House of Ife review: Effective balance of grief with levity
You can choose your friends but you can’t choose your family, goes the old saying. House of Ife is a damning case for why we feel this way. We’re presented with a split of explosively divisive personalities in the Ife family, showing how far removed we can be from the people we’re birthed by, or birthed alongside.
House of Ife’s great strength is that it mirrors how surprising, exhausting and upsetting family dynamics can be during the worst of times. In the first hour-and-a-half, we’re lulled into a false sense of security, after which the play takes a staggering turn that leaves, at a glance, a third of the audience in tears.
We’re in-the-round in the Bush Theatre’s main Holloway Theatre space with Frankie Bradshaw’s set sitting like a TV studio in the middle. The exposed set highlights how claustrophobic this small London flat feels. With bright lights, unexpected summer heat and windows that will barely open, it’s a hellscape even for the tightest, most functioning of families.
It also offers moments of levity, handled gracefully by Tessema’s writing and Lynette Linton’s direction. At one point, Jude Akuwudike’s father figure Solomon throws son Yosi’s hat purposefully off stage into the audience. In a gleeful meta skit, Yosi actor Michael Workeye retrieves it from a ticket holder and calls out his dad for “embarrassing” him in front of the audience.
While Tessema’s script is concerned with a family dealing with the loss of its eldest son, Ife, from drugs, it’s balanced with a whir of laughter and generous displays of what it’s like to be young and living in London with parents who feel religiously and culturally disparate.
The characters pop, especially the three siblings: Karla-Simone Spence captures the energy and anxiety of youth as tempestuous Aida, a painter accused by members of her family of becoming a hipster. She struggles with her mental health and is out on the sesh too much, trying to mask her grief. But “panic attack is hippie talk,” her father tells her. “You’re in the ends now.”
Impressionable youngest sibling and rapper-cum-poet Yosi is in a way the most tragic, showing how easy it would be to enable another generation of grief through misplaced hope and trust. “Abuse?” his father barks, harrowingly gaslighting him: “You’re using words you’re hearing on the street.”
House of Ife plays at the Bush Theatre until June 11