Clyde's Donmar Warehouse review ★★★★★

Clyde’s Diner is a roadside truckers’ stop, undistinguishable from countless others dotted along the USA’s many roads except in two respects: its staff are all ex-felons and its sandwiches are special – unique even.

It is the setting for American playwright and double Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage’s 2021 play, Clyde’s, now on at the Donmar in a glorious new production meticulously directed by Lynette Linton, who also helmed the theatre’s previous staging of Nottage’s Sweat.

It is also a clever and effective metaphor for the redemptive power of self-belief through achievement, in this case the perfect sandwich, which has always seemed out of reach to people who got used to being at the bottom of the pile – ‘everybody keeps telling me I’m shit’ is the feeling that recurs, spoken or unspoken, thorough most of Clyde’s 100 unbroken minutes.

Yet Clyde’s is also extremely funny, with its vibrant bowed-but-not-quite-broken characters, and its vivid true-to-life rapid-fire dialogue that swerves vertiginously between joking, swearing, mockery and anger, even as the cooks go about composing their very realistic sandwiches.

Frankie Bradshaw’s detailed set is the greasy spoon’s grimy kitchen, where the staff are verbally whipped and humiliated by the owner, Clyde, herself an ex-con now in hock to some unsavoury characters, played with convincing borderline pathological relish by Gbemisola Ikumelo (Sex Education).

Gbemisola Ikumelo in Clyde's. Donmar. Photo: Marc Brenner
The man with a passion for devising the perfect sandwich is Montrellous, whose natural authority and near-mystical approach to food are conveyed in yet another remarkable interpretation by Giles Terera (Blues for an Alabama Sky, Death of England). As one character puts it, ‘Montrellous is like the Buddha if he’d grown up in the hood.’

Giles Terera in Clyde's. Donmar. Photo: Marc Brenner
Montrellous is a mentor for his younger colleagues: African-American Tish, the spunky, harried single mother of a sick child played by Ronkẹ Adékoluẹjo (Blues for an Alabama Sky) and Latino Rafael, the immensely expressive Sebastian Orozco (A Fight Against). As the play starts, they are joined by morose new arrival Jason, a white man whose former association with racist gangs is literally written all over his face and neck in telltale tattoos. He is played by Patrick Gibson, who also starred in Sweat.

Naturally there’s conflict among this motley crew, but as they are persuaded to tell their stories, so they discover their common humanity and, through their sandwiches, a kind of freedom, though they should heed Montrellous’s advice, ‘don't get too high on hope.’

Through her lifelike characters – Nottage’s research involves extensive interviews with marginalised people, so often overwhelmed by circumstances they can’t control – the author provides a cutting criticism of the US penal system, where people are spat out at the end of often disproportionate sentences, like Montrellous ‘with five dollars, the clothes on my back and nobody I could call.’ No wonder the recidivism rate is over 75%.

Clyde’s is a thoroughly enjoyable piece of work: a socially aware play that raises important issues with a light touch, is riotously funny, peopled by characters you come to deeply care for, and is skilfully constructed to keep you hooked – all well served in the Donmar's assured, intelligent production.

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