Theatres can endlessly develop playwrights without actually staging their work, but it’s only when a play is seen in front of an audience that it becomes apparent what works and what doesn’t. So it’s good to see Clean Break bringing these fledgling plays to production, even if one of the writers, Somalia Seaton – whose House is the more traditional and more successful half of this double bill – has already gone on to write more sophisticated work. Seaton’s Fall of the Kingdom, Rise of the Foot Soldier has been playing in the RSC’s Making Mischief season.
There is much to enjoy in the strongly performed House, which takes us into the heart of a black family, where there is a homecoming. After five years away, Patricia (Shvorne Marks) has returned to visit the place where she was born and raised. The religious pictures are still on the wall; the smell of palm oil and crayfish is familiar. But who has invited her to return and where has she been for the last five years? “The world moves to a whole new beat when you ain’t been out in it. It’s a new start,” says Patricia optimistically.
But in order to make a new start, the ghosts of the past have to be confronted and laid to rest. As gradually becomes clear in a tense if slightly obvious family drama, Patricia’s younger sister, Jemima (Rebecca Omogbehin), has no idea about the family secrets that lurk in the attic, and the sisters’ mother (Michelle Greenidge) would prefer to blame her eldest daughter for the sins of others than to face up to the truth and her own collusion in what happened to her child.
Shame also figures significantly in Chino Odimba’s Amongst the Reeds. Oni, brought to the UK by an “auntie” who tried to enslave her, is desperate to remain here rather than face the shame of returning home; Gillian (Jan Le) was betrayed by an uncle, is heavily pregnant and is unable to contact her beloved father. Faced with a world that renders them invisible and an immigration system that refuses to see the truth about their lives, these two teenagers are holed up together in a derelict building, living in the dark.
As with House, the characters are well developed – you believe in the needy Gillian and the bragging Oni, who may actually be the more dependent – but the scenario lacks a driving energy and several of the scenes are repetitive.
The plays transfer to the Yard in London in early September. But like some other new plays at this year’s festival, they feel as if they have been rushed into production and would have benefited from further development and redrafting. Both Seaton and Odima are already writing plays for other theatres, but this double bill hints at promise rather than confirming it.
• At the Assembly George Square, Edinburgh, until 27 August. Box office: 0131-226 0000. At the Yard, London, 1-17 September. Box office: 020 3111 0570.
