Anxieties over race and money in Stillwater run deep
* Photos: Camilla Greenwell
Daniel Nelson
The three couples in A Good House are unsettled by a seventh character: a shack with no known owner and no known occupants.
Two of the couples in the gated community are White, the third is Black. All are concerned about the unknown intruder(s) who have set up home on what is apparently a patch of no man’s land.
The couples’ suspicions and fears about the mysterious construction are anxiety-inducing but veiled: heaven forbid they are seen as being unsympathetic to poor people or, worse, to poor Black people, or to being motivated by anything as vulgar as the value of their own houses.
The setting is “a cookie-cutter suburban home in … Stillwater, wherever that may be”, and A Good House is in a line of plays, beginning with US writer Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, about race and property (unsurprising since the US and South Africa are both struggling with the aftermath of apartheid).
Playwright Amy Jephta is South African and so are the Black couple, Sihle and Bonolo, the characters given the most depth. It is Bonolo who picks up and reacts to the unconscious (I would call it automatic) racism of their neighbours, but there’s a telling twist when she is challenged by her more phlegmatic husband.
The neighbours are yoga-teacher Jess, who spends a lot of time between downward dogs covering up for her husband, nervy sandwich shop manager Andrew; and property agent Lynette and blokey Chris, who lacks awareness of his awkwardness when conversing with a Black bro’.
Each couple is defending their good house against the increasingly embellished shack, not understanding that the shack may also be a good house.
Jephta pulls off the trick of maintaining both a fast pace and several levels of characterisation, and has the confidence to abruptly freeze a group scene and briefly put the spotlight on the unspoken reactions of Sihle and Bonolo - a brilliantly arresting break in conventional theatrical narrative.
She’s written a short play about prejudice and capitallism that’s not really profound enough for its subject, but it’s lively, funny and pointedly observed and highly entertaining.
+ A Good House, £16-£58,is at the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Downstairs, Sloane Square, SW1W 8AS until 8 February. Info:Royal Court