Meeting the parents is never easy – especially when the parents don’t know they’re meeting you. Journalist Bim Adewunmi’s debut play, ‘Hoard’, is an endearing and quite funny take on the classic dinner-party-gone-wrong scenario.
It starts out with sisters Rafi (Elizabeth Ita) and Ami (Estella Daniels filling at short notice for Emmanuella Cole) having younger sister Bili (Kemi Durosinmi) round for dinner with her new beau, Brian (Tyler Fayose). The sisters are Nigerian-British, born and raised in Plaistow and still living in east London, just now in a posher bit. Brian is an American tech boy working for Google. At the beginning, all he has to deal with is Rafi and Ami’s gentle teasing and general sniffing him out, but then the girls’ mother, Wura (Ellen Thomas), arrives in a surprise ‘drive-by visit’.
‘Hoard’ sets itself up to be all about the maternal vs boyf tension, including a potential culture clash between the Nigerian-Brits and the Yank. In reality, Wura is relatively relaxed about meeting her daughter’s partner and Brian is way too charming to create any actual unpleasantness. Instead, it turns into an impromptu family counselling session about Wura’s decades-long hoarding that’s resulted in a four-bedroom house crammed with STUFF.
Script-wise, it’s really pretty weak in places. There’s some horribly clunky signposting of future events, like when the sisters oh-so-casually mention that Brian is yet to meet the parents and won’t it be awkward when he does, *WINK*? And Femi Elufowoju’s production never quite settles on a tone, sometimes aiming to be a super-stylised sitcom and sometimes a straight drama.
Yet somehow – somehow – they just about get away with it. Adewunmi describes her play as ‘a love letter to east London’, and it shows. It’s also a love letter to the characters who are all so warm and lovingly sketched it would be hard to genuinely begrudge spending time in their company. Oh, and because the message is basically: let shit go and love your mum. And because we need more dancing curtain calls.