By Neil Durham

WORTH A LOOK?: ****

WHEN?: Saturday 22 June, running through 27 July 2024 RUNTIME: 135 minutes (including a 20-minute interval)

Author Faith Omole is perhaps best known for her 2023 Olivier Award-nominated role for Best Actress In A Musical for Richard Hawley’s Standing At The Sky’s Edge.

• Read on for reasons including why this is 1 of the best new plays we’ve seen so far this year and how it could transfer onto a West End stage

We saw her most recently this year in Yael Farber’s production of King Lear and described her portrayal of 1 of the titular royal’s daughters as ‘memorably villainous’.

Omole recently won the prestigious Alfred Fagon Award, the leading theatre prize for Black playwrights, for her play Kaleidoscope and My Father’s Fable is the story of Peace who didn’t know what she needed when her father died.

Then she found Bolu, her half-brother from Nigeria she didn’t know existed. Filled with grief and a thousand questions, his arrival feels like something clicking into place. Despite her mother’s concerns and encouraged by her partner, Peace invites Bolu to England. 

But questions about this stranger’s intentions and his mysterious past hang heavy in the air. Desperate to keep her fractured family – and herself – together, Peace must face the fact that the answers she desperately seeks might just lead to everything falling apart.

BAFTA winner Rakie Ayola (pictured above, The Glow, Royal Court) plays Peace’s mother Favour and brings some real spice to the role of a woman who controls her daughter, mistrusts the intentions of partner Roy, a very believable Gabriel Akuwudike (Time Is Love/Tiempo Es Amor, Finborough Theatre), and inserts herself in their home by feigning illness to better monitor the arrival of a relative she is unsure of.

What we liked about Omole’s writing was the confidence to confront the stereotype of an email purporting to being from a Nigerian with the promise of a seemingly unlikely reunion and we never quite knew in which direction this play was going.

Tiwa Lade as Peace convinced as a woman with an open heart and inquisitive mind who could be manipulated be her mother and could be taken in by someone without her best wishes at heart.

When Theo Ogundipe as potential brother Bolu is found to have stolen some belongings of his mother from Peace’s home it is easy to believe that his motives are questionable but are they?

The Bush Theatre is 1 of the hottest beds of the best new writing and transfers to the West End with recent examples including Shifters, which runs at the Duke Of York’s 12 August through 12 October, and Red Pitch.

My Father’s Fable is definitely 1 of the best new plays we’ve seen so far this year and it wouldn’t surprise us if it doesn’t follow its predecessors onto a West End stage and soon after an acclaimed run at this vibrant and thrilling venue.

• Main picture by Manuel Harlan via Facebook courtesy Bush Theatre Tickets
• Have you seen Bush Theatre show before and what did you think of it? Let us know what you thought in the comments below
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