In this worrying time of theatre funding cuts, it’s salutary to remind ourselves of the dramatic riches we have on offer every night here in London. Other parts of the country aren’t so fortunate, which makes companies such as Eclipse Theatre so vital. Eclipse is the only black-led outfit that takes “mid-scale” touring productions to regional theatres, and before it sets out this year the Tricycle hosts its ebullient new offering.
The joyously titled One Monkey Don’t Stop No Show is a rediscovery from the Seventies by the late Don Evans, a leading light in the Black Arts movement in America but almost unknown over here. Director Dawn Walton has had the ingenious idea of framing Evans’s sharp comedy of black middle-class manners in Philadelphia as a live television recording, a sort of comedy-drama Cosby Show. The arrival of each new actor on stage is amusingly accompanied by a canned applause track.
Any broadness in the acting and writing can thus niftily be excused by the television show conceit, although the production does occasionally find itself stranded between the exaggerated laughs of sitcom and the quieter depths of drama. Avery (Karl Collins) and Myra (Jocelyn Jee Esien), a pastor and his social-climbing wife, find their aspirational existence upended with the arrival of headstrong adult niece Beverley (sparky Rebecca Scroggs), assigned to the guardianship of Caleb (commanding Clifford Samuel), a club owner from the dubious side of town.
The acting is sharp and the writing sassy — “Lord, I wish I was white, so I could faint!” exclaims Myra — with Evans casting an unflinching eye over the snobbery with which his characters are all too ready to dismiss each other. The piece takes sporadic detours into the terrain of a sex comedy, but proves its worth throughout.
Until February 9 (020 7328 1000, tricycle.co.uk)
