Ruth Leon Pocket Review of Kerry Jackson

Kerry Jackson – Dorfman Theatre at the National

I’m a fan of the playwright April de Angelis whose new comedy, Kerry Jackson, is currently at the Dorfman Theatre.

Kerry is a working class woman who has achieved her dream, to open her own restaurant and to make it a success in a rapidly gentrifying area of London. She’s annoying, loud-mouthed and very funny, just as apt to infuriate the customers as charm them, with an Essex accent that is as much a part of her personality as her over-the-top blouses.

Kerry Jackson, the play and the character, is as much about class as about her struggle with a faulty refrigerator, as she negotiates her romantic life between the up-market university professor, the down-to-earth former policeman, and the homeless man who are all vying for her attention.

Kerry Jackson is very much a female endeavour. The director is  Indhu Rubasingham and, in Fay Ripley, the production has found actors who can perfectly inhabit the feisty, proudly anti-intellectual Kerry, her much better educated chef, a splendid Madeline Appiah, and the professor’s teenage daughter, well played by Kitty Hawthorne. These women have strong individual characteristics as well as being symbols of their place in today’s London.

The play has some sharp edges which give it necessary heft. This is England, after all, and the upward-striving Kerry will always be coming up against the barriers of a class system that has allowed her to get this far but will continue to trip her up at every turn.

Kerry Jackson is almost a soap opera in its formulaic need to cover all its options with a character displaying every viewpoint from Thatcherite to liberal. Its saving grace is that it is laugh-out-loud funny with a cracking central character who, in the performance of Fay Ripley, makes a thoroughly enjoyable evening in the theatre. 

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