Gone Too Far! Theatre Royal Stratford East.

Bola Agbaje’s Gone Too Far! premiered at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs back in 2007, gaining praise and earning the British Nigerian writer an Olivier for Outstanding Achievement along the way. Theatre Royal Stratford East and The National Youth Theatre’s current revival, directed by Monique Touko, has palpable comic energy, but the work’s evident flaws are never far from the surface.

Gone Too Far! explores the relationship between loud, in-your-face, London-raised teenager Yemi, played by Jerome Scott, and his gentler Nigerian-raised elder brother Ikudayisi. The two teenagers are not just at odds over who gets to use the PlayStation or run mum’s errands, but about their basic identity. Dalumuzi Moyo’s Yoruba-speaking Ikudayisi is a proud Nigerian who, despite his fake American accent, wants his younger brother to cherish the family’s African heritage. Yemi is a Peckham lad who knows nothing of Africa and cares less. “This is London, not LA Lagos, things work different here,” he instructs his sibling. But should Ikudayisi stop being who he is and simply fit in? It is the evolving bond between these two opposites that provides the driving force for the show’s too thin narrative.

Mum sends the boys out into the woods of South London on a mission to buy milk. The challenges they face on their odyssey include navigating confrontations with shopkeepers, edgy white neighbours, and the police. There are tricky encounters with guru-like gangster Blazer (Richard Adetunji) and his comic drug-dealing acolytes Razer (Tobi King Bakare) and Flamer (Tyler Kinghorn). But it is a chance misunderstanding with Razer’s pushy girlfriend Armani (Keziah Campbell-Golding) that sets the scene for a life-threatening encounter.

Agbaje’s script takes a hatchet to the illusion of homogenous black community. Pernicious racism emerges not just from the boy’s white neighbours and police. It appears between members of African and Jamaican communities, in the woefully under-explored relationship between the scheming, aggressive light-skinned Armani and her darker-skinned buddy Paris (Hannah Zoé Ankrah), and between Yumi and the mixed-race policeman he slurs as a “coconut”. The ever present threat of knife-crime simmers beneath the surface. This is a world in which showing disrespect, particularly to gang-members and drug-dealers, has consequences. Many of Gone Too Far! ‘s themes re-occur in Ryan Calais Cameron’s more recent (much better) London-set play For Black Boys…

The modern-day Peckham that director Touro offers up here is more gentrified than in the original production. Planet Organic, staffed by a Ukrainian refugee, replaces the Pakistani owned corner-shop. A leggy drag-queen substitutes for a pole-dancer on the local club podium. It is to Rwanda that Yemi wishes away unwelcome immigrant newcomers. These details aside, the production seems to suggest that for black residents, life offers up most of the same trials and tribulations as 15 years ago. This may indeed be the case, but perhaps there is a risk here of stereotyping. Agbaje’s skill in observing and capturing the cadences and rhythms of working-class multicultural London English in her writing is manifest. But let’s not imagine all black people in South London live in rundown council estates or communicate in roadman slang.

Two of Touko’s previous directorial projects, the Almeida’s The Clinic and Hampstead’s Malindadzimu explore characters who struggle with finding a comfortable identity as both Black and British. This conundrum may well be personal for her. Whether the answer lies simply in rediscovering one’s cultural heritage, as Gone Too Far! seems to suggest, is debatable. That it should be gangster Blazer who spurs Yemi’s choice to rethink who he is seems unlikely. Touko’s final directorial twist, a clever montage of characters coming together to co-create a backdrop of a London skyline, suggests building a new shared identity is part of the solution too.

Performance wise it is a majestically malign turn from a vivacious Keziah Campbell-Golding as Armani that stands out. Her character is described as someone who “pronounces English like she’s chewing boiling water” and Campbell-Golding hits it spot on. Jerome Scott is tremendous too as the cocky Yemi, as is Dalumuzi Moyo’ adroitly witty fusion of high-speed English and Yoruba.

Madeleine Boyd’s set, smoky haze, scaffolding, skate-board slopes, and a Peckham sign etched out of brutalist concrete, vividly captures the South London urban vibe. Kloé Dean’s choreography, indeed the movement design throughout the whole piece, adds edgy momentum.

Writer: Bola Agbaje

Director: Monique Touko