What makes you British? That is the question posed by this 90-minute show, which marks Paulette Randall's debut as director of Talawa theatre company. The script by Kofi Agyemang and Patricia Elcock offers no great revelations, but it does capture the confusion of national identity.
Since the play's six characters are thrown together by an East End siege, the play has obvious echoes of Alecky Blythe's recent Come Out Eli. But where that used tape-recordings to convey authentic reactions to a 15-day hostage drama, this feels a bit like one of those old British movies constructed on the lifeboat principle. There is a second-generation Jamaican immigrant mum and her university-bound teenage son. There is also a cockney workman tempestuously married to a wife from St Lucia. And, for good measure, the writers throw in a black social worker and a white teenager tethered to a racist gran.
What emerges, unsurprisingly, is that everyone has a different view of Britishness: the smothering mum is defiantly Jamaican, though she's scarcely visited her parent's homeland, while the cockney jokingly advocates passports for Britishers visiting London. But, although the characters constitute a too carefully chosen microcosm, the writers do pin down our contemporary contradictions. The Jamaican mum and the white teenager are united in their hostility to asylum seekers and, when the former is accused of being racist, she cheerfully retorts: "How can I be a racist? I'm black."
Randall's production is energetically acted by Suzette Llewellyn as the vivacious Jamaican, Steve Toussaint as the broad-minded social worker and Jay Simpson as the Cockney. But it left me wondering whether the only thing that really unites the British is a suspicion of newcomers. When one of the characters witheringly remarks that today's main immigrants are from Australia and New Zealand, sections of the audience let out a disturbingly approving cheer.
· Until November 15. Box office: 020-8534 0310.
