Sleepova review

Like a jar full of bright jelly beans, this new play by Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini is a sweet, vivid and joyous jumble. It’s stuffed with more ideas and plot strands than we can comfortably chew, and Ibini scatters them about with abandon rather than arranging them into a satisfying dramatic structure. But there’s such tenderness, humour and exuberance in the writing that it’s hard to resist. And Jade Lewis’ production, though it, too, needs a better defined shape and dynamics, is a giddy sugar rush.

It’s performed by a cast of four, three of whom – fast-rising screen actor Bukky Bakray included – are making their stage debuts here. Playing out across a handful of sleepovers and a school prom, in giggles and teasing, intense confidences and emotional confrontations, it’s a teenage rites-of-passage story that sees a quartet of close friends discovering themselves, each other and their place in the world as young Black women. Shan (Aliyah Odoffin), sensitive and shrewd, is living with sickle cell disease, which means contending with physical and psychological struggles that she mostly keeps to herself. Studious and devoutly Christian Elle (Shayde Sinclair) is secretly experiencing feelings that will bring her into conflict with her strict parents. Rey (Amber Grappy), who is of mixed heritage and proudly queer, desperately misses her mum, who died when she was little, and is mutinously at odds with her white stepmother. And Funmi (Bakray), who has a lethally quick wit and an eye for the boys, is embracing her Yoruba heritage.