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Multiple emotional crises erupt when a female therapist forms a cookery group with three male inmates of a secure unit in this empathetic but uneven debut play by Sophia Griffin. The writer feels her way convincingly into the mix of bravado and vulnerability of male characters – all, like the therapist Naomi, of Caribbean heritage - both yearning for and afraid of the world outside. And there’s a real warmth between them and the woman they bashfully refer to as “miss”.
But the narrative is a mixture of the obvious and the elusive, and overall fine acting in Corey Campbell’s production - originally seen at Coventry’s Belgrade Theatre, where he is artistic director - sometimes veers towards the overemphatic. We get only sketchy backstories of the men and the events that got them locked up, and just a hint of Naomi’s complicated home life, by eavesdropping on her phone conversations. It’s a serious but skimpy look at an underreported issue: black men are four times more likely to be sectioned than white men, according to the charity Mind.
This is primarily a character study of the three male characters. Swaggering Ty (Corey Weekes), bearish in his jutting beard and Hoodrich shell suit, has pretensions to be a chef, though his signature dish seems to be a breakfast fry-up. Daniel (Darrel Bailey) is anxious and jittery, latching obsessively onto the possibility of cooking for his estranged children on the hospital’s Family Day. Leroy (David Webber) is the austere father figure - mostly trusted and respected, sometimes deeply resented - whose long incarceration is a warning to the others. Illiterate but dignified, Leroy has a lemonish reserve and a respect for propriety yet we gather he was put away for killing his mother and has a daughter he never sees.
Under the fondly exasperated eye of Naomi (Aimée Powell) the trio bicker over who’s going to cook what, over the music they play on an iPad (Aerosmith vs Bob Marley), and over culinary history: Ty moans that a Caribbean cookbook is mostly Jamaican recipes with Guadeloupe warranting only “one page at the back”. He sabotages Leroy’s dumpling batter and is comically aggrieved when found out.
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Sometimes tensions boil over, and there is a palpable sense of fear whenever a kitchen knife is brandished. But early on, all three men are united in sadness when they learn another older inmate, Vincent, has died – by suicide, it’s implied. Vincent, who is mentioned but never seen, tended the secure unit’s small garden, a metaphor for the men’s attempts to shore up their mental health.
Bailey and particularly Webber mine deep moments of emotion but there’s something even more moving in the brief glimpses that Weekes gives us of Ty’s sensitive side. Powell makes a sympathetic Naomi, even though it’s effectively a reactive role. As director, Campbell can’t help overegging things. Brief passages of agonised mime between scenes, and interludes where Naomi glitches like a frozen screen when tussling with authority, are superfluous and frankly embarrassing.
It’s also a shame that more actual cooking doesn’t take place on Claire Winfield’s terrific kitchen set: there’s something hugely evocative about the live preparation of food on stage. Her design is full of nice touches, the institutional grimness of the locked knife drawer and the sealed doorway leading to an infinitely regressing corridor leavened with fridge magnets and Caribbean flag bunting. Above and around it are boxes of case studies and signs filled with psychological terminology (“Dissociative Identity Disorder”, “Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scale”).
Perhaps it’s a good thing that we never learn exactly what conditions these men are suffering from, or what most of their alleged crimes were, enabling is to see them as humans. But it adds to the frustration that this sensitive debut doesn’t entirely deliver on its promise.
The Bush Theatre, to Dec 20; bushtheatre.co.uk
