Diana Nneka Atuona is a Nigerian-British playwright from Peckham, London. Her first play, Liberian Girl, won awards for best play and most promising playwright.
Trouble in Butetown, which is set in Wales in 1942 during World War II, is a reminder that there has been a closely-knit multi-racial community in Tiger Bay, the dockland district, for over two centuries.
The leading character is a Welsh war widow (Sarah Parish) with two mixed-race children. Her husband was Nigerian. She runs an illegal boarding house and the lodgers are mainly black.
The American army, even in wartime, segregated black and white soldiers. They had different barracks. The main story is about an African-American GI (Samuel Adewunmi) who is on the run from the American military police, who are portrayed as brutes who enjoy beating up people. He is given refuge by the widow in return for an alcohol recipe.
In these days of diversity, the play ticks all the right boxes; but there is still a lot of work to be done on the actual script. There are too many characters and too many underdeveloped subplots.
The play takes far too long to lift off and Tinuke Craig’s production has too many scenes which fall flat. There are attempts to liven things up with a song and having everybody on stage jiving; but they feel awkward and tacked on.
Interestingly, it is a little 10-year-old girl (Rosie Ekenna), who is cute and irritating in equal measure, who upstages everybody.
On my way home, I remembered an old British film, Tiger Bay, an expert little thriller starring John Mills, Hayley Mills and Horst Buchholz, which was, emotionally, much more involving. So much so that cinema audiences didn’t want the police to capture the murderer.
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