The Book of Grace
Arcola Theatre, London

THIS three-hander by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks could have been a straightforward domestic drama, with the return of an estranged son and former soldier to the house of his domineering, xenophobic, border-guard father, Vet, on the entreaty of his eternally optimistic wife, Grace, who believes reconciliation is possible.

The scaffold and barbed-wire border fence spanning the living room set, and the divergent opening monologues delivered by the isolated characters, immediately divests us of such a simple reading. 

Vet, played with unpredictable hostility and simmering fury by Peter De Jersey, reveres the fence and his uniform. Ambivalent about his son’s return, he is concerned that Buddy will intrude on his vigilant isolationism and steal some of the limelight from an upcoming award ceremony in his honour.

His intensity, fervent views and strict code of conduct makes him as much a symbol of intolerance towards immigrants and outsiders as a real character.

Buddy (Daniel Francis-Swaby) down on his luck and looking for some sort of resolution to unspecified paternal abuse and a possible future with his father on the US-Mexican border, is a deeply conflicted character trapped between needy son and some sort of Nemesis.

Ellena Vincent’s Grace, surviving behind a mask of eternal optimism and a concealed scrapbook of upbeat stories and newspaper cuttings, constantly looks for the positives.

She tries to embrace the basic life she leads in the hot, desert border lands under the untrusting scrutiny of her oppressive husband. Her cliched words of encouragement, snatches of songs and permanent smile quickly shape her into yet another representative figure.

The nature of the characterisations and explosive tensions between father and son, with Grace’s ebullient attempts to mediate, are wrought with overt symbolism that turns the play into something closer to a modern Greek tragedy with a predictably cruel denouement.

This ambivalence between a family drama of possible redemption, representative of a polarised, torn US and a fully fledged symbolic drama of fearful, violent isolationism in the mould of an ancient tragedy, is the problem director Femi Elufowoju Jnr fails to solve and despite some powerful, committed performances the production never quite catches the potential heart of this thought-provoking play.

Runs until June 8. Box office: (020) 7503-1646, arcolatheatre.com.