Ilford Boy: ‘zinging’ drama with ‘electrifying performances’

“What a transformation,” said Clive Davis in The Times. Three years ago, actor Danny Lee Wynter’s debut play, “Black Superhero”, was staged at the Royal Court and I found it “so self-indulgent and overwrought that it had me squirming in my seat”.

But now he has produced a second piece – a family drama about growing up gay and mixed-race in 1990s east London – and it is brilliant: quietly moving, “extraordinarily funny, endlessly thought-provoking, and propelled by some electrifying performances”. It is “quite simply the most entertaining” new British play I’ve seen since “Till the Stars Come Down”, Beth Steel’s wedding-day masterpiece that premiered at the National Theatre in 2024.

As in Steel’s “zinging” play, the focus here is on a big, working-class family gathering, said Fiona Mountford in The Telegraph. Rather than a wedding, though, it’s a funeral that has drawn a large cast of characters back to the family home, including the dead woman’s grandson, biracial 14-year-old Ted, and her daughters – a witty and acerbic trio whom I could have happily watched “strop and bicker all day”.

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Ted’s white mother, Tilly (Ria Zmitrowicz, “who always lights up a stage”), now only sees his Black father Ken (a terrific Gershwyn Eustache Jnr) once a week when he arrives to take Ted to a boxing lesson, said Nick Curtis in The Standard. Ken wants to bond with Ted over boxing, but Tilly’s Black gay best friend Patrick (Craig Stein) blows in and broadens Ted’s horizons.

The play is mostly set in 1995 but it flashes back to the 1980s, as “Wynter captures the camaraderie and affection that unites the characters” before revealing “the legacy of prejudice and violence that divides them”.

Ultimately, Wynter “crams too much into his narrative”, said Sarah Crompton on What’s on Stage, and his play never quite escapes the sense of being a “therapeutic outpouring”. But it is “wonderfully vital”, the “dialogue crackles, and Tim Sheader directs the whole with energy and warmth”.
Donmar Warehouse, London. Until 28 November