A Place For We review, Park Theatre: Big on poignancy but low on tension

Playwright Archie Maddocks’s intriguing, episodic look at gentrification and social change is set in a London where the Windrush Generation are being lost, fast

David Webber as Clarence and Harold Addo as his younger self in ‘A Place For We’ (Mark Douet)

Change – or die out. That’s the Darwinian dilemma facing funeral parlour proprietor Clarence (David Webber), whose traditional Caribbean business is fighting for survival as Brixton gentrifies. Playwright Archie Maddocks’s intriguing, episodic look at gentrification and social change is set in a London where the Windrush Generation are being lost, fast – if they’re not being forcibly deported by the Home Office. And white gentrifiers are moving in just as quickly: an amusingly gauche Blake Harrison’s eagerness to support a local Trinidadian business quickly turns to fury when Clarence won’t support his request for “eco burial pods”.

Still, although Clarence rushes to the barricades against gentrification, looking on in approval as his eccentric mate wields improvised flamethrowers against property developers, Maddocks’s play is a bit more circumspect. His thesis is, broadly, that change is inevitable, a core part of London. This message is hammered home first by Clarence’s enterprising son Keron, who won’t take part in the festive Trinidadian mourning rituals his father hosts – he’s more interested in developing new pricing structures. Then it’s bolted down by the play’s second act shift back to the 1960s, where a working-class white couple are mourning the loss of the pub they’ve owned for generations. Brixton doesn’t feel like it’s “theirs” any more, they lament.

This sense of fatalism, of inevitable change, slightly hampers the momentum of a play that’s big on poignancy but low on tension. Clarence doesn’t change, and nor does anyone else: they just watch the streets around them change colour like autumn leaves, the things they love withering, the odd unfamiliar green shoot popping up in recompense.