My Brother’s Keeper at Theatre503

Going to Theatre503 regularly is one of my better habits and I was pleased to continue it with My Brother’s Keeper by Mahad Ali. Other people had the same idea and tickets sold so well that I was forced into the unfamiliar territory of the second row where seat B6 was a modest £14 because, apparently, I am over sixty.

The evening started with a stroll down to the theatre from Sloane Square. Along the way I tried to add some new roads to my CityStrides map and I managed to get Cavalry Square despite the protests from the guard on duty at the private road.

Battersea Park was the next destination and I took a winding route through it to include the lake, bandstand, Festival of Britain site, Peace Pagoda and Old English Garden. That is a lot of pretty things to fit into a fairly short distance.

The final stop before the theatre was The Latchmere pub, below the theatre, where I had booked a table for 6:15. Unfortunately their kitchen was in something of a disarray and, after chasing, my food arrived almost an hour later and I had insufficient time to eat it all and no time to appreciate it. Very disappointing.

At lest it took only a couple of minutes to walk upstairs and I was able to get to the theatre on time.

My Brother’s Keeper was, essentially, the stories of two very different families and their interactions; migrant brothers find themselves in a run-down Margate hotel run by a father and son.

The main relationships were within the two families, between the father and elder brother and between the son and younger brother; that gave us four main stories that developed in parallel.

Their stories were set against the backdrop of a neglected seaside town (we have lots of those) and the reaction of some locals to this for whom the arrival of Turner Contemporary did little to improve things.

There is one stand-out line in the play that caused the biggest laugh, it opened with "Rome was not built in a day", and I am still unsure whether it was too funny and so broke the flow of the play or whether it was a sharp statement on the situation. That said, if I had come up with that line I would have left it in whatever it did to the rest of the play.

My Brother’s Keeper is a clever play. It would have been easy to write something about racism and how migrants are actually people too but while the play does go into those territories it is far more about two unusual families trying to cope with the difficult situations that they both find themselves in. Like all relationships these all had their ups and downs. Not all these relationships developed in the way that those involved might have liked but there were good things too and there was a reasonable ending if not quite a happy one.

I like Theatre503 because they do interesting new plays and My Brother’s Keeper was certainly that.