The Princess, in Princess and the Hustler, is 10-year-old Phyllis and she has a dream: to go to Weston-Super-Mare and win the beauty pageant crown. Princess’s brother, Junior, camera ever round his neck, dreams of becoming a photographer. Mavis, their mother, has, as she tells the Hustler, “small, quiet” dreams: that “this country will see the possibilities of our children”.
Many of us share such dreams; not all face the same realities. This is Bristol, 1963. Mavis and her husband came to England from Jamaica in 1945 on the promise of jobs, only to discover that not all jobs would be open to them.
The unexpected return of the Hustler, with another small child, coincides with Bristol’s bus boycott, aimed at getting the bus company to employ coloured bus crews. Can dreams come true?
Chinonyerem Odimba’s beautifully crafted new play, directed by Dawn Walton, kaleidoscopes multiple issues with warmth, integrity and humour. The action is concentrated in the family’s modest flat. Simon Kenny’s naturalistic-seeming set, like the play itself, cleverly dissolves barriers to offer new lines of vision. Characters are similarly multi-layered: each exposing the fading and brightening of their hopes, experienced in moments of isolation and of connection.
Integration, here, is a personal, family and neighbourly issue, as well as a social and political one (scope extended by the adept use of a chorus of community players). Performances are as textured as the text. Donna Berlin subtly reveals the multiple facets of the experience – hardened yet still compassionate and loving Mavis, who gives her life for her children without ever losing herself.
As the Hustler, dealt a tough hand by life, Seun Shote balances wily, self-regarding self-assurance with genuine feeling, while Jade Yourell, as Mavis’s white neighbour, ably combines an unsettling mix of honest friendship with unconscious racial prejudice.
The linchpin of the play, though, is Kudzai Sitima’s Princess: all nonstop talking enthusiasm; when her bright hopes are tarnished, her stillness and silence become a devastating comment on prejudice in all its forms.
• Princess and the Hustler is at Bristol Old Vic until 23 February, then touring until April 13
