The Estate
Soho Theatre, London

Lily Einhorn
posted 19 June 2006

Oladipo Agboluaje's new play is bright, energetic, and exuberant. It breathes colour and noise and laughter. Unfortunately, beneath the hubbub of music and the swathes of patterned material, there is not a great deal to grab hold of.

The play is set in Nigeria, or more accurately, in a Nigerian living room dripping with '1980s ostentation'. Three portraits adorn the back wall. The recently deceased Papa, head of the household, smiles out from the centre, surveying all he has left behind. To his left he is smiling with his first wife and their two sons, Soji and Yinka, and on his right he sits with his second wife, Helen, and their daughter, Sola. Three smiling Papas in the same ceremonial dress, three faces, three eras, all culminating in the events that play out on stage: the wake, the will, the recriminations.

It may be an unfamiliar setting for many - in that it is set in Nigeria, not London. But everything about it is familiar. It has the servants-being-smarter-than-their-masters of Gosford Park and countless 'Upstairs, Downstairs' plays, novels and films. There is the quiet scandal of Abasina, the house girl, having an affair with the eldest, married, son; there is a dastardly Mr Collins-lecherous-hypocritical hybrid, all bare-toothed scheming and solemn smiles; and the servants revealing that they know more about the intricacies of the household workings than any of their employers. No one's going to pull the wool over their eyes. Ho ho. It's a comedy of manners, of errors, of class. And it's good. But it's not new. It's not original.

The workings of modern (or recent) Nigerian society are here laid bare. The corruption; the disillusionment of the younger generation who have gone to the UK or USA to seek their fortune only to realise that the world they left behind offers them opportunities of its own. Amid the poverty, the class system, the injustice, there are ways out if you are prepared, or able, to take them. Helen is the former house girl who got pregnant with her employer's child and thus became the new queen of the castle. Abasina, by the end of the play, finds herself in a potentially similar situation; being pregnant with the on-the-verge-of-divorce eldest son's child, she is given a chance to rise to his social level. By any means necessary.

There are some great performances by members of the cast, most notably Ellen Thomas as Helen, all swinging hips and quick temper. Hers is the oxymoronic confidence of the unsure. Her overexuberance belies nervousness at the outcome of the will reading. Even as the house girl can rise through the ranks, once her support is gone she has the potential to be cast back out from whence she came. Yvonne Dodoo as Sola also portrays a woman in a state of flux, caught between loyalty to her mother and the world outside of Nigeria that she wants to be a part of. Ayo-Dele Ajana as Abasina and Richard Pepple as Yinka both play out the complexities of their relationship within the microcosm of the house with a nice mixture of the tender and the absurd.

But the problem with this play remains. It is a problem with the theatrical world it has been produced in. It is a problem with the press and with reviews. The problem is perception. The press see the play as a piece of theatre to be judged against others; against contemporary writing and the whole gamut of classics and failures that have come before it. The theatrical establishment is getting its knickers in a twist about the fact that Tiata Fahodzi are 'Britain's only African touring theatre company'; their existence is political and ideological. Tiata Fahodzi write that their work is primarily directed at 'a specific critical cultural mass (Africans living in Britain)', and so to a majority of the audience the play is seen as an achievement of familiarity.

The reaction is one of recognition, of empathy with circumstance, action or class. The audience on press night - usually family and friends - also obviously saw the play simply as something to be enjoyed and laughed at and appreciated. It was fun, and fun was being had. These differences in perception seem to put criticism in a different light. Is the play unsuccessful if, in borrowing heavily from other literary tropes, it succeeds in speaking directly to an often overlooked 'cultural mass'? Should it be criticised for its lack of originality when it can communicate to so many people by using that familiarity as some form of theatrical commonality between diverse audiences? I really don't know. No matter. At the curtain call half of the audience rose to give the cast and director a standing ovation. And you can't argue with that.

Run over.