“Skeleton Crew” at Donmar Warehouse
Jeremy Malies in the West End
13 July 2024
Plays and musicals set in factories include The Factory Girls, The Pajama Game, Made in Dagenham, Rags, Sweeney Todd, and Waking/Walking at Kiln Theatre. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory makes the list, and the most notable recent example is Sweat by Lynn Nottage which ran here at the Donmar in 2018. The list is now extended by Dominique Morisseau’s Skeleton Crew, the final part of the author’s Detroit Project trilogy.
Morisseau sets the plot in 2008 in her native Detroit at an ailing automotive plant where skilled blue-collar workers (the four characters are black) are using dexterity and physical courage to press out the principal panels for a range of cars. George Bush Jnr is in the last year of his terms, and Illinois has a promising black senator with ambitions to occupy the White House.
The play takes place exclusively in a rest area for shopfloor staff. Morisseau hints at the financial crisis in the US and across the globe with characters either losing their homes to subprime mortgages or battling to stay in them. The matriarch figure on the assembly line, Faye played by Pamela Nomvete, has seen her lender foreclose and is sleeping in the factory with the tacit approval of supervisor Reggie played by Tobi Bamtefa. They have known each other since childhood.
I could find little subtlety, modulation, or real humour in Nomvete’s performance. Her seen-it-been-around character dominates but fails to truly resonate with colleagues. Occasionally on press night, Nomvete was reaching for lines. Many of her speeches are invested with the lyricism and unmannered figurative language that Morisseau is justly respected for but little of it landed here for me.
Racheal Ofori as Shanita.
Photo credit: Helen Murray.
Bamtefa by contrast (it’s by no means a lazy device by the author and is earned) benefits from nearly all the tension in the play. Reggie is from the same wrong side of the Ambassador Bridge as his staff, and he tells us that his shoes bear the same dirt as theirs. He has already disobeyed senior management by hinting to the workers that the plant is ailing if not doomed. A betrayal by any one of them would mean he is the first out of the door. Even with these advantages in terms of the dynamics, I feel confident in saying that Bamtefa acts his colleagues off the stage.
Branden Cook plays a cocky tyro, Dez, who smuggles a gun into work and may be stealing equipment for its scrap metal value. (There are some clunky moments of tension as his bags are searched repeatedly that director Matthew Xia might have marshalled better.) This is Cook’s stage debut and it shows. He could usefully look at the many hints in the text that would help him be part of a courtship ritual involving more subtlety, invention, and flair.
His love interest (it’s more of a flirtation since she is already pregnant by an unseen partner who may have left her) is Racheal Ofori as Shanita. Her speeches are bejewelled with sonorous imagery and metaphors, most notably when Morisseau has her compare the combative morning drive to the factory along a no-holds-barred freeway with the socioeconomic conflict between her shift and the unseen industrialists. Voice and dialect coach Aundrea Fudge (no doubt with Xia overseeing) brings Ofori through a thicket of allusive language. Glorious asides include: “I’m pregnant and my hormones are little shooting stars at the moment.”
Perhaps I’m the dullest person in the stalls but I spent much of the play thinking that the threat to the employees was increasing mechanization and use of robots. More simply, the challenge is the fact that the perfect storm of the Great Recession means that people aren’t buying cars right now.
Other stars of the show are the set by designer Ultz and sound by Nicola T. Chang. Ultz gives us a bank of battered lockers in which workers store paltry possessions knowing the smallest item could be stolen, Formica tables that you might find in a prison, and multiple notices regarding behaviour which in an Orwellian way encourage workers to inform on each other about petty rule-breaking. You suspect that bad safety practice is widespread, and we know that there have been fatalities with ghosts now patrolling the assembly lines. I wondered what vehicles were being made and finally spotted a poster showing a Beetle-style car. Sound by Chang is so subtle that you can tell that the noise in between scenes is pressing of metal rather than general fabrication. Chang is also a composer and has subtly introduced the sounds of riveting into the music.
Skeleton Crew will always fare badly when compared with how Lynn Nottage deals with the theme of industrial capacities being removed or undergoing evolution in Sweat. And Nottage has dealt brilliantly with an altogether lighter industry (sandwich-making) at the Donmar last year in Clyde’s. Nottage can also do gags that spring naturally from more weighty themes while many of Morriseau’s attempts at humour are clumsy.
It should be stressed that the Donmar is in no way trying to discuss industrial themes in an overarching way, and Skeleton Crew is here as a late replacement for Primary Trust by Eboni Booth which deals with the somewhat different theme of a mentally fragile bookshop employee receiving care in the community.
The ending here (by no means sunny though reasonably upbeat) can stay under wraps though the message is that one should always fight while taking care not to sabotage oneself. Solidarity prevails, the characters are loyal to each other, and we have been told that this is “the best small factory still standing”. Characters make their final speeches while sitting beautifully on the metre of songs by Detroit resident Aretha Franklin. Whatever the outcome, even with the macroeconomic chaos worldwide, these people have valuable skillsets. Initially suspicious as to why Xia gives us limited period flavour, I finally realized that his point may have been that this could have happened in any developed economy and may happen again as AI renders even the most adroit of operatives redundant.
