NINE NIGHT is the debut play by actress Natasha Gordon and after it's premiere at the National Theatre's Dorfman Theatre last year, it won her the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright - and deservedly so. It gripped it's audience throughout with it's look at the love and bickering that holds a North London family together amid the shock waves that every family feels at a bereavement.
Gloria has finally died from cancer and lies upstairs in her bedroom in the house she owned in North London. She has been lovingly nursed by her daughter Lorraine who took early retirement from a good job to care for her. Although emotionally and physically drained, Lorraine now has to face the next hurdle: the Jamaican ritual of Nine Night, the nine nights of a wake to celebrate Gloria's life and to help her spirit to move on. Lorraine is helped by her feisty daughter Anita and mostly hindered by her brother Robert who vaguely deals in property with a friend, Robert's white wife Sophie who still feels an outsider, and Lorraine's formidable Aunt Maggie and sensible Uncle Vince.
Talk frequently turns to Gloria's oldest daughter Trudy, who she left in Jamaica when she came to London with the Windrush generation. Trudy was eventually sent for after Gloria had married and had Lorraine and Robert, but never appeared - will she travel for her mother's burial? The consensus is no but Aunt Maggie knows differently... on the final Nine Night Trudy appears, at first an uproarious larger-than-life addition to the sad family but Trudy brings with her an extra dimension of pain that is unleashed like a Jamaican hurricane.
I loved how Gordon made room within the play for each of her seven characters to contribute: Anita first seems like a stroppy daughter but is revealed to be a loving young mother and partner whose idea of spirituality changes with her experience of the Night Night, Trudy's fun-loving exterior disappears to reveal the hurt and betrayal she has carried from a young girl of being left alone without her mother, Aunt Maggie, although cantankerous and demanding, knows exactly what is best for her late sister's soul, while Robert who appears unfeeling and conniving in trying to sell his mother's home against Lorraine's wishes, has his own pain at being faced with the thinly-veiled contempt of his white mother-in-law.
Director Roy Alexander Weise's production had a great mixture of laugh-out-loud humour, painful family life and even a touch of the supernatural - this final shift of the play should have felt jarring but it didn't thanks to Weise's careful pacing and the explosive scene of Trudy's anger. The seeming appearance of Gloria's spirit is almost a release from the pain of the previous scene.
By the time we saw it, the award-nominated Cecilia Noble had left the production to star in a new play at the National Theatre so the part of Aunt Maggie was played by understudy Jade Hackett who, although she got a big response on her laugh-lines, was overdoing the old woman shtick which you feel would have sprung more naturally from Noble.
There were fine performances from Karl Collins' wise Uncle Vince and Rebekah Murrell's open-hearted daughter Anita but the stand-outs were Michelle Greenidge's Trudy, a force of nature that arrives with presents for everyone - and many bottles of rum - but who shakes the family with her angry pain at her mother - and Natasha Gordon herself playing Lorraine, the daughter who put her life on hold to care for her mother but feels guilt at her own suppressed feelings of sadness and anger.
They all deserved the huge ovation they received at the end of the play, and it was heartening to see the audience was predominantly black; Gordon had definitely tapped into an experience which was loudly appreciated in the funny dialogue but also attentive in the more serious moments of the play. Natasha Gordon is a playwright to watch, let's hope she finds an outlet in the theatre and we do not lose her very real observational talent to television.
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