The Comeuppance at the Almeida Theatre – review

The quality the American playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins brings to his work is a sense of saying and doing exactly what he wants, without worrying about what anyone might think. That sounds obvious but feels surprisingly rare.

His subjects vary. In An Octoroon he took an 18^th century melodrama and used it to examine the expectations placed on Black contemporary writers. In Appropriate he used the device of a white family finding an album of lynching photographs to explore in complicated ways how you deal with the legacy of racism and guilt.

Now in The Comeuppance, he writes a play about death which is both high comedy and a melancholic exploration of the vagaries of memory and the weight of nostalgia on 30-somethings surviving in a post-Covid landscape. It is a magical, original piece of theatre.

It isn’t giving too much away to say this is a play about Death, since Death has the opening monologue of the play – “Oh, hello there” – spookily voiced by the character of Emilio (Anthony Welsh) as he arrives on his friend Ursula’s porch, driven by a mood of “door closing panic” before a visit to a 20^th high school reunion.

The action then switches to the naturalistic pre-pre party chatter, on a set by Arnulfo Maldonado that depicts an old-style house in Maryland, complete with flag flying at a jaunty angle. Throughout the narrative Death haunts the picture, his presence registered by the shifts in Natasha Chivers’ sensitive lighting, and by magic effects that leave glasses hanging mid-air or characters isolated as he takes over different characters, revealing new aspects of his intent. He has come to “work” he says, pre-figuring the fact that by the end of proceedings we know that one of them will die young.

Under this metaphysical structure, life goes on. The gathering friends – all but one members of the self-styled “Multi-Ethnic Reject Group” – are beautifully drawn, each with an arc to their lives that prefigures trouble ahead. As Emilio and Ursula recognise, “this is just that age. The age of shit showing up. The age of bad choices seeking their consequences.”

Ursula, played with troubled grace by Tamara Lawrance, is losing her sight thanks to type one diabetes; Caitlin (Yolanda Kettle) is married to a much-older man who has to be kept away from internet conspiracy theories and whose saving grace is that he “was not in the group that actually stormed the Capitol.” Kettle gives her character a rattle gun delivery and a flirtatious silliness that conceals deep sadness and high intelligence; she constantly suggests a sense of unfulfilled potential.

Meanwhile, Kristina (a brilliantly febrile Katie Leung) is a military doctor with an unacknowledged drink problem, worsened by all the death she has witnessed in the pandemic. The experience of Covid hangs over the action just as distinctly as death, driving the nostalgia, and the need for connection that has not only prompted Kristina to book an ironic limo but also to bring along Paco (Ferdinand Kingsley) who suffers from PTSD after his experiences in Iraq.

On the face of it, the violent Paco, who once dated Caitlin with unhappy consequences, is the outsider. Yet as stories unfold and events from the past come home to roost, it becomes more clear that Emilio, now a successful conceptual artist based in Berlin, is the character who is having most trouble, not only with accepting his current life, but in accommodating his memories of the past with those of people he once viewed as friends. Welsh plays him like a coiled spring, his surface cool constantly punctured by anger, contempt, and profound longing.

The precision and power of the writing is delivered with acute understanding. The piece is tonally wild and invigorating, shifting from hilarious to disturbing in the blink of an eye. At one characteristic moment, mother of five Kristina bemoans the sadness of her life and finally simply explodes “and I have so ..many…fucking kids”. The line carries the weight of her woes, as she collapses and is comforted.

Director Eric Ting holds the multiple shifts in tone, sometimes in the turn of sentence, in a strong grip, letting events unspool realistically over an unbroken two hours, but also allowing the sense of the numinous, of the unspoken, to creep through the text. Only towards the close, does Jacobs-Jenkins perhaps overstate his case, pulling out morals where previously they have just emerged. Nevertheless, The Comeuppance is a magnificent drama, truthful and haunting.