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...
