Nine Night, National Theatre, London, review: Natasha Gordon's debut play buzzes with comic energy

A Jamaican nine-night wake is the basis for this affecting, funny study of a family dealing with grief

Cecilia Noble is gloriously funny as the formidable Aunt Maggie (Helen Murray)

Natasha Gordon’s debut play buzzes with comic energy and boasts moments of affecting intensity as it portrays a Jamaican family coping with grief.

When Gloria, the grandmother of this clan, dies of cancer, her London home becomes the centre of the traditional Jamaican nine-night wake. Family, friends, and mourners from the local community descend to celebrate the departed over several days of dancing and singing, rum, storytelling and laughter.

Sophie, the white daughter-in-law, contrasts this admiringly with the emotionally cramped culture she was brought up in – people hardly able to look the bereaved in the eye. But for Gloria’s children, this prolonged party is more of a mixed blessing. The strain of enforced conviviality exacerbates tensions.

Robert, the driven, dodgy businessman son (Oliver Alvin-Wilson) wants to sell the house quick in order to ease his money troubles. This puts him at loggerheads with Lorraine (excellent Franc Ashman), the daughter who took early redundancy to care for the ailing Gloria. She angrily objects that this is a home rather than a property and that their mother’s spirit has not yet been released. The two see eye to eye more over their half-sibling Trudy (Michelle Greenidge), who got left behind in Jamaica as a toddler when Gloria emigrated to Britain and started a new family.

These raw, primal emotions are offset (without being undercut) by the mischievous comedy that bubbles through the script and Roy Alexander Weise’s beautifully judged production. Cecilia Noble is gloriously funny as the formidable, glowering Aunt Maggie who knows what she thinks about every aspect of the mourning ritual and won’t be easily gainsaid. The wonders that woman can work on a corpse: “Me grease up she foot good, help the stockings fi slide on. People tink, because yuh dead, yuh don’t need Vaseline... Even she husband tek picture on Whatsapp to send back home.” The Jamaican patois is deployed to brilliantly comic, never condescending, effect.

Though we don’t get a glimpse of Gloria, we build up a pretty detailed picture of her. I loved the filthy laugh that Aunt Maggie lets out in a speech praising her Freedom Pass (“de only decent ting me get from dis teefing government”) and agreeing that Gloria “was certainly one for getting around on those north London buses” (“You can say dat again”). It is 70 years since the Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury Docks and with the current political storm over citizenship and the threat of deportations, it feels particularly timely for the National to be giving a voice to that generation and its descendants in this humane piece.

You want it to be longer. Running at 110 minutes straight through, Nine Night has to leave too many loose ends – for example, Robert’s future relationship with Sophie, pregnant at 45, remains unresolved.

But the cast perform it to perfection, with Ashman snagging the heart as the put-upon, underappreciated Lorraine and Greenidge at first hilariously sociable and then harrowingly resentful as the revenant Trudy. The piece generates a fantastic atmosphere of inclusion. Natasha Gordon is an actress, but I have no doubt that from now on, we will be hearing a lot more from her as a dramatist.

Until 26 May (nationaltheatre.org.uk)