‘For the loved ones we lost along the way’
Daniel Nelson Photo: Marc Brenner
I must have seen scores of plays about migrant parents and their Britain-born children - and still they keep coming.
Many budding playwrights presumably are drawing on their own experiences and those of people around them, so it’s not surprising that they make play of tensions between generations, between parental expectations and the realities of UK life, between urban British culture and the ways of the old country, between individual freedoms and family pressures.
It’s great that they do so, because it’s producing good theatre, and helping open up the stage to the lives of other people, other cultures..
Now here’s another: House of Ife at the Bush Theatre, which crackles with energy, snappy dialogue and excellent acting. as it puts an Ethiopian-British spin on first-generation tropes.
The family under the microscope consists of mum, Meron — where would the world be without these tireless, wise, stern but endlessly loving and forgiving matriarchs? — and three children, Aida, Tsion and Yosi. Dad, Solomon, doesn’t turn up from war-torn Ethiopia (where he has a younger wife and other children) until there’s a tragedy that requires his presence. Of course, he’s late for the funeral.
The death is that of another family member, the event that triggers an eruption of memories, tensions, misunderstandings, values. A succinct dedication at the start of the print version of the plays sums it up neatly: “For the loved ones we lost along the way. Home is always within us.”
Playwright Beru Tessemer, born in Ethiopia, raised in London, has said, “I have always wanted to write epic family dramas that have the scale of an Arthur Miller play, but firmly rooted in contemporary London.”
In the same interview with https://www.theunderstudy.co.uk/2022/05/interview-beru-tessema-i-have-always.html The Understudy he said he also wanted “to put the Grime aesthetic into this epic classical structure” and that this play “is not only about a younger generation of Londoners, it is also about their immigrant parents and their struggle to find a home and raise their children in a land that they were strangers to.”
He has really breathed new life into that well-worn idea.
* House of Ife is at the Bush Theatre, 7 Uxbridge Road, W12, until 11 June, Irom £20. Info: 8743 5050/ bushtheatre.co.uk