Natasha Gordon’s multigenerational family drama captures the experience of being caught between two worlds – past and present, Jamaica and Britain. In the new production at Leeds Playhouse, this sense of existing between places is inscribed on Emma Williams’s set. A backdrop suggesting a lush Caribbean landscape is the container for all the homely details of departed matriarch Gloria’s London house. This is the setting for the titular nine night: a traditional Jamaican wake, during which family tensions rise.
It’s exciting to see Gordon’s acclaimed play revived outside London just four years after its premiere. The most compelling scenes in this packed hour and 45 minutes involve Gloria’s two younger children, each with their own response to the loss of their mother. Shereener Browne’s dutiful Lorraine is a coiled spring, tight with contained grief just waiting to explode, while Robert (Daniel Poyser) copes by turning his attention to the sale of Gloria’s house. The way in which Lorraine’s forthright daughter Anita (Jessica Whitehurst) needles at her uncle is equally convincing, as are the attempts of Jo Mousley’s Sophie – Robert’s wife – to defuse the conflict.
