Chichester Festival Theatre - compelling tale of swinging 60s and sinking disappointment

Mom, How Did You Meet The Beatles? offers a fascinating and rather beautiful reminder of just how little you need in order to make compelling theatre. An intriguing story and a superlative storyteller – and that’s the essence of Adrienne Kennedy’s autobiographical play.

The result is theatre – co-written with her son Adam P Kennedy – at its purest and simplest, a near monologue, unbroken by an interval, in which Rakie Ayola as Kennedy tells Adam the answer to the question the play carries in its title. Any play that contrives mention of The Beatles in its very first sentence gets my vote, but Ayola’s skill is consummate as she then goes on to deliver her 75-minute answer, one which takes us to the heart of the swinging 60s just as they were turning flower-power. Out of nowhere, Kennedy, it seems, decided she wanted to turn John Lennon’s book In His Own Write into a play. Impulsively and with young Adam in tow, she heads off to London and soon starts to mingle with the movers and shakers of arguably the most exciting decade ever.

Ayola brings alive her wide-eyed wonder as she meets first Paul McCartney and then John Lennon. She gives us a sense of what it was like to walk into a room in which they sat; you feel the frisson. Soon she’s mixing too with Victor Spinetti, Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Tynan. Somehow, through limited contacts, luck and opportunism, she’s mingling with the greats.

But does this make her part of the set? No, of course not. All too predictably this is ultimately a tale of rejection, and while we can certainly share her disappointment, it’s difficult to share too much of her surprise. If you come up with a good idea for an icon in another land, indeed in another world, how likely is it that the idea will remain yours for long? How reasonable is it to have assumed it ever would? In the end, this is the tale of how Kennedy discovered you can’t just suggest John Lennon turn his book into a play and expect the credit to remain with you.

But it’s a tale which is richly, mesmerisingly and movingly told by Rakie Ayola in one of the finest performances the Minerva has seen for a long, long time. Diyan Zora’s direction and Ayola’s instinct ensure that what might have been static never is for a moment. Ayola’s delivery is fresh and completely engaging as she name-drops her way through 60s London.

Jack Benjamin as Adam Kennedy on stage barely speaks, though he asks the question which prompts the whole show. Otherwise he’s there to offer mood music on the guitar. Maybe that’s missing a trick. Some Beatles might have been more appropriate. But elsewhere there is a nice use of projections. Videos at the back very rarely enhance any play. They never seem truly to belong on the stage. But they do here, and indeed there probably could have been more of it. A minor quibble, though, in a night which puts the emphasis firmly on story-telling and offers up something very special, hugely helped by Anisha Fields’s excellent, spare and simple design.