Writer: Daniel Chaves
Director: Jenny Eastop
Malcolm is building a bridge between his country and a newly formed republic across the nearby river. He is also building other bridges of sorts. Although married to a woman from his country, he has begun an affair with another woman, an immigrant from the republic. Daniel Chaves’s play could work as an examination of Brexit Britain or, when the bombs fall, any of the conflicts that are currently being fought across the world. There is great potential in Kindliness, but it’s marred by some overwrought action that verges on the farcical.
Initially, it may appear that Malcolm can see the good in both tribes, but his championing of the republicans is based on the dangerous beliefs of an imperialist who insists that their culture is the better. His wife still distrusts the people across the river, sensing that they will kill her if they ever get the chance. Malcolm’s girlfriend Mimmi is more measured and talks of being refused service in restaurants once the waiters discover her surname.
And yet, despite her xenophobic fears, Malcolm’s wife Amara is the most interesting character on stage, helped by Fia Houston-Hamilton’s compelling performance. Amara is engagingly pragmatic, even though she never shifts away from her biases. She seems concretely part of our world where long-engrained fears never disappear.
Mimmi is more optimistic about a future where the two sides can live together harmoniously, but Lucy Kean’s early portrayal of the immigrant, frivolous and talking in an affected childish way, means that the audience never warms to her, despite her later good intentions to form a new society. Chaves’s Malcolm is cowardly and weak, his plans as a peacekeeper ruined by his simplistic ideas that two warring factions can put away their differences for the sake of a trading bloc.
Malcolm’s naiveté is balanced well by his wife’s insistence that bridges should never be built, and this gives the play a pleasing complexity, rejecting a starry-eyed happy ending. Refreshing, too, is Chaves’s commitment to move away from a script that is overly talky, but the resulting action needs some refining as a few scenes reduce the audience to laughter, and that doesn’t seem to be the aim of such thrills.
Running at 75 minutes, Kindliness is also too long, and some of Malcolm’s speeches could be spliced, and perhaps the son could be an off-stage character despite Victoria Chen’s winning performance as the young boy. A 60-minute three-hander would be a tighter vehicle for this play about blood feuds.
Runs until 22 November 2024
The Reviews Hub Score
Brave
