'A Good House' review — prejudice and privilege are put under the microscope in this potent South African drama

Read our review of Amy Jephta's fiery play A Good House, now in performances at the Royal Court to 8 February.

To live in Stillwater, a new housing development in a quiet, safe South African suburb, is aspirational. It’s why young couple Andrew and Jess have maxed out their budget to buy property there. It’s why thirtysomethings Sihle and Bonolo have bought there too – escaping the poverty of Sihle’s upbringing and that of Bonolo’s extended family. It’s why Lynette, an estate agent managing the development, has moved in with her partner Christopher. And it’s why all three couples are feeling threatened by a makeshift shack that’s curiously popped up on their idyllic estate.

Amy Jephta’s play A Good House is a worthy exploration of prejudice and privilege. There’s even a state-of-the-nation essence to its depiction of characters who complain how race, class or wealth is holding them back, while being unable to acknowledge which corner of this triangle offers them advantages. But while spiky exchanges thinly veiled as neighbourliness air these uncomfortable truths, it feels unfocused, as if unsure whether it wants to be a play about racism or capitalism. And while both ‘isms’ are addressed, it doesn’t peer under the bonnet of either of them thoroughly enough.

Nancy Medina’s production is at its best when stoking the awkward, fiery exchanges between these couples. Bonolo (a level Mimî M Khayisa) is quick to flag racial undertones in anything Christopher (simmering jobsworth Scott Sparrow) and Lynette (an easily flustered Olivia Darnley) say.

And to be fair, Christopher struggles to mask his surprise that she and Sihle (Sifiso Mazibuko, all forced smiles), a Black couple, are moving in, even giving Sihle a patronising disclaimer about respecting neighbourhood rules. There are stark parallels to Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun in this vision of a white couple protecting their neighbourhood from a highly offensive fantasy of what a Black family might bring.

The twist, though, is that Bonolo is, to quote her husband, “bougie as fuck”. Christopher and Lynette struggle to place her penchant for good wine and cheese in their narrow preconceptions of ‘Blackness’. But there's a further one: Jephta, who is good at multilayering her characters, does not make Bonolo out to be a saint: though she’s happy to speak of coming from nothing, she won’t visit her extended family who still live cramped together under a corrugated metal roof.

Conversations between the four make you squirm, but when Bonolo and Sihle visit another white couple, Andrew (a curtain-twitching, quick-to-snap Kai Luke Brummer) and Jess (uptight yoga bunny Robyn Rainsford), and a similar exposing of unconscious bias occurs, it’s too improbable that the obviously middle-class Bonolo and Sihle, who turn up a vision of leisurely affluence in their running gear, would be confused with those living under a makeshift roof.

The shack itself is a clever antagonist. Looming silently from the back of the stage in ULTZ’s set design, it’s inoffensive-looking with its painted window sills and potted flowers. This silent structure with its invisible residents isn’t causing any trouble, and yet its presence in a neighbourhood of houses worth millions threatens, even ridicules, the capitalist system these couples have bought into. If they don’t act, they’ll have to acknowledge these squatters as their de facto neighbours.

Jephta presents a housing complex masking as a community, where there are as many invisible walls as there are physical ones between its residents. But like Stillwater's unwanted shack that's still sprouting and expanding, this play, with its cracking premise, still has room to grow.

A Good House is at the Royal Court to 8 February. Book A Good House tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: A Good House (Photos by Camilla Greenwell)