The week in theatre: Alterations; A Knock on the Roof review

The Guardian

09-03-2025

Let's hear it for costume designers. The temptation for a reviewer has always been to regard their work as primarily decorative, not informative; seldom mentioned unless the stage is crammed with silken flounces. An old journalist friend told me that in the 50s, Queen magazine reviews had a formula: the cast was 'beautifully gowned'. Imagine getting away with a description of an actor which said only that she spoke very nicely.
Yet costumes can tell the story of a play as surely as the dialogue. Never more so than in Alterations, the 1978 play by Michael Abbensetts, who came to Britain from Guyana in 1963, had his first play directed at the Royal Court by Stephen Frears, and was the first black British author commissioned to write a TV drama series in the UK: Empire Road ran on BBC Two from 1978 to 1979.
There are numerous alterations in Abbensetts' drama, which has been retrieved from the Black Plays Archive. A tailor whose parents came to London from Guyana is trying to alter his prospects and buy a shop in Carnaby Street. To do so – the task has a fairytale dimension – he has to alter a huge batch of trousers overnight. Meanwhile, British society is creakingly, grudgingly altering: kids are called 'darkie' at school.
Frankie Bradshaw designs set and costumes for Lynette Linton's production: the two worked together to glorious effect in Blues for an Alabama Sky three years ago. Bradshaw wires you into the heart of the action. The 70s are summoned in an orange onesie for a determined woman, a rose-tinted velvet suit with wide brown reveres for her raffish admirer, a trilby for the man who has commissioned the trouser tucking. Dreamlike, the past drifts on in the form of a stately, straw-hatted Windrush matriarch; the future in the shape of a young black man in tracksuit and earphones.
Garments become scenery as clothes rails crowded with shirts swish down from on high, but this decor is never only naturalistic: amid the clutter of Singer sewing machines, tape measures and bolts of cloth, the shirts arrive like lovely promises, but also, being bodyless, like wraiths. Which goes to one of Abbensetts's central, simple points: financial success may come at the expense of human warmth.
Arinzé Kene, the tailor who gets his shop but loses his marriage, is vivacious, hustling and bustling across the stage, but the strongest performance is from Cherrelle Skeete – soaked in sadness, growing into resolve – as the capable wife who, having been strung along and patronised, claims her independence. Her part is bolstered by additional script from Trish Cooke that points up the casual disregard of women's viewpoints: a man ringing the hospital to ask if his wife has given birth is bemused by her inability to get a move on.
Genial, larky, with small touches of melancholy, Alterations is more atmospheric than incisive. In June, Linton will direct another drama about a person of colour whose profession is clothes. Lynn Nottage's Intimate Apparel, about a black seamstress who makes knickers in 1905, is delicate and far-reaching. It was a revelation to me 11 years ago and I am agog.
The title of Khawla Ibraheem's one-person show is itself a piece of information. What sounds like a small incident – perhaps a spooky occurrence in an attic – is a blood-freezing indicator of a large terror. Ibraheem's roof is in Gaza, and the knock is a minor explosion, the warning that the Israeli military give to residents that a bombing will take place in five to 15 minutes.
A Knock on the Roof is in some ways very particular. How often do bombers exercise that terrible parodic courtesy of the tipoff? The setting is precise: the evening begins with the speaker's young son begging to go to the beach – not part of Trumpian real estate but a public playground, washed by a dirty ocean. The life of an individual city is evoked: one whose streets are suffused by the smell of baking a special pastry – one that is brilliant at producing constipation.
Yet the psychological study that drives Oliver Butler's production – a study of what happens to humans if they are always afraid – could be the product of any war, of anyone under siege. Ibraheem rehearses what she will do when she hears that knock, going through the procedure much as people did years ago when told they might receive a four-minute warning of nuclear attack. She practises what she will pack and what she can carry. She turns to her audience for advice: someone suggests taking a cardigan, another a passport, a third perfume. She makes up a bundle the weight of her son to see how much she can hold as well as him. She cleans the house obsessively; she worries what will happen if her elderly mother is on the toilet when the knock comes. And she runs: into the evening through the city, seeing how far she can get in 10 minutes.
A desolate, haunting backdrop designed by Frank J Oliva shows a skeleton apartment block with dislocated beams swinging from various ceilings. Ibraheem talks of the sensation of being looted. It goes beyond the physical. This is the portrait of a ransacked mind.
Star ratings (out of five)
Alterations ★★★
A Knock on the Roof ★★★
Alterations is at the Lyttelton, National Theatre, London, until 5 April