Review: Hold Still, written by Nadia Davids and directed by Jay Pather, at the Baxter
A riveting portrait of a moment in time, an intersection of histories and history in the making, that will very likely become a classic.
Focusing on one dramatic evening in a North London home, a couple, both survivors of tyranny, face up to their own limitations when their son gives refuge to a friend who is threatened with deportation, putting their own hard-won stability at risk.
Rosa and Ben Feigel (played by Mwenya Kabwe and Andrew Buckland) arrive home after a dinner party, complaining about the food (quiche!) and the fact that the host, Ben’s brother, is becoming more and more of a fascist, an echo of the state of affairs across the country. A quiche-eating fascist? It just goes to show how scrambled things have become.
Their son, Oliver (played by newcomer Lyle October), is facing his own personal-political crisis. He is hiding his best friend, Imran (Tailyn Ramsamy), whose application for refugee status has been declined after many years stuck in the system.
Imran is threatened with deportation to his ‘home’ country, an unfamiliar place he left as a boy. In one very moving soliloquy he describes the moment he decided to stop speaking his native tongue in an effort to end painful dreams about his mother and everything else he left for this ‘better life’.
Oliver’s act of defiance springs naturally from a political consciousness that his parents have encouraged in him. The teenager is named after Oliver Tambo and he complains at one point that his mother has dined out on her struggle credentials all of his life.
Giving refuge to his friend seems an obvious choice for him, but it threatens the stability and freedom from struggle his parents have worked so hard to achieve for him.
Also, today’s England is a very different place from the one that welcomed their various family members as exiles and survivors of the Holocaust and apartheid South Africa.
Rosa and Ben have changed too. They are still living in the shadow of their own catastrophic political histories, but they live in hard-won middle-class comfort far removed from the agonies that drove them there.
The intimacy between Buckland and Kabwe feels genuine, comforting even, a connection between survivors. It is also an excellent set-up for the crushing reality that they are divided by their own personal struggles as much as they are united in their fight against injustice.
Oliver doesn’t bargain on how much his parents would sacrifice to avoid him being pulled into the war against tyranny, escape from which has shaped their entire lives.
Set design is by Patrick Curtis, sound by Neo Muyanga and costume by Angela Nimov.
Hold Still, at the Baxter Flipside, for a limited season, from 7 to 19 November 2022, at 7pm, with Saturday matinees at 2.30pm.