'My Father's Fable' review — a gripping new drama that keeps you guessing right to the end

Read our review of Faith Omole's family thriller My Father's Fable, now in performances at the Bush Theatre to 27 July.

The past informs, and threatens to upend, the present in My Father’s Fable, a play from the Olivier-nominated performer Faith Omole (Standing at the Sky’s Edge) premiering at a theatre that last year hosted another play, Elephant, from fellow Olivier-nominated performer Anoushka Lucas.

If west London’s ever-mighty Bush is good at allowing young talent to spread their wings, it also knows how to corral an audience to respond in kind. Time and again at this venue, and My Father’s Fable was no exception, a notably diverse audience is very much along for the ride, and you can feel the company feeding on the energy in the room. There really isn’t these days a more invigorating theatre in London, and this show represents a further feather in its cap.

Sure, it isn’t as accomplished a work as Elephant: it’s baggier and more clunkily staged, and not all the cast are of equal weight. But Omole has a good topic – the way people from our past can make for an uneasy present – and she structures the play like a thriller. The result throws narrative swerves all the way through to a whispery finish worthy of August Wilson’s more gothic literary concoctions.

Let’s face it: you surely expect a play with a central character called Peace (Tiwa Lade) to experience anything but, and so it proves here. A history teacher in an apparently loving relationship with a boyfriend, Roy (Gabriel Akuwudike), with whom she’s gone through rocky times before, Peace finds her, well, peace threatened by the arrival from Nigeria of a half-brother, Bolu (Theo Ogundipe), she hasn’t until now met: the two, it seems, share the same father.

Bolu’s arrival doesn’t sit especially well with Peace’s excitable mum, Favour (Rakie Ayola), who questions the young man’s motives and also clearly doesn’t like sharing the spotlight as a rival occupant of a home that also isn’t hers. An increasingly restive quartet reveals conflicting perspectives – and a cat’s cradle of secrets – that upset the status quo, as resentment and rancour prove the order of the day.

Rebekah Murrell’s direction could be springier: scenes early on sag, and Ayola in particular isn’t always audible when her back is turned on that portion of the audience facing her back at any given time. (Playgoers are seated on three sides.)

Omole, too, sometimes pushes to vary the tone of what in effect is a study in familial dysfunction. A “prostate/prostrate” misunderstanding doesn’t land, and one is aware of melodramatic flourishes to the writing – “that boy is the outsider” – intended to cue suspense. Peace’s ancillary drama involving a troubling student at school stretches the thematic gist of the play unnecessarily.

Where the evening really resonates is with its two men. The ever-charismatic Akuwudike is immediately likeable as a film-loving techie trying to reconcile career prospects with his commitment to a wobbly relationship.

And Ogundipe is terrific as that dramatic mainstay – the character-as-hand-grenade whose existence detonates events around him – who comes bearing a quest that keeps you on tenterhooks right up to the play’s shivery ending.

My Father's Fable is at the Bush Theatre through 27 July. Book My Father's Fable tickets on London Theatre.

Photo credit: My Father's Fable (Photos by Manuel Harlan)