'The Authenticator' review — Winsome Pinnock's new comic thriller tackles the legacy of slavery

Read our review of The Authenticator, directed by Miranda Cromwell, now in performances at the National Theatre to 9 May.

Summary

• Winsome Pinnock's The Authenticator premieres at the National Theatre
• The play tackles race and the legacy of slavery
• The cast features Cherrelle Skeete and Rakie Ayola
• Miranda Cromwell's production has thriller elements as well as comedy

Race plays aren’t often comedies for obvious reasons. It’s not easy to confront — in this case — slavery with humour. In her previous play Rockets and Blue Lights, playwright Winsome Pinnock explored more seriously the task of contemporary Black Britons to reconcile with some of the darkest chapters of their country’s past. Here, she teams up again with director Miranda Cromwell to put more characters through the wringer with it, only this time with tongue-in-cheek wit. And the laughs do land in this outlandish story of two Black British historians who talk their way into a job authenticating the records of a former white Jamaican plantation owner, but perhaps because it’s all played so lightly, it’s unclear what it’s looking to say.

Not-quite professor Abi (Rakie Ayola) and her star-pupil-cum-charity-project Marva (Cherrelle Skeete) have been invited to the stately Hartford House by its recent inheritor Fen (Sylvestra Le Touzel), who’s keen to authenticate six dusty tomes dating back to the mid 1700s, when her ancestor Henry (all the men in the family are called Henry) was living in the West Indies.

Marva is understandably disturbed to see humans listed among Henry’s meticulous records of his stock — a detail Fen barely registered. This sets the tone for a strangled relationship, in which Fen does her best to create a chummy pretence they’re all equal here, while Marva walks on eggshells through a house that hasn’t fully masked its owners’ terrible history.

Unlike Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s poignant play Appropriate, which treads similar territory in terms of its revelations and ensures its audience fully feels their weight, here things just become silly — and spooky, because it is also a thriller. As the women set about studying Henry’s past, the very walls of the house seem to groan under the weight of uncovered revelations.

Jon Bausor’s traverse stage is a strip of what we presume was once a fancy hall, now fading in glamour. But it has the trappings you’d expect from a creepy old mansion: a rising staircase shifts the action to the property’s candlelit ‘dungeon’, where a Blackamoor statue of a child-slave is kept in order not to offend visitors. And Fen’s motives are increasingly explained by the fact she, like many members of the landed gentry, must open up the house for public events and filming in order to pay for its upkeep.

The racial dynamics between the three aren’t so simple, either. While Marva is the descendant of Ghanaian slaves, and Fen’s family profited first off slavery and then the abolition of it, Abi comes from wealthy Nigerian lineage, and her family also made a living through human trafficking.

Each of their identities is peeled like an onion as the play grapples with genetic inheritance, yet none of these characters are wholly believable. As Fen, Le Touzel does a good job of playing the haughty host one minute, and seeming unnervingly villainous the next. But it’s as hard to imagine her adopting a cockney persona during her Oxford university years as it is Skeete’s conscientious Marva becoming flippant with the records. Ayola’s well-to-do Abi is perhaps the most believable, but her backstory remains too vague.

Pinnock confronts the politics of racial identity head on. But is laughter the best medicine for tackling troubling ghosts of the past? I’m not so sure.

The Authenticator is at the National Theatre to 9 May. Book The Authenticator tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: The Authenticator (Photos by Marc Brenner)