"Whereas Playboy of the Western World is recognised as a serious play, despite its comedy over-tones, Mustapha Matura’s Trinidadian version is all good humour.  Possibly this is because its setting, a small fishing village, may have some significance to West Indians but to us it is simply a colourful background for this clever adaptation.

Most of Synge’s characters are here.  The playboy himself, here named Ken, who believes he has killed his father and becomes a hero despite, but probably because of, that fact."

"It actually turns out to be a very jolly seasonal entertainment, with some excellent acting.

Kobna Holdbrook-Smith as Ken is another of the impressive young black actors who are now emerging and he is well partnered by Sharon Duncan-Brewster as Peggy.  Joy Richardson, who was one of the young girls in the 1984 production of the play, has now assumed the smothering mantle of Mama Benin, and there are some spirited veterans of black theatre, including Larrington Walker, Shango Baku, Malcolm Frederick and Danny John-Jules as the avenging father."

Peter Hepple

"It’s anniversary time up the Kilburn High Road with Nicolas Kent’s production of Playboy of the West Indies.  Mustapha Matura’s play was first staged 20 years ago with Kent at the helm.  And this year the theatre saw the difficult birth of the play’s source material, Ireland’s national theatre, The Abbey, celebrated 100 years.

When J M Synge’s Playboy of the Western World opened in 1907, the father of The Abbey, W B Yeats, had to beg from the stage for the audience to desist from rioting at its controversial subject matter.  The play has lost little of its power.

Indeed, Matura’s version, relocated from County Mayo in Ireland to Mayaro in Trinidad, gives back to the original a clarity by freeing it from any hint of reverence.

What first becomes clear, in a much more knockabout and funny production than many Irish versions this reviewer has seen, is that British colonialism created the milieu that so offended the Dublin playgoers on 1907.  That the peasantry are venal, petty, self-centred hypocrites is merely learned behaviour from the British Empire.  In an often laugh-out-loud production, this assertion morphs from "a nation once again" style protest song into comedy and satire.

The familiar story in which Ken - an excellent Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, oscillating between vainglorious bluster and a weak-kneed non-entity as seamlessly as Kent’s production snaps from comedy to bleakness - stumbles into Mikey’s rum shop claiming to have murdered his father, only to find himself fêted as a hero, takes on contemporary relevance. In the space of a day his fan-club turns into a lynch mob, suggesting an relationship with celebrity pre-dating even the a quarter of an hour in the limelight that many people today seem to take as their birthright.

Matura’s transfer is a faithful and easy one. The set designer, Adrianne Lobel, turns the shebeen into a wood and corrugated-iron rum shop. And moving the tale from one culture with a rich oral tradition to another yields great dividends, especially for those with a love of English in all its forms.

Most important of all is the comparison of two matriarchal cultures, identified as such not only by the presence of noisy, ineffectual men, but by the subtle control asserted by Peggy, who runs the rum shop for her father. In the role, Sharon Duncan-Brewster is funny, surly, sexy, both vulnerable and strong and, finally, heart-rending as her fate dawns on her in the blink of an eye - the standard amount of time required to change the universe in this precision production. This much-loved, much-admired piece is not only illuminating in itself: it even sheds light on the shebeen back in the old country from where it was lifted."

Adam Scott

"Playboy of the West Indies, Mustapha Matura’s 1984 work, based on J.M. Synge’s 1907 classic of a similar title, is now at the Tricycle Theatre.  In a 1950s Trindad rum shop, where a ’saga boy’ refers to a flashy fellow, Ken (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith) announces he has killed his father.  This attracts women admiring Ken’s ’courage’ and causes men to hate the ’hero’."

Thomas Leuchtenmuller

"At the Tricycle in Kilburn there is a 20th-anniversary revival of Mustapha Matura’s The Playboy of the West Indies, directed (as it was the first time round) by Nicolas Kent.  Matura transposes J.M. Synge’s masterpiece from County Mayo to Trinidad in 1950.  The substitution of Caribbean for Irish detail is neatly done - the pub becomes a shebeen, Pegeen Mike is Peggy the barmaid and so on."

"the play is highly entertaining, with rich local colour and engaging characters.  The production, too, is very spirited (and enhanced by Adrianne Lobel’s atmospheric set).  Among a string of fine performances, Sharon Duncan-Brewster particularly impresses as Peggy, but I was almost equally taken by Danny John-Jules as the father whom the playboy has supposedly murdered.  In Synge he takes on an almost mythic quality as he returns from the dead, and he proves no less notable an apparition here."

John Gross

"J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World turns a small rural Irish community upside down when with a man on the run seeks refuge, claiming to have murdered his father. The dramatist Mustapha Matura brilliantly transfers the action to another equally remote location - from County Mayo to the playwright’s native Trinidad. Playboy of the West Indies does more than survive the transfer - it positively flourishes.

First staged at the Tricycle Theatre twenty years ago, Matura’s play was an inspired original commission from Nicolas Kent. Always laced with irony and affection for its characters and their predicaments, Synge’s surreal play invites Matura’s robust adaptation. Culturally, the two countries share surprising similarities: boredom, boozing and frustrated women in a colonial world.

The all black cast speak the West Indian patois with gusto. "Who do you think I is?" asks Ken of the sensible pub-hut owner’s daughter Peggy. Soon she will be swept off her feet by the good looks of this seemingly brave and sensitive murderer while her drippy and inconsequential fiancé Stanley does nothing. No surprises then when Peggy declares she wants to marry the stranger who croons "When mango ripe, it’s ready to fall - nothing can match me for love and devotion."

The action really comes to life in the second half, when the "murdered" father returns to seek his revenge, the son cowers in fear, and the community is divided as to what to do. Peggy is broken hearted when she realises the man she was about to commit herself to is not the hero she once took him for. Pandemonium follows when Ken kills his father for love of Peggy, and both lovers end, abandoned, and condemned: he to certain death, she to spinsterhood, or Stanley.

Designer Adrianne Lobel’s ramshackle watering hole boasts blue sprayed windows and a door which opens onto a vista of palm trees stretching to the beach. With its adverts for Bovril and Bisto, its limited collection of beer, rum, coke bottles and tins of Carnation milk, this place promises a welcome refuge from the midday sun, and the good humoured banter of its shabby regulars.

The performances are strong: Sharon Duncan-Brewster gives Peggy a fine dignity, Ben Bennett captures Stanley’s uptightness, Joy Richardson gives Mama Benin the dangerous allure of a woman on the rampage, while Kobna Holdbrook-Smith gives the sexy stranger Ken a mysterious charge.

So head for the Tricycle Theatre where a black comedy unravels in a world of palm trees, coconut groves, and cotton fields this Christmas"

Charlotte Birkett

While working with the Oxford Playhouse Company in the early 1980s, he commissioned the play that was first seen at the Tricycle in 1984. It returned for a 10th anniversary production in 1994 and therefore perhaps it was inevitable that he would be directing this production a further 10 years later.

Pleasingly, the historical feel is also maintained by the recasting of some actors who appeared in the two earlier productions; and the presence of the playwright at the opening night.

The play is set in a laid-back bar in a little fishing village in Trinidad. The ramshackle hut and distant palm trees, courtesy of designer Adrianne Lobel, together with the sometimes unintelligible patois (helped by a glossary in the programme) give a real sense of location.

Barman Mikey’s daughter, Peggy, seems far too bold a lass to fall for the hopeless, money-driven Stanley (Ben Bennett), who looks as if he will fall over his own feet. Sharon Duncan-Brewster is both funny and convincing as the woman who immediately falls for a mysterious stranger Ken, well played by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith.

His attraction is the fact that he is both a murderer on the run and an innocent. The description of his patricide "Dead like a ripe mango" should be enough to turn any girl’s head and soon, not only is Peggy in love but so are a couple of giggling schoolgirls and Joy Richardson’s hilarious Mama Benin, a lecherous voodoo priestess.

Soon, the whole place is awash with rumours and admiration. Seemingly the only thing that can stop our hero in his tracks is the local policeman who never visits the village. Either that or Danny John Jules playing a horribly bloodied father - a cutlass victim returned from the grave.

After a fight or two and a view of the fickleness of the lovely Peggy, father and son eventually bury the cutlass and, miraculously, the village’s residents all attain a new level of wisdom.

Nicolas Kent’s production always maintains pace and there is plenty of humour, particularly when the alcohol is flowing. This is a fine finale to what has been a very interesting autumn season at the Tricycle, following Irish and Jewish classics.

Despite a recent TheatreVOICE debate, reported in the Daily Telegraph, it is hard to believe that there is not a disproportionately small amount of black drama to be seen in London. It is therefore very pleasing that the Tricycle is working so hard to ensure that this changes forever, as this play is followed by the world premiere of One Under by Winsome Pinnock."

Philip Fisher

"This is the play Kent staged as the Tricycle ’s new boy 20 years ago, and again 10 years down the line; so this is an anniversary revival.  Of late, however, the Tricycle has only consolidated its local and international reputation.  Onwards and upwards: the past six years - from The Colour of Justice, to Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom - have been its most remarkable.

By comparison with these, and the many strong Afro-Caribbean plays seen over the past 15 years, The Playboy of the West Indies feels charming, funny, harmless".

"A Trinidadian adaptation of J. M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, the plot, the charm, the provincial satire are close to the original, and the substitution of Trindadian dialect is well done.  Kent’s actors find all the local music in the language".

"Every performance here is good.  In the central role of Peggy, Sharon Duncan-Brewster is the player who most keenly catches the music of the play"

Alastair Macaulay

"From Mayo to Mayaro, a shining transplant.

Kilburn’s Tricycle Theatre, focusing on work for its Black and Irish communities, scores a double-hit in reviving Mustapha Matura’s transplant of J M Synge from rural Ireland c1907 to mid-century Trinidad. First seen 20 years ago (and revived at the Trike 10 years after: pattern or tradition?) it retains its comic energy with the latest generation of British Black actors at least as strong as their predecessors.

Being unkind, you could say Matura made a good play out of a great one. But if he doesn’t achieve the poetic intensity of Synge’s language, he has its breadth; contrast young Peggy dreaming of a happier life with the fascinating patricide who comes to her father’s tavern against the forthrightness of the experienced Mama Benin.

As Matura says, English colonialism links Ireland and Trinidad; Peggy’s scorn for her witless suitor Stanley (a gangling, awkward Ben Bennett) is expressed by calling him an English gentleman. Fussing with collar and tie, he’s a contrast to the ‘blood and magic’ she finds in Ken, proudly bare-chested as he throws down his new shirt in defiant rejection of the fickle villagers.

Though politics make occasional appearances, the action mainly shows life bursting through the stifling forces of age, conformity – and self-interest. Mama Benin might be a fleshy force initially trying to inveigle Ken into her bed, but once she gives up physical proximity (and despite her reputation for magic) she’s out for the best material bargain she can win from him. There’s a watchful as well as a wilful side to Joy Richardson’s performance.

Kobna Holdbrook-Smith’s Ken grows from fearful fugitive with an awesome new reputation through boastful exploitation of his one dread act to spine-erect, smiling confidence just as the public-opinion tide is turning.

Add Ken’s nervously impressed 2-person teenage fan club from Remi Wilson and Tracey Saunders (clutching her dress while eagerly talking to Ken), forceful male parents in Malcolm Frederick and Danny John-Jules, all on Adrianne Lobel’s colourful shack-set (suggesting Mikey and his drinking companions’ laid-back lifestyle), and Nicolas Kent’s production is as bright a spot as you could wish in midwinter."

Timothy Ramsden

"Every 10 years Nicolas Kent revives Mustapha Matura’s famous Trinidadian transposition of Synge’s 1907 Irish tragi-comedy. On its third outing, the show remains as lively, ebullient and funny as ever: if anything, it is a shade too genial, missing some of the sombre undertones of Synge’s original masterpiece. What is astonishing is how closely Matura follows Synge’s plot. We may be in a Trinidad rum shop rather than a Mayo shebeen, but the hero, Ken, is a fugitive who finds that his presumed parricide endows him with unexpected sexual charisma.

Local girls ply him with fresh-water oysters and molasses and an antique voodoo woman sinks her claws into him. But the heart of the play lies in the joint transformation of Ken from nervous wimp into conquering hero and of Peggy, who runs her father ’s rum shop, from sharp-tongued sourpuss into adoring lover.

As comedy, Matura’s version is hard to fault: he keeps all Synge’s surprise entrances and adds to them his own 1950 period texture and joyous Creole dialogue, with its references to "washicongs" (plimsolls), "totie" (penis), and "Basil de Boobalee" (a dummy). The main difference between Matura and Synge is that in the latter you feel women are perennial victims and that Pegeen, after her moment of self-discovery, is doomed to derelict solitude; but that itself may be a comment on the cultural gap between mournful County Mayo and life-loving Trinidad.

Even if the tragedy is short-changed, the performances in Kent’s revival are a delight. Sharon Duncan-Brewster, salaciously licking the sweat off her hero’s bare torso, captures the blossoming sensuality of the oppressed Peggy. And Kobna Holdbrook-Smith’s Ken has such beguiling innocence that even when he tells Peggy he feels closer to her than anybody - "man, woman or dog " - he makes it sound like a compliment

Two supporting performances also have abundant, extra-textual life. Joy Richardson turns Mama Benin, the old obeah woman, into a figure of quivering concupiscence. And Ben Bennett makes Peggy’s intended fiancé a wonderfully nerdish figure.

Adrianne Lobel’s set also adds much to the event by artfully evoking a Trinidad where poverty and paradise exist in ironic proximity."

Michael Billington

"MUSTAPHA MATURA’s relocation of Synge’s Playboy of the Western World was staged at the Tricycle in 1984, got a revival there in 1994, is at the same address right now, and, assuming nobody nukes Kilburn in the interim, will doubtless get another showing in 2014. And, really, why not? Once you get accustomed to the West Indian accents, which are as thick and exotic as the local tulum or coconut-and-molasses, you’re in no doubt that this is a refreshingly good-natured show.

Of course, it’s questionable if it should be such fun. The original producer of Synge’s play described it as "anger in excelsis", and its first production, which had its rawly realistic moments, provoked its audience to displays of riotous fury in response. There’s no underrating the offence that was given to the patriotic by the play’s portrait of a rural outback in which the peasants, and especially the peasant women, are so impressed by a young man’s claim to have killed his father that they fete him as a Celtic Achilles.

No such seriousness underlies Matura’s play or Nicolas Kent’s production. Indeed, there are several ways in which 1950s Trinidad fits the story less well than 1904 Kerry. In particular, a sense of the paganism lurking beneath Christianity and subverting orthodox ethics is missing. For Synge’s rustics, the murder of a father is a blow against patriarchy, the priesthood and all they find oppressive.

In this West Indian fishing village it has no such justification or force. Matura can get a bit confusing at moments when their morality, immorality or amorality becomes an issue, and certainly downplays the sheer callousness on show in the original.

Still, he brings an enjoyably wry glee to his tale. You can see why Sharon Duncan-Brewster’s haughty Peggy, who like Synge’s Pegeen looks after the local bar, resists a "good" marriage to Ben Bennett’s wimpish Stanley and is attracted by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith’s Ken, who has rippling muscles and brags of patricide. You’ll certainly laugh at the moment when his father, Danny John-Jules’s belligerent Mac, reacts to a second offstage death-blow by crawling back through the door like some bloodied male Fury bent on slaughter.

And, as often with Matura, you’ll relish the evocation of a run-down but resilient community: the ageing rum-drinkers, the chattering, giggling girls, the droll language, and Joy Richardson as a commanding old bat in beads, bangles and an orange dress that looks as if it’s been worn for two centuries. Isn’t it time that other work by this dramatist — As Time Goes By, maybe, or Play Mas — was resurrected too?"

Benedict Nightingale

"Mustapha Matura’s marvellous adaptation, Playboy of the West Indies, which transfers the action from County Mayo to the fishing village of Mayaro in the dramatist’s native Trinidad in 1950, proves as sweet and luscious as a ripe mango.

Though Matura closely follows Synge’s plot and characters, every line has been rendered into the tangy, expressive Trinidadian English of the 1950s.  It’s not always easy to catch every word but the sense is clear in Nicolas Kent’s wonderfully acted, warm-hearted production."

"It was Kent who originally commissioned Matura’s adaptation of Synge’s play in 1984, and now he is staging his fifth production of the piece to celebrate the work’s 20th anniversary.  It is hard to imagine how the show could be improved upon.

There are passages that have a delightfully garrulous inconsequentiality about them, but there are also scenes of wild laughter, warm and tender love, sudden violence and grief.  The whole evening feels astonishingly fresh and alive.

Adrianne Lobel has come up with a lovely design for the bar, with its wooden walls, corrugated iron roof, old advertisements for players and Oxo and a view of the palms on the beach.  And there isn’t a weak performance among the company, with even the smallest roles coming to vivid life.

Sharon Duncan-Brewster gives a deliciously spirited, sexy performance as Peggy, gamely coping not only with her rum-swigging clientele but also with her ineffably wet nerd of a fiance, hilariously played by Ben Bennett."

