We don't often see plays set in Nigeria. So this piece by London-based Oladipo Agbouluaje is fascinating purely as theatrical information. Since it also shows strong traces of both Tartuffe and The Cherry Orchard, it also emerges as an intriguing, if sometimes confusing, cultural hybrid.
Set in contemporary Lagos, the play deals with a stock situation: a family funeral gathering. But this is no ordinary family.
The dead man, Chief Adeyemi, was a wealthy businessman. We watch as his second wife, his expatriate sons, and their half-sister gather for the dividing of the spoils.
But, as their estate dwindles before their eyes, so too do their hopes and dreams.
And in the end it is a creepy pastor, a mixture of Molière's religious hypocrite and Chekhov's low-born Lopakhin, who hoovers up the bulk of the property.
The play is unmistakably a comedy but it is one that also tells us a lot about Nigeria today. The church, it suggests, exercises an insidious power. Wealth, confined to the few, breeds a revolutionary spirit. And the ambitious young who flee to Britain or America to make a new life often return home disillusioned.
Agbouluaje writes with a sharp, satiric eye. He has a gift for funny lines, as when the daughter, having an affair with her half-brother, explains away another lover as her "standby generator".
But it would be a better play if the author gave his characters room to breathe and allowed situations to develop: at the moment he's a bit like a man trying to stuff too much into a small suitcase.
But the production by Femi Elufowoju Jr has a capricious liveliness. Ellen Thomas gives a rumbustiously assertive performance as the merry widow always nipping upstairs with the preacher for a bout of praying.
There is strong support from Eddie Daniels as the silkily smooth pastor for whom religion is a form of acquisition, from Richard Pepple as an angry exile who discovered that America is not after all the land of plenty, and from Yvonne Dodoo as the daughter who dreams of flight to London. The play sometimes has the short termism of sitcom, but it does prove the truth of the old adage that where there's a will, there's a play.
· Until June 17. Box office: 0870 429 6883.
