Gone Too Far!
Hackney Empire
Eating Ice Cream on Gaza Beach
Soho
Piaf
Donmar
Anyone for a knife crime comedy? Bola Agbaje’s attempt to get laughs from our anxieties about blade-wielding teenagers might have been a disaster if the script hadn’t been so witty and its examination of the subdivisions within black culture so penetrating. The play starts out, rather improbably, with a Nigerian boy Ikudayesi arriving to spend time with his brother Yemi who has been brought up in Britain. Yemi has always posed as a fashionable Caribbean and suppressed his west African lineage from a misplaced sense of shame. As a mixed-race kid puts it, ‘The Africans sold us to the white man and stayed behind living like kings and queens in their palaces.’
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