Alterations

If there is an afterlife, pioneering Black playwright and screenwriter Michael Abbensetts is presumably looking down from it in delighted surprise. His play Alterations originally ran at the now defunct 80-seat New End Theatre in Hampstead for a few weeks in 1978. There was a BBC radio adaptation too, but that looked to be it for his drama about Walker, a Windrush immigrant grappling with his dream of opening his own tailor shop in London.

And yet here we are in 2025 – almost half a century on – and Alterations’s first ever revival is on the National Theatre’s huge Lyttelton stage, playing to virtually the capacity of the entire New End run on a nightly basis. 

This has been made possible by the NT’s Black Plays Archive project, a catalogue documenting works by Black British writers that would simply have been lost to history otherwise.

But it’s also the result of a Herculean effort from the creative team to bulk this bittersweet little drama out to Lyttelton scale. Director Lynette Linton adds some epic flourishes to underscore Alterations’s status as a part of a grander narrative about Black British life, while playwright Trish Cooke has been enlisted to expand the script and tweak its more dated moments. 

Abbensetts’s greatest legacy is the pioneering Black-led TV soap opera Empire Road (which had two seasons on the BBC in the late ’70s) and the tone of Alterations is distinctly sudsy in places. 

Walker (Arinzé Kene) is an ambitious tailor struggling to get his business off the ground. But a potential jackpot has come along:Mr Nat (Colin Mace), an older German Jewish immigrant who sees something of himself in Walker, has offered him a veritable warehouse’s worth of trouser alterations that he has until the next evening to compete. The fee will be enough for Walker to put down the deposit on his own shop. But before that there are emotional crises to be surmounted, not least Walker’s own: his wife and childhood sweetheart Darlene (Cherrelle Skeete) is fed up with his indifference to her and their daughter.

What Abbensetts does really well is provide a window into a specific time in his characters’ lives. They’re immigrants on the cusp of middle age, who are now grappling with the idea of putting permanent roots down in Britain. It's a play about a generation now looking for meaning in the journey they made in their youths.

Linton is a humane and empathetic director who’s wonderful at directing ensemble dramas. She does a typically great job here at capturing the camaraderie and the tension that defines the lives of Walker and his colleagues. There’s a particularly great turn from Karl Collins as Walker’s eccentric but very decent co-worker Horace. Linton also has a nice line in using dreamy interludes and tweaks to Frankie Bradshaw’s semi-abstract set to slightly muddle the timeframe. It is obviously extremely contrived to have Walker’s private life reach crisis point at the exact same time he has a make or break trouser order. But Linton doesn’t ham up the race against time element – there’s always the sense that Walker and his colleagues will pull this off if they can avoid killing each other – a very big if. 

It ultimately feels like a nicely observed but relatively slight slice of life drama. Linton sometimes overcompensates: having a lad wearing Beats headphones occasionally wander across the stage feels like a hysterically heavy-handed way of reminding us of the present generation’s connection to Walker’s. I’m also not totally convinced by the star casting of Kene. It seems to me that Walker is a relatively simple character, but Kene’s combination of freakish good looks and a determination to burden Walker with a load of physical business and a somewhat incongruous pernickity middle manager vibe leaves the character feeling weirdly elusive and ill-defined compared to literally everyone else on stage.