Surviving the murder mile

Elmina's Kitchen does just what the best contemporary theatre should. It urges people with half-closed minds and averted eyes to confront the ignored and evaded problems of our time.

Kwame Kwei-Armah's new play is a blast of anguish and alarm from the war front of Hackney's murder mile where Yardies rule the roost, guns are worn as badges of significance and black-on-black murders are all the rage.

In a programme interview Kwei-Armah asks rhetorically why, "We, black people, are destroying ourselves on the streets of Hackney and Birmingham?" To a limited extent, Elmina's Kitchen answers the author's own question.

In a play that spans three generations of black fathers who regard each other with hostility or grievance, Kwei-Armah movingly charts a desperate battle fought by Paterson Joseph's reformed criminal Deli, owner of a West Indian takeaway, to make something of his precarious life and keep on the right side of the law.

But his attempt to evade the protection-racket business run by Digger, the local Yardie supremo, collapses. And Deli's plan to save Ashley, his son, from becoming a Yardie accomplice ends in catastrophe. Violence rears its angry fist.

The odds, Kwei-Armah demonstrates in the play's amusing but too static first half, are all against Deli and Ashley: family roots and ties have withered away; criminality, with its traditional appeal for a stigmatised community, prove an irresistible lure.

George Harris as Deli's totally detached father, Clifton, reappears from a distant past, all flamboyant and grandiloquent in a flashy three-piece suit and cashmere coat.

He settles down in Elmina's kitchen, which designer Bunny Christie makes rather too elegant and clean, with Oscar James's vibrant, old door-to-door salesman helping to maintain the crackle of humour and exuberance: there ought be a programme glossary to help audiences decipher the West Indian lingo.

Divisions and differences gradually become apparent. Shaun Parke's impressively sinister Digger hankers for the West Indies and its indigenous culture. Deli, until obliged to face the idea of escape, wants to belong to England.

Kwei-Armah tightens the overloose strands of plot in the absolutely chilling second half. You see Paterson Joseph's sturdy, stoic Deli ruined as Clifton scuppers his tentative relationship with Dona Croll's beguiling kitchen assistant Anastasia. And Ashley, who despises his father, flags the route to disaster. Elmina's Kitchen illuminates a closed, riven world.

Booking to 17 June. Box office: 020 7452 3000.

Elmina's Kitchen