★★★★★

“an evening of powerful, enriching theatre”

The extended family have gathered for a wedding. Pastor Blake (Mark Rylance) arrives to save a household that was managing perfectly well without him.

Usifu Jalloh’s Oga is the pious patriarch and a generous host. His daughter Adanna (Sara Mokonen) is engaged to Sinclair (Ivandro Da Cruz Leite), a nice young man who is in love with her. In an Iago-like move, Pastor Blake plants a seed of doubt in Oga’s mind about Sinclair’s faithfulness both to God and to Adanna. Oga responds by promising his daughter to the pastor instead. However, Pastor Blake has designs not just on Oga’s second wife Elmire (Nakeba Buchanan), but also on the family money.

Adaptor and director Darren Raymond writes in rhyming couplets, laced with spoken word and punctuated by Duramaney Kamara’s sound design and score. The rewriting of Molière’s script in Tartuffe Remixed reveals that Pastor Blake’s power is verbal. He weaponises his education and authority to make the family doubt one another.

This is a study in how the patriarchy weakens the tribe by imposing the paterfamilias’s blind spots on others, instead of combining everyone’s strengths. Oga loves his daughter Adanna. Yet he hands her on as though her life is merely his game of pass the parcel.

Molière’s original farce breaks through into this production when the groom’s father Delroy (Craig Blake) attempts to unveil the pastor’s fraud. This doesn’t go according to plan.

Morenike Onajobi’s Kemi is Adanna’s oldest friend. She’s been onto Pastor Blake from the beginning but hasn’t the status to intervene. Suzette Llewellyn’s Grandma and Blanche Williams’s Great-Grandma are convincing Afro-Caribbean elders. Christopher Mbaki’s D-Miz brings a noisy charm.

Raymond is Artistic Director of Intermission Youth. Most of this cast came up through it, with two of the charity’s graduates joining the company in rotation through the run. Rylance is a founding trustee. This superb show is what that investment produces.

ULTZ gives Oga a mansion worth stealing (though on the night I saw it, a light flickered distractingly, and I could not tell whether that was deliberate). The wedding clothes by Shola Ajayi (with Maybelle Laye as associate costume designer) were perfect, not straying beyond the stylish, tasteful side of flamboyant.

Molière was denied a church burial by the institution he satirised. By the end of this show, you can see why. Although entirely predictable, the denouement is the most moving ten minutes of theatre I have seen this year. The family returns to their faith, without any corrupt and corrupting mediator. The women have untangled the knotty problem, re-jigging the tribal power structure. In the end, the extended family submits not just to their Creator but to the higher purposes of strength, unity and peace within the tribe.

Full marks, all round. This is an evening of powerful, enriching theatre that restores one’s faith in humanity.

BLOODSPORT: AFTER HELEN OF TROY

Stratford East

★★★★★

“Dockery and Aikman are mesmerising in this tale of two women torn apart by events”

There is a brief scene in the recent blockbuster film ‘The Odyssey’ in which we see Helen restored to her position in Menelaus’ court after Troy falls. She is scarred and bowed, a reluctant wife-slave again.

Not so in Ava Pickett’s Bloodsport: After Helen of Troy. Helen, played by Downton Abbey’s Michelle Dockery, is indeed bloody and shocked as she is dragged back from the fighting into the pristine Essex home of her former best friend Cee (Laura Aikman), but she is by no means bowed.

Pickett is surely one of our most up and coming writers. Here she gives us a feel of Mike Leigh’s ‘Abigail’s Party’ early on then Yasmina Reza’s ‘God of Carnage’, and if she borrows from both, then the dramatisation offers the best of tributes. Pickett has also just co-written the script for Baz Luhrmann’s upcoming film Jehanne d’Arc so, maybe battle scenes are familiar territory. She sets her take on the return of Helen firmly in modern-day Essex but the ancient parallels are joyously clear. Troy has become a series of street wars and burnings, set off by Cee’s pugnacious husband Mario (Gerard Monaco) to redress the insult to his friend Marcus (Jay Taylor). This is, of course, the disappearance of Helen after a pick-up in a bar by lounge lizard Paris.

Mario is all fists, fight and fury and wants to go for a victory drink down the pub when he returns. He brutally ignores Cee’s carefully planned champagne celebration. Marcus is conciliatory and weak, just glad to have his family back together but, guess what, he is under Mario’s spell. So the two leave.

And that is the signal for the true nature of the play to emerge. There have been laughs aplenty for the audience up till now. Suddenly we are in much darker territory. Against an unmistakably suburban interior (Polly Sullivan) Director Lisa Spirling uses lighting flashes and explosive sound (Nicola T. Chang) to punctuate the change in tone. Helen gets over her simulated daze, pulls on black combat pants over her underwear and takes over Cee’s home as a fortress for her own female troops, including Cee’s apparently dozey maid Dani (a great performance by Maimuna Memon).

Dockery and Aikman are mesmerising in this tale of two women torn apart by events, with truths to face. There’s a wonderfully well-conceived ‘Messenger’ – Ethan Moorhouse – who introduces and holds the narrative line together, in a rapidly spoken Essex patois (full of profanities) commenting, Greek chorus like, on the unfolding drama.

There isn’t a redundant performance here or one that does not deserve praise. Spirling was introduced to the play when it was first written as part of a New Writing Programme and now brings it to fruition through skilful deployment of, as she says, a ‘ridiculously talented’ cast and creative team. She has delivered an ensemble backing for the two leads in which every player is clear and distinct in their roles. The courageous and shocking finale itself marks a remarkable departure from traditional theatrical outcomes. This play is one for the awards.

Tag Archives: 5STAR26

TARTUFFE REMIXED

★★★★★

Marylebone Theatre

TARTUFFE REMIXED

Marylebone Theatre

★★★★★

“an evening of powerful, enriching theatre”

TARTUFFE REMIXED

Marylebone Theatre

Reviewed on 11th September 2026

by Elizabeth Botsford

Photography by Mark Senior

TARTUFFE REMIXED

TARTUFFE REMIXED

TARTUFFE REMIXED

BLOODSPORT: AFTER HELEN OF TROY

★★★★★

Stratford East

BLOODSPORT: AFTER HELEN OF TROY

Stratford East

★★★★★

“Dockery and Aikman are mesmerising in this tale of two women torn apart by events”