…and breathe, Almeida, review: a searing portrait of a young rogue meeting reality

The Almeida is becoming rather good at rising to the challenge of the moment. Last December, in between lockdowns, they squeezed in Nine Lessons and Carols, a piece that captured the fractured loneliness of living in a pandemic. For at least a year, they have been unable to stage Jeremy O Harris’s hotly-anticipated melodrama Daddy – it will now appear next year – but not wanting to squander talent when it’s available, they have instead cast that production’s lead actor, David Jonsson, in this elegant monologue.

His performance is a wonder. Jonsson, known for his role in the TV drama Industry, is so at home with this material that I initially assumed he had written it himself. In fact, it’s based on a poetry sequence by British-Nigerian writer Yomi Sode. Jonsson plays Junior, a young black father addressing an unseen cousin, Ade, whose mother, “Big Mummy”, is dying of cancer. Junior didn’t know about the cancer, which (we learn) is typical of a secretive family who regard illness, even grief, as weaknesses to be hidden.

Still, he’s eaten up with guilt over the fact that he was off chasing girls and sneaking into clubs, or what he calls “overindulgence in my own performances”, when he should have been supporting his family, not least his mother, who has been working 12-hour shifts in a nursing home before going on to care for her sister. His monologue is an attempt at reparation, but it’s also a reckoning with mortality and personal responsibility.

Sode’s language is flinty and delicate at once, mixing an artless conversational style and prosaic references to the Docklands Light Railway with moments of lyricism. For instance, waiting for news from the hospital, Junior watches his phone “like a hatching bird in my palm”. The monologue has a montage-like quality, layering memories, thoughts and anecdotes in ways that, coupled with the harmonious integration of guitar and beats from on-stage musician Femi Temowo, convey the impression of a moment suspended in time, like a dream or an intake of breath.

It’s Jonsson who prevents the text, in Miranda Cromwell’s production, from drifting off into the ether. He’s simply mesmeric, be it the heartbeat he leaves to allow a line to achieve its full impact; the quicksilver switches between bravado and vulnerability, insolence and charm; or the effortless ability to slip between multiple characters. He keeps moments of comedy to a minimum that makes them all the more effective – a perfectly-timed little dance when describing a chicken sandwich, or a comic impression of an uncle.

Sode’s poetry is bound up in the specificity of black experience – the clash between Yoruba culture and the West, the performative nature of black masculinity – but it also reaches beyond that in its search for the language of grief. Admittedly, despite its subject, the piece isn’t particularly dramatic: in lesser hands you can imagine it working more effectively on the page than on the stage. It’s a small, even low-key piece – and yet, thanks to Jonsson, it’s also pretty special.

Until July 10. Tickets: 020 7359 4404; almeida.co.uk