”Trouble in Butetown” review – Donmar Warehouse serves up a slice of Tiger Bay

There’s always something very appealing about big stories in small spaces. Diana Nneka Atuona’s Trouble in Butetown fills the tiny Donmar with a heavily plotted tale of huge historical import. It’s an oddly old-fashioned play, given that it was written in 2019, but it has all the rich satisfaction of an interesting story well told.

Peter McKintosh’s impressive set, careful in textured detail, places us in an illegal boarding house in Tiger Bay in Cardiff in the 1940s. This dockland area was famous for its poverty but also its close integration, with a truly multiracial community building up around the ebb and flow of the shipping trade.

Gwyneth (Sarah Parish) who defied her family to marry a Nigerian seaman, now missing in action, presides over a gathering that includes her two daughters, Connie and Georgie, and three merchant seamen and dockers, one Welsh, one Jamaican and one Arab. Into this happy band, comes Nate an American GI who is clearly in trouble. He is baffled by the harmony on display; the American forces are still strictly segregated and the racism Black southerners experience at home has been replicated in their stay abroad.

A lot happens in this little room, and director Tinuke Craig expertly charts both the shifting emotions and the political currents that underlie the events unfolding. As she has shown before, she is wonderfully sure in holding a mood and allowing every character to develop.

There is some terrific acting too. Parish is commanding and Zephryn Taitte brings an attractive swagger to Norman, quietly in love with Connie, loudly convinced that Marcus Garvey is right and no Black man will be free until he understands his own history. But it’s debutant Rita Bernard-Shaw as the tremulous Connie, shimmering on the brink of life, desperate to escape the constraints her mother imposes on her, who gives the play its impact and force.

As it hurtles towards its conclusion, the plot’s mechanisms show too strongly and the play comes more and more to resemble a wartime B-movie designed to show just how plucky the Brits can be. It’s arguably too starry-eyed about the racial integration of Tiger Bay – a place Connie calls “God’s golden mile”.

But Trouble in Butetown never loses its capacity to engage. It looks at the past with new eyes, trying to pull out the strings of Britain’s tangled history, and it has the grace to spend time developing and listening to characters who aren’t often heard. It’s not just a set of notions, spouted by people about whom we do not care. It’s a proper chunk of life, and a highly enjoyable evening.