The House That Will Not Stand review unlike any other play in London

A tyrannical matriarch presides over a house in mourning. Her daughters long for freedom and fight over a man. A relative, presumed mad, is hidden away.

Such is the situation in Federico García Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba, and in this new play by the young African-American playwright Marcus Gardley. For all of Gardley’s palpable debt to Lorca, his play has a historical fascination and exuberant theatricality all its own.

It is set in New Orleans in 1836 after a long period of French rule that permitted common-law marriages between free women of colour and white men. Beartrice, Gardley’s newly widowed protagonist, is determined to hang on to her house and to prevent her three teenage daughters from following in her footsteps and becoming the kind of white man’s concubine known as a placée. While the play is partly about the sexual rivalry among Beartrice’s locked-up daughters, it’s also about the multiple definitions of freedom in a household that includes a black servant yearning for manumission.

It’s a rich mix, but Gardley vividly captures the sense of a house not only divided against itself but also caught up in a war of different traditions. Memories of Franco-Spanish colonial rule vie with recent American statehood just as Beartrice’s resort to voodoo, which involves conjuring up the dead, competes with her professed Catholicism. Occasionally, I thought Gardley had tossed too much into the pot, and he manipulates character to make his point about the universal desire for freedom.

But the play has a pulsing theatrical vitality that comes across well in Indhu Rubasingham’s production. It also gets strong performances from Martina Laird as domineering Beartrice, Tanya Moodie as her regal servant, and Ayesha Antoine, Danusia Samal and Ronke Adekoluejo as her three fighting daughters. With its magic, incantations and chants, it is not like any other play in London, and sheds new light on the Louisiana Purchase, so often referred to in the work of Wilder and Williams.

Until 22 November. Box office: 020-7328 1000. Venue: Tricycle, London.

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