“The Authenticator” at the Dorfman, National Theatre
Jeremy Malies on the South Bank
★★☆☆☆
4 April 2026
There is irony in the title of Winsome Pinnock’s new play and from now on I will never quite trust academic verdicts on the authenticity of primary-source historic material. So far so good, but this genre-fluid piece (a merit of course if it can be pulled off) takes on too much. The blurb describes it as “a Gothic psychological thriller” but the writing spans multiple presentation techniques.
Cherrelle Skeete and Sylvestra Le Touzel.
Photo credit: Marc Brenner.
Pinnock shows us two black archivists (Abi played by Rakie Ayola and Marva played by Cherrelle Skeete) from an unnamed academic institution visiting a stately home in a bid to be official assessors of newly discovered journals from the 1750s. The journals were written by English aristocrat Henry Harford while on his Jamaican plantation.
The third character is Henry’s descendant, Fenella, played by Sylvestra Le Touzel. It was Le Touzel’s acting that came between me and the play, as she fought shy of the highly articulated vowels with which an aristocrat of this kind would surely speak and settled for the manner in which (post-elocution lessons) Mrs Thatcher used to lower her larynx. After 90 minutes I found it grating.
Fenella delivers the script’s many (excellent) barbed observations about the National Trust and the way that heritage studies have become an aspect of the tourist industry. Alan Bennett dealt with this in his 2012 play People. Abi who is head of her department but not a professor (a result of supposed prejudice) has mentored Marva whose own family history becomes intwined with the history of this house and the Harfords. The plot and Pinnock’s handling of character dynamics do not earn such a resolution. You soon realize that this will be a three-hander and by the end I was wishing for the introduction of another character.
The best and most skilfully presented theme sees Fenella resort to shameless cultural appropriation based on her Caucasian family’s previous interaction at every level with enslaved people in Jamaica. Pinnock has explored the slave trade before in her 2018 play Rockets and Blue Lights.
Cherrelle Skeete and Sylvestra Le Touzel.
Photo credit: Marc Brenner.
A segment in which Fenella pontificates to a fawning interviewer about finding her ethnic roots on BBC’s Woman’s Hour (sound designer Tingying Dong) was a highlight for me. By now the piece has become something of a state-of-the nation play with its critique of academics who will resort to plain lies and the shallowness of the history trails that are prepared for us when we visit stately homes.
The play is directed with imagination, wit, and technical flair by Miranda Cromwell who is an artistic associate of the National. I wonder what she sees in the writing here to warrant her attention after successes with Mlima’s Tale, Death of a Salesman, and the aforementioned Rockets and Blue Lights.
The set by Jon Bausor is also outstanding. It is strictly traverse I suppose but almost in-the-round or in-the-square. The audience sees Marva fall through a set of sliding doors in a bookcase to find an antechamber. She emerges in knight’s armour and wielding a sword for some moments of genuine physical comedy. Multiple trap doors work well, with furniture rising from the depths. All of the props (no programme credit so presumably also the work of Bausor) are substantial and well crafted, notably a blackamoor statue and a bronze bust of Marva. Stairs appear, and the women descend these into what becomes a truly claustrophobic cellar in which the tone touches on farce and whodunnit.
But whenever the play works up a head of steam, it lets itself down. There is a weak scene in which Fenella (after being told that Abi was one of her Oxford contemporaries) reverts to her JCR punk rock identity and goes through some headbanging after digging out her leather jacket which is almost stiff with studs and safety pins. (Costumes by Kinnetia Isidore have the academics as a shade frumpy in tweed and corduroy, and Fenella in good-quality but distressed classic outfits elsewhere.)
Pinnock soon introduces stronger themes. Having come from a leading Nigerian Yoruba family, Abi was on a fast track to Oxford. Her family has no colonial history of subjugation. Indeed, Abi’s aristocratic descendants may have enslaved fellow Africans. And the script reminds us that this house and grounds are the result not of growing sugar cane but compensation from the British government when slavery was abolished.
All this is admirably balanced, but it often feels didactic with the tone of the platitudes that you hear through your headphones as you tour such a house. With the humour being frequently forced and clunky, I certainly wanted more subtlety in the cultural and political messages, but these proved strident. There are as many turns here as in the garden maze that the two visitors negotiate. With the plot’s heavy freight of cultural and political baggage, I expected something more linear.
