DramaLondonReview

A Good House – Royal Court Theatre, London

Reviewer: Scott Matthewman

Writer: Amy Jephta

Director: Nancy Medina

There’s something perpetually watchable about middle-class couples making each other uncomfortable. That’s why Abigail’s Party remains such a popular work nearly fifty years on. That same tension, of terrible people being terribly civil (and civilly terrible) to each other, infuses Amy Jephta’s black comedy, A Good House.

Opening with a wine and cheese evening as two established residents of an elite housing estate, Scott Sparrow’s Christopher and his relator wife Lynette (Olivia Darnley), visit their “new” neighbours Bonolo and Sihle for the first time, the initial comedy comes from Mimî M Kahyisa’s Bonolo and her airs and graces – traits which cause her own husband to describe her as “bougie as fuck”. Wine aerators, beautiful but impractical cheese knives and crystal wine glasses that must not, under any circumstances, be clinked together after a toast all provide a sense of the absurdity at the heart of so many pretentious houses.

But it is where this residence is situated that provides additional depth. We are in Stillwater, an expensive, exclusive housing estate in South Africa. Bonolo and Sihle are the only Black residents, and despite having moved in two years ago, Christopher and Lynette are making their first visit only now.

The reason is that a corrugated iron shack has appeared in a nearby undeveloped plot. On stage, the shack rises and assembles behind the action, ULTZ’s design affording the structure a sense of both amusing personality and social pressure. Given its resemblance to the homes that make up so many of South Africa’s townships, the perception of the shack and what it means varies from house to house. For Sifiso Mazibuko’s Sihle, it is a reminder of the life he has long since left behind. His wife knows she has relatives who live in such buildings, although she has never visited them. For the white residents, it is a symbol of external incursion into their pristine lives.

Initially, Bonolo and Sihle are amused by how the white residents contort themselves to be racially right-on, even as they try and reject a building structure traditionally associated with the country’s oppressed Black populace. Jephta brings us along for the ride, mining the situation for all the value in its comedy of embarrassment. The true interest comes, though, in the cracks that start to appear in Monolo and Sihle’s marriage.

The dynamic between the couple is ever-shifting. Kahyisa and Mazibuko provide pin-sharp portrayals of a couple who are so alike that when they point out flaws in their partner, they fail to see that they are just as present in themselves. Whether laughing together at their neighbours’ absurdity or biting chunks off each other, their relationship feels bright, vital and real. That’s in contrast to the two other couples in the play; both Christopher and Lynette and young couple Andrew (Kai Luke Brummer) and Jess (Robyn Rainsford) feel much less well drawn, there to highlight the neuroses and racism at the heart of Stillwater’s gated community but with little else to round themselves out. Many of the script’s broad strokes feel like they’re retreading familiar ground.

Still, that doesn’t detract from the sharp satire and the recognition that, while Jephta’s play is set in South Africa, its story plays out everywhere. The areas of London inhabited by well-to-do families who give to homeless charities but call the police on a tent down the street. The homeowners’ associations that claim to want a friendly neighbourhood, but crack down on any sense of individuality. The companies where non-white employees must work harder and longer to gain promotions that their colleagues receive more quickly. Stillwater is everywhere.

That’s why A Good House feels so connected to our own lives. And that’s why those points at which the play lapses into stereotype feel so frustrating; in a play with so much potential to speak to all of us, one desires its flashes of originality to stick much longer than they do.

Continues until 8 February 2025

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Biting social satire

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The Reviews Hub London is under the editorship of Richard Maguire. The Reviews Hub was set up in 2007. Our mission is to provide the most in-depth, nationwide arts coverage online.

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