other thing bugged me from a tedious scene which I believe I can remember word for word. The male characters recall the names of the cinemas they used to go to in Guyana and give a roll call of white actors mainly known for playing cowboys. John Wayne, Gary Cooper, and Montgomery Clift are on the list and the question is asked: “Why couldn’t we have our own heroes?” Either Abbensetts or Cooke (and I should like to know which) is telling me that none of these men watched so much as a day of cricket in Guyana or that none of the legendary players of the era enthused them with their skill or moral character which in some cases included civil rights activism. With all the technical excellence on show here, I wish the sociological points had not been so broadbrush.