THEATRE REVIEW: Notes On Grief - Manchester Central, Manchester.

There’s no doubting the heartfelt emotion and paternal adoration inherent in novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s stage version of her book, 'Notes On Grief', itself based on an acclaimed essay in the New Yorker, but sadly the expansion of something so powerful on the page to fill 90 minutes doesn’t make for gripping drama.

The play is one of the headlining shows at Manchester International Festival and chronicles, in a somewhat repetitive series of over 20 segments, Adichie’s reminiscences & stages of grief following the news that her beloved father and retired academic, Nigeria’s first professor of statistics, James Nwoye Adichie has died during the pandemic, from kidney failure.

This is a production that is more meditative and reflective than dramatic, despite director Rae McKen’s fierce attempts to animate it, broadening it out to include three actors (playing a variety of roles), and using song, movement, fragments of Zoom images and grainy home movie-style footage, in an attempt to put some meat on the emotional bones. The pandemic itself merely acts as a backdrop for Adichie’s personal & specific pain

Michelle Asante does a fantastic, physical, energetic job playing Adichie herself, overwhelmed by melancholy and anger, baring her soul & directly addressing the audience with reminiscence and anecdotes. However, the repeated outpourings of denial, anger, pain, incredulity and lament become repetitive & I could feel the audience’s restlessness after the first hour

It’s in the detail that the piece sparks into some life, such as Adichie’s impatience at a queue of glib condolences offered, the comments on Nigerian society - with mortuary workers only caring for bodies if they are given tips,  and the reference to her father being kidnapped, with the ransom demand his ‘famous daughter’ is expected to be able to pay. I was more interested in James’ life than in Adichie’s catharsis, which becomes exhaustive and just a bit exhausting.

As expected from a famed novelist, Adichie’s language is at times striking and refreshing – more elegant, poetic and eloquent that you’d expect in a contemporary play – but there is only so much that can be done to dramatise what is effectively a very long monologue with no breaks. Even Alan Bennett would struggle to develop the increasingly one-note content.

Reviewer - Tracy Ryan

on - 6.7.21