Review: Ilford Boy, Donmar Warehouse ★★★

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Review Red Bus Londinium

Danny Lee Wynter‘s semi-autobiographical drama Ilford Boy follows Ted, a mixed-race teenager in 1990s Ilford, and the loud, quarrelling family that surrounds him, with flashbacks to the 1980s. There is real feeling in it, and the best of it sits between two people who are not Ted.

Those two are Tillie and Ken. She has clearly never let him go, and because he is Ted’s father, it is an open wound that cannot heal. Ken makes hurtful choices, not least missing the funerals of both Nan and Pat. The play tells us he was a battered son who became a battering father, which explains something to us, but it is not a pattern he can recognise for himself. This is where the play comes closest to real feeling. It also leaves questions hanging. We are told Ken stayed single all his life, which hints he might also be gay, but nothing is confirmed. Potentially more could have been explored here.

It feels as though Ted should be the heart of the play, but the noise of his relatives swallows him and he is lost in the middle. I did not find we were given enough reason to care about him. I also had little sense of a bond between him and his mother Tillie, though that may be deliberate, since Nan seems to have been his key adult. It is possible that a boy drowned out by his family was Wynter’s aim, but I wanted a chance to get to know Ted more.

Pat, a gay man dying of Aids who becomes Ted’s guide, is the role most likely to tip into caricature. Craig Stein is such appealing company it is hard to mind. I want my own Uncle Pat. His tap number on the coffee table before the interval is exhilarating, and there is a deeply affecting scene in which he spars with Ken, who has challenged him to relive his childhood boxing days. I had seen RENT two days earlier, and some echoes were hard to miss, but these two moments belong to this play.

The two tiered set gave a real sense of a busy home, especially in the teenage scenes with sisters hollering from above.

The cast work hard on material that deals mostly in types, and the family can read like a list of what a certain kind of Essex household is supposed to contain. Racist? An aunt has married an Indian cabbie and the family can’t remember whether he is Muslim or Hindu. Foul-mouthed? Everyone. Tacky? The women totter about in heels. When the play wants poignancy, the aunts bleach the gay man’s cups. The details are accurate, and Pat’s illness fits the period, but as a combination they all arrive a little too conveniently.

Raj fares worst. Ann says she will leave for Birmingham because the family won’t accept him. He has family there, so we suspect he’ll be fine, but the play seems to want him mostly as someone to be abused. It is also hard to square his marrying a white woman so readily, with under three years in the country, with his later worry that his child will not know their heritage. Jackie’s husband gets a single line about walks he took away from his foster homes, delivered while he tidies. If it is meant to explain why he stays with a caustic Jackie, it asks the audience to do the work.

The laughs were real, but while we were laughing we were not always learning anything. The line about the Donmar, delivered to those of us sitting in it, was fun, and Thatcher’s right to buy earns its place. The costume, hair and music in the flashbacks already tell us when we are, so I wondered whether the period needed quite so much underlining.

Overall, there may be a moving play about Tillie, Ken and the wound between them somewhere in here, and Pat and Ted both deserve more room. Perhaps less period detail and simpler back stories for the wider family would have given them the space to breathe.

Image credit: Helen Murray

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