Shifters play review: Idris Elba is right to back this fresh love story
Shifters play review and star rating: ★★★
Benedict Lombe’s Shifters is only the third piece ever by a Black female playwright to make it to the West End. If that sounds unbelievable, let it sink in. Execs clearly want to shout about its arrival at the Duke of York’s after a run at the Bush; Maya Jama, Idris Elba and Little Simz have been on-boarded as producers and a TV transfer has been confirmed. But that shouldn’t get in the way of the real story here: Lombe’s writing.
Shifters gives a fresh perspective on Black storytelling on London stages. Looking at memory and trauma and the way they can affect love, Heather Agyepong’s Des is opposite Tosin Cole’s Dre, two thirty-somethings recalling their teenage love affair who’re thrown back together briefly for the funeral of Dre’s grandmother.
Shock, horror: Dre and Des feel like two Black Britons who could feasibly exist, and we’re living in an age where that itself is ground-breaking on major West End stages. Lombe’s writing also doesn’t play by the rules: it feels bravely representative of real speech, and not ‘real’ speech for the stage but properly real, messy everyday language. Half-formed ideas conflate different points as the continually self-questioning duo deliver, then go back on, thought trails as funny as they are vivid. The predominantly Black audience laughs almost constantly in moral support.
We’re darting back and forth from their formative years to the present day, with Alex Berry’s strobe lights initiating the end of one tableaux and the beginning of the next in a way that reels reminiscent of Nick Payne’s time-travelling 2012 play Constellations. It’s generally effective, though the pacing of the segments don’t always nail it, sometimes detracting from the drama: oftentimes we need longer with one memory, or moment of light relief, before we’re pulled non-sequitur into another. It makes it sometimes hard work to become engrossed in the tales, some of which allude to young trauma, and the play’s culmination feels underpowered.
And yet, Lynette Lynton’s contemporary direction always lures you in, giving plenty of space for Agyepong and Cole to spar. There are some gorgeous moments where, her wrapped amongst him, they’re untouchable, like young people in love without half of Des and Dre’s baggage. Comfy from their Bush Theatre run, they’re both firmly talents to watch.
Shifters perhaps doesn’t need quite so many shifting moments to make its point. But that shouldn’t diminish where it has succeeded in offering incredibly vital representation.
Shifters plays at the Duke of York’s until 12 October
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