Foxes

Dexter Flanders’ play – shortlisted for 2018’s Alfred Fagon Award – is a long, level look at masculinity, sexual identity and the pressures of family and faith. Foxes are solitary, nocturnal animals, to which the play compares queer Black men.

The play tells the story of Daniel (Michael Fatogun), a young man from north London on the brink of unexpected parenthood with Meera (July Namir), who has been thrown out of her home by her parents.

Flanders’ writing is warm and often direct, and though James Hillier’s direction occasionally veers towards the overemphatic and cautiously literal, his staging sings in its moments of quiet, stuttering intimacy.

Fatogun gives a raw, exposing central performance, which is boosted further by his rapport with best friend Leon (a charismatic Anyebe Godwin).

Foxes shies away from delving into each character’s personal history, allowing the performances do a lot of the work in this respect. Namir’s Meera is best when at her most stingingly defiant, already isolated from her Muslim family and convinced she smells a rat in her relationship. Tosin Alabi is poised as Daniel’s sister Deena, and Sex Education’s Doreene Blackstock is a welcoming presence as his mother Patricia.

Erin Guan’s domestic set is an effective canvas for Will Monks’ projections and lighting, particularly in a moment when rain shrinks to fit a window, behind a face spotlit by a phone screen. The use of projections to show time passing are less necessary, as are scenes literalising Daniel bound and straining in the darkness as a baby cries: it’s all in the script and Fatogun’s face already.