Review - My White Best Friend at the Bunker Theatre

It's a tried-and-tested method: an unrehearsed actor steps onstage to perform a script they've never seen. Manwatching at the Royal Court recently saw a bunch of unprepared male comedians read a letter about female desire in front of an audience; Nassim, recently seen at the Bush and in New York, explored how language divides. This latest festival, curated by Rachel De-Lahay and Milli Bhatia at the Bunker Theatre, puts three actors in the spotlight to deliver some home truths about race and privilege.

Actor Inès de Clercq takes to the stage for the first piece, De-Lahay's My White Best Friend, in which the audience is divided: women to the front, non-white and people who consider themselves disabled in the middle, white men to the back (the view from the back was fine.)

De Clercq begins to read from the lengthy letter, which has clearly had some personal touches added with about getting drunk and meeting mutual friends. But the meat of the piece revolves around a house party where a lad boasts about being able to pick between the girls as he is the last one standing, but "isn't into brown nipples".

As she reads, de Clercq is clearly taken aback, smiling through as she puts herself in that position, asking if she could/would have done more in that situation. In the segregated space, I'm sure there were people across the room asking the same.

Next up, Ben Bailey Smith (better known as Doc Brown) reads a letter from Stef, a white guy, to Jammz, his Black friend. There's a rhyme and flow which Smith commands with ease and has the audience hanging on his every word. Stef's letter is about how he dressed and spoke like his friend to try to fit in, Jammz' rebuttal emphasises that he can't switch being Black on and off.  

Admissions, recently opened in the West End, focusses on a white family that struggles when their son is turned down from a major university in favour of a student who better meets diversity quotas, but it projects the problem as a white one. That's not the case. That isn't the right narrative. Jammz and Stef got the same grades, but only Stef is going to uni. It feels like a far more truthful reading of reality, that racism far from eradicated from society.  

That's the point Zia Ahmed makes with the next piece, tonight performed by Zainab Hasan. The majority of her set involves picking out snippets and sound bites from an ice cream tub. Passages that lay some of the absurdities of, not just our culture, but our industry, bare: "The play got made, but was what I heard mine, or had it turned white"/"You write, perform, and only get white applause, who are you writing for?"

Approval buzzes through the crowd, though there does seem a sense of irony to the night as a whole when Hasan talks about 'Good Browns on Live at the Apollo' - those who riff on stage about not being a member of ISIS as their opening bit. But it does seem a little weird, having just witnessed the excellent actor, rapper, writer and performer Doc Brown - who has somewhat made a name for himself on such shows as a top talent.

Nestled in the urban underground space, each piece challenges in its own unique, raw way. But the challenge for de-Lahay and Bhatia now should be how they can pose these questions to a less liberal and open-minded audience.

My White Best Friend is at the Bunker Theatre until 23rd March.