Caribbean Beat — January/February 2019 (#155)

need to know
courtesy national theatre
On Stage
Nine Night
Following last year’s six-week staging
at London’s prestigious National
Theatre, Natasha Gordon’s Nine Night
is currently enjoying an extended run
at Trafalgar Studios in the heart of the
city’s theatreland — making Gordon the
first black woman playwright to have
a play open in the West End. A story
of grief, ritual, and identity set within a
Caribbean-British family, Nine Night’s
plot unfolds in the kitchen of distraught
protagonist Lorraine, who is grappling
with the loss of her beloved mother
Gloria, as conflicting family dynamics
take an additional toll. Centred on
the Jamaican funerary tradition of
celebrating the deceased’s life through
an extended wake, the seemingly simple
storyline reveals layers of complexity as
each new character introduces another
problematic element, and the unspoken
truths of their hidden lives reveal as
much as the play’s plausible dialogue.
Delivered with an air of authenticity that
can only stem from personal experience,
it is an inaugural triumph for Gordon as a
playwright, her longstanding career as an
actor surely contributing to the drama’s
lifelike feel.
Praise for the work has been nearunanimous,
an unusual situation for
what would normally be deemed a
fringe play with a “black” theme. The
Guardian saluted its portrayal of an
ethnic-minority family at home in
multicultural Britain, while the five-star
review that appeared in the Evening
Standard described Nine Night as
a “remarkable debut” for Gordon
in playwright mode. The Times, a
bastion of the conservative upperclass
establishment, gave the play its
unreserved recommendation.
Since the noughties, Gordon has
gradually carved a niche for herself in
the acting world. Appearing in cop-show
television dramas, Gordon faced the
familiar difficulty of finding meaningful
roles of substance as a black actor. In
contrast, a particular strength of Nine
Night is the realness of its characters,
including Robert, the scheming brother
at loggerheads with Lorraine; his white
wife Sophie, who is embraced by the
family despite her parents’ refusal to
accept her choice of husband; and
long-lost half-sister Trudy, inexplicably
left behind in hardscrabble Kingston.
Then there’s the seriously old-school
Aunt Maggie, whose withering looks and
enduring Jamaicanness give the play
some of its most humorous interludes.
Through the dramatic tussles between
these characters in the aftermath of
Gloria’s passing, the audience observes
a family caught between the traditions
of the older island-born generation and
the contemporary British way of life.
In the aftermath of the Windrush
scandal, which saw scores of British
citizens erroneously returned to
the Caribbean by force, Nine Night’s
ascendancy seems particularly
timely, questioning the very nature of
Britishness — although the experience
of grief is more at centre stage here.
Ultimately, Nine Night reveals Gordon
as a playwright of considerable skill,
whose nuanced work deserves its
glowing accolades — which also include
the 2018 Charles Wintour Award for
Most Promising Playwright.
David Katz
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