Review: One Monkey Don’t Stop No Show ***

The strange thing about this production is that the performances are fantastic, the direction spot on, the set perfect, but the play itself feels almost unnecessary.

The reason will not be clear from simply watching it – it is only when you realise that this play is 30 years old that the feeling makes sense.

It is impossible to watch a play about an upwardly mobile black American family living in a well-to-do white neighbourhood without thinking of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and its progenitor The Cosby Show.

The latter was a watershed and important piece of work that told the stories of Black America. The Fresh Prince superceded that and, as is the natural order, tackled similar issues with less innocence.

So you expect One Monkey... to move forward from the Fresh Prince (last episode 15 years ago).

Somehow, it moves backwards.

Director Dawn Walton stages the show as though it really were being filmed in front of a live, studio audience. It is a nice conceit, one you expect will be somehow inverted, to explode the idea that we are simply watching a TV show, after all, what would be the point of that, in a theatre? You would be forgiven for sitting on your seat through the whole show, waiting for a big reveal. When this doesn’t happen and you realise that you really are watching a straight version of a show that could have actually been filmed in a studio, the immediate and constant question is, why?

Why wouldn’t you instead, just watch a re-run of The Cosby Show, or Fresh Prince?

The answer would most likely be that, despite being written almost 30 years ago, this is the European premiere of the play and that co-producer Eclipse’s raison d’etre is to promote black theatre work.

That’s great, but why not stage something that isn’t 30 years old?

It is a shame because the performances are, universally stunning and full of exuberance that it is impossible not to enjoy, in particular from Daniel Francis and Ayesha Antoine. It’s just that really, the performances would have been better harnessed for a different, more relevant, play.

To September 24. West Yorkshire Playhouse, November 1 to 5.