A tiring and emotional experience

One of life's more reliable rules is that by the end of any play about alcoholism you'll be desperate for a stiff drink.

This new play by Rhashan Stone holds true to this rule, with an ending that is bleak and, to me, incomprehensible. Its concluding scenes slip into the sort of foul-mouthed nightmare deemed de rigueur by modern drama types.

This is a pity, for until then the play had been interesting and rather moving.

Mona (Dona Croll) is a 50-yearold black woman 'edging over to the slow lane' of life in a grotty part of London. Out of nowhere her ex-love Lenny (Derek Griffiths), unseen for 32 years, arrives at the door. Lenny has changed. He has a smart car, two wallets, aftershave that 'smells like Kew Gardens' and a white wife. He is also in Alcoholics Anonymous.

At first Mona laughs, then crumbles. As she recalls a baby lost in a miscarriage all those years ago, any spectator's eyes will surely prickle with tears. Croll and Griffiths are fluent and subtle. Playwright Stone catches the inventiveness of black English, from the snobbish shopper 'walking like she had a boiled sweet stuck up in her poom-poom', to the teenager (Ricci McLeod) who complains that, 'I got my mum burning up my Nokia all night, stressing me out, wanting to know where my dad is, then I start to get vex'.

It all ends unhappily. Plays about drink always do. Although this play is part of a state-sponsored black theatre initiative, and although the programme carries some crashingly feeble platitudes about racial discrimination, the blackness is not essential in the story. Many of the observations could as easily be made by non-black characters. But that would rob us of Croll and Griffiths, and two superb, award-worthy performances.

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