I just saw Alterations at The Lyttelton Theatre, a powerful revival of Michael Abbensetts’ 1979 play, directed by Lynette Linton with additional material by Trish Cooke. Set in a Guyanese-run tailor’s shop in 1970s London, it offers a vivid snapshot of the Windrush generation’s hopes, struggles and sacrifices.
At the centre is Walker Holt, played by Arinzé Kene, a man consumed by his dream of owning the shop he runs. But that ambition comes at a cost – to his marriage, to his daughter, and to his ability to hear the people around him. His wife, Darlene (Cherrelle Skeete), hasn’t seen a penny from him in months. Their six-year-old daughter Janet goes unseen, unheard – much like Darlene herself – while Walker buries himself in a potentially life-changing order: hundreds of trousers from a mysterious new customer, Mr Nat (Colin Mace), which, if completed in time, will allow him to buy the shop and bring his dreams to fruition.
Kene’s performance is multi-faceted and skilful. He moves through the full gamut of emotions as the play unfolds, and Walker’s arc offers more than enough challenge for any actor – but Kene takes it in his stride.
Alongside him is Buster, his loyal friend, played by Gershwyn Eustache Jnr, whose subplot – waiting by the phone as his wife goes through an extended labour – injects humour, heart, and a powerful reminder of the era’s expectations around work, gender, and presence. While Buster makes frequent calls to check on the birth, he’s expected to keep sewing – a subtle but cutting comment on the pressures Black men faced to provide, even at the cost of showing up for their own families.
Their delivery van driver, Courtney (Raphel Famotibe), represents the disaffected Black youth of the 1970s. He’s angry, disillusioned, and frustrated by the treatment of Black people in the media and in everyday life. He talks about how nobody listens to the younger generation – and ironically, Walker doesn’t hear him either. Famotibe brings a restless, simmering energy to the role, capturing both Courtney’s exuberance and the anger that brews beneath the surface. It only bursts out in moments, like when Walker shouts, “I want to open a paper just once and not see that I am the problem,” and Courtney retorts, “We’re not the problem – they are.”
Darlene, Walker’s wife, is already neglected before we even meet her. He clearly has a girlfriend on the side – Liz – and at one point says, “Me and Darlene get along fine, as long as we don’t live together,” a sentiment Darlene very obviously does not share. She’s the one holding things together, struggling to feed their child while Walker’s obsession swallows any sense of duty. Skeete plays Darlene with heart and precision – every flicker of sadness, anger, and fear is tangible. Her Darlene is not just a foil for Walker’s ambition; she’s a full, complex character who aches with frustration and longing.
Mr Nat, the man with the miraculous trouser order, is initially presented as a lifeline – a white client offering Walker a lucrative job that could secure the future of the shop. But as the play unfolds, he reveals a deeper backstory. Mr Nat is a German-Jewish refugee, someone who also understands what it’s like to be marginalised. He shares that he once had a different, recognisably German name – one that made life harder in post-war Britain – and he speaks movingly about his experiences of prejudice, saying that, at the time, nobody wanted to deal with people like him. It’s a powerful moment of apparent solidarity.
The comparison is sincere but flawed – and perhaps that’s the point. The play hints at the gap in experience between Mr Nat and Walker, but it doesn’t interrogate it in any great depth. As a grandchild of German-Jewish refugees myself, I found the moment resonant but also quietly troubling. Yes, Mr Nat changed his name, and my grandparents did too – and that allowed them to fit in. But for the Windrush generation, no name change, or clipped accent could make them blend in. They were always seen as “other.” It’s a comparison that risks false equivalence – and while the play touches on that tension, it leaves it to the audience to make the deeper connections.
There was a lot of impressive accent work in this play, but I particularly want to highlight Colin Mace’s Mr Nat. While the Black characters all had distinctive, pronounced Caribbean accents, Nat’s accent was understated – a mostly English tone, with the faintest trace of something European. It sounded just like my grandmother’s accent – she fled Berlin during the Nazi era – and I was genuinely struck by the authenticity.
Frankie Bradshaw’s set is deceptively simple: a cluttered tailor’s shop with machinery, mess, and a retractable clothing rack hanging high above, set on a revolve. The main set switches between the shop floor and a back break room – but the revolve is used cleverly at one point when half the characters are eavesdropping on the other half. There are moments where the set expands seamlessly: hidden sections slide on, fully dressed, then vanish again. The clothes rack also becomes a striking visual cue, reappearing to mark key transitions.
A woman at a theatre party recently told me that “no one ever mentions the wigs, hair and makeup,” and in the case of Alterations, that would be a real omission. Cynthia De La Rosa’s work is spot on. The wigs are perfect – not cartoonishly retro but deeply rooted in the period – and paired with Bradshaw’s costumes, they evoke the 70s effortlessly without ever feeling like pastiche.
Alterations doesn’t offer easy resolutions, and perhaps that’s what makes it feel so honest. It captures a generation mid-struggle – between dreams and a sense of duty, between the past and the future – and lets their stories unfold without judgement. What Lynette Linton and Trish Cooke have done is to take Abbensetts’ already groundbreaking work and breathe new life into it. This revival isn’t just about nostalgia; it’s about reclaiming space for stories that still resonate, still provoke, and still matter.
Alterations plays at The Lyttelton Theatre until 5th April. It might not shout for your attention, but it absolutely deserves it.
Tickets from nationaltheatre.org.uk
Words Nick Barr
Photos by Marc Brenner
