No stage play about inner-city black life can have delivered a more disturbing or deadly topical message than Elmina's Kitchen. This is one of the first serious black dramas to try for a life in the West End and to galvanise audiences with its cri de coeur.
In Angus Jackson's powerful production, with the author - eloquent, angry Kwame Kwei-Armah himself - in the lead role, Elmina's Kitchen dramatises the familiar thesis that inner-city, black-on-black violence and murder comes naturally to uneducated, unemployed young males: the Yardies and a gangster, gun-toting African-American culture offer seductive inspiration.
More controversially, Kwei-Armah implies that teenagers turn anarchic because of family breakdown: in his play three fathers, all of whom have abandoned their partners, are variously absent, criminal or failed role models.
The scene of conflict, where these characters and influences converge, is Elmina's Kitchen, a West Indian take-away in Hackney's Murder Mile. Shaun Parkes's shady, gun-carrying, super-cool Digger vividly contrasts with the restaurant owner Deli (Kwei-Armah), a former jailbird himself who is set on a life of law and order. The narrative lines tauten and intermesh to thrilling effect. Crucially, Deli fails to repair father-son relations and keep his son Ashley out of trouble.
Michael Obiora's impressive Ashley finds Digger's dangerous, easy money too tempting to resist. The shocking finale in Elmina's Kitchen underscores Kwei-Armah's conviction that black-on-black violence has become both an epidemic and an addiction.
Garrick Theatre, Charing Cross Road, WC2. Tel: 0870 890 1104
