'Skeleton Crew' review — unemployment stalks Dominique Morisseau’s empathetic work play

Read our review of the Tony-nominated drama Skeleton Crew, now in performances at the Donmar Warehouse to 24 August.

American work has been a mainstay of Michael Longhurst’s regime as artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse, and it looks to be crucial to incoming artistic director Timothy Sheader’s tenure as well.

So before Sheader gets going in the autumn with a world premiere from Lindsey Ferrentino, starring Oscar winner Adrien Brody, Longhurst is bidding farewell in programming terms with the UK debut of Dominique Morisseau’s Skeleton Crew. A Tony nominee for Best Play in 2022, this drama set in a Detroit car factory in 2008 won a Tony for Phylicia Rashad’s featured performance as the feisty factory worker, Faye.

Her part here falls to Pamela Nomvete, an Olivier nominee last year for To Kill A Mockingbird who could well find herself in the running once more on the basis of this latest, memorably impassioned performance.

Though Morisseau’s play exists in the shadow of such previous Donmar entries as Lynn Nottage’s comparably themed, and superb, Sweat, Nomvete powers her way through an overlong drama, playing a longtime employee and union rep who refuses in more ways than one to go down without a fight. She resists, for starters, the entreaties from others that she give up smoking, and has been known to have a fondness for gambling that itself won't quit.

Set throughout in the staff common room frequented by a disparate foursome, Skeleton Crew is a work play shot through to its core with the threat of unemployment.

“Better to wait till the last possible moment to worry, I say; till then, go with the flow,” one character is heard to remark, voicing the sort of maxim that masks abiding anxiety. One is aware throughout of people at risk of being marginalised living on borrowed time: Faye, for one, would like to make it to the 30th anniversary on this automotive factory’s books so as to cash in on a rewards package that, in truth, looks increasingly far from reach.

Matthew Xia’s empathic production has a commendably lived-in quality throughout, and one notes this play's pertinence to British life, the (ace) American accents notwithstanding. (One thinks of the output of Alexander Zeldin, though his writing doesn’t trumpet its themes quite so baldly.)

It helps that each character is sharply individuated. Racheal Ofori is both sassy and sorrowful as the pregnant Shanita, who finds herself in a protracted mating dance with the galvanising hothead Dez (Branden Cook, in a knockout professional debut), who wields a gun, yes, alongside buckets full of charm.

Overseeing them all is Reggie (a likeable Tobi Bamtefa), whose apparent calm is more than once put to the test. A high school dropout made good, Reggie has already lost half his work crew, and is well aware that his zero tolerance policy won’t mean much if there are soon to be zero jobs.

Morisseau takes a meandering approach to a story that feels as if it ought to be more emotionally impactful than it is. But even if Skeleton Crew sometimes dawdles when it might otherwise detonate, an exemplary cast foregrounds the need for dignity and compassion – something that, with luck, will never show its age.

Skeleton Crew is at the Donmar Warehouse through 24 August. Book Skeleton Crew tickets on London Theatre.

Photo credit: Skeleton Crew (Photos by Helen Murray)