What’s in a name? A great deal in this play by South African writer Mongiwekhaya, produced with the Market Theatre of Johannesburg. It’s directed with a restrained punchy power by Noma Dumezweni, who recently stepped into the breach at this address in Linda and will shortly be playing Hermione in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child in the West End.
In a South Africa that is dancing to new beats, a lively Friday night is about to turn bad when black law student Ben meets a young white woman who calls herself Skinn. Driving away from a bar together they are pulled over by a policeman, Buthelezi, and his colleague. Buthelezi is a former freedom fighter, disappointed that post-apartheid South Africa hasn’t turned out to the land he dreamed about, and furious that his wife has a restraining order against him. Ben, with his western name and an inability to speak any African language, soon becomes the butt of Buthelezi’s rage. He is determined to make Ben dance to another tune. Particularly when Skinn, speaking Afrikaans, attempts to intervene with a bribe.
Mongiwekhaya’s script has some plotting issues – not least that Ben never tries to summon help on his phone – but it paints a grim portrait of a society in which the abused turn abusers and everyone turns a blind eye to violence. The staging implicates us. The personal is highly political in a play that beneath its thriller-like structure explores complex issues of histories erased, languages lost and what it feels like when you no longer have a place you can call home.
Some of the characters are sketchily drawn and the symmetries of personal relationships too obviously highlighted. But it’s gripping and beautifully acted, with Desmond Dube horrifying and heartbreaking as Buthelezi, a man who wants others to remember their history even as he is destroyed by his own past.
• At the Royal Court Upstairs, London, until 26 March. Box office: 020-7565 5000.