"Kobna Holdbrook-Smith touchingly shows how the oppressed and fearful farmer’s son gains in confidence and machismo as a result of his tale of murderous derring-do.  And there are richly comic performances from Malcolm Frederick, Larrington Walker and Shango Baku as a trio of beautifully observed drunks, Joy Richardson as the oversexed local voodoo specialist, and Danny John-Jules as the father who keeps returning from the dead.

In grey, pinched december Britian, this riotous and generous show is almost as welcome as a holiday in the Caribbean, and the perfect choice for those seeking a festive alternative to panto."

Charles Spencer

"This 20th anniversary revival for Mustapha Matura’s cheeky Caribbean version of JM Synge’s riot-inducing Irish classic shows the play is ageing well.  First directed at the Oxford Playhouse by Nicolas Kent, now the powerhouse behind the Tricycle’s impressive theatrical output, it ditches the bleaker aspects for a more knockabout approach."

"The cast is uniformly excellent - particularly Sharon Duncan-Brewster as Peggy, the rum shop owner’s daughter so smitten by Ken she ditches her fiance, and Malcolm Frederick as her father Mikey, the only one to temper the hero-worsjip of the stranger.  Together with an evocative set from Adrianne Lobel and fast-paced, assured direction from Kent, they make this production as warming as a shot of rum."

Siobhan Murphy

"It is 20 years since Playboy of the West Indies first lit up the Tricycle stage with its exuberant energy, and the rum-fuelled warmth of this revival provides the perfect antidote to bleak winter evenings.

As the title suggests, JM Synge’s 1907 Irish classic The Playboy of the Western World has taken a long boat ride.  Playwright Mustapha Matura has transposed the action - yet remained utterly faithful to the story - from the wilds of County Mayo to an equally remote rural village in 1950s Trinidad, a community that lives for rum shorts and tall stories.

It is here that imperious young Peggy works in her father’s liquor shack cum general store, and we intuit straight away from Adrianne Lobel’s attractive, evocative set of painted wooden slats topped by palm trees that Peggy’s world is convivial yet claustrophobic."

Fiona Mountford

"West Indian English is so exotic that it can render attempted patricide a cause for laughter.

That was certainly the case last night when the fringy Tricycle revived a heavily-accented Trinidadian adaptation of JM Synge’s Irish nationalist play A Playboy of the Western World.

I suppose you could call Playboy of the West Indies a black comedy.

All the actors - and what a good cast too - are black.  The laid back attitudes and the rich West Indian words are thoroughly rum-soaked and island balmy.

The action is set in a wood-shuttered boozer run capably by the owner’s pretty daughter Peggy (Sharon Duncan-Brewster).  She ie engaged to a timid bore called Stanley (Ben Bennett, as wet as Private Pike off Dad’s Army)."

"The theatre provides a small glossary of Caribbean terms, such as ’packoti house’ for brothel and ’fire one’ for have a drink.  There’s plenty of the latter.  I have not seen a better pair of stage drunks than Larrington Walker and Shango Baku as two of the rum shop’s regulars.

Miss Duncan-Brewster is lovely as Peggy weighs starchy sense against her urges.

Remi Wilson and Tracey Saunders are enchanting as two girls who also lust for a bad man."

Quentin Letts

"Mustapha Matura is now almost a forgotten name but in the 1970s and 1980s he was everywhere. Co-founder of Black Theatre Co-operative (now Nitro), he was also a forerunner of TV comedy, as adept at satirising his own community in series like No Problem! as he was at serious exploration of the legacy of colonialism on stage. This adaptation of J M Synge’s Irish classic, The Playboy of the Western World remains one of his most popular and in Nicolas Kent’s joyous co-Tricycle and Nottingham Playhouse Theatre revival, it’s easy to see why.

Transposed to Trinidad (Matura’s own birthplace) circa 1950, there is a positively rhapsodic feel to the language as Matura, matching Synge’s lyricism, captures the sounds, and effects of the Caribbean upon his characters.

In an environment inhibited by poverty and backwardness, there is nonetheless a recaptured pride here and an extraordinary beauty attained in the stolen moments of love expressed between Kobna Holdbrook-Smith’s struggling `playboy’, Ken – the young stranger whose reported killing of his father has suddenly endowed him with a reputation he could never have imagined – and Sharon Duncan-Brewster’s feisty Peggy, the daughter of the local bar-owner.

But it is only for a moment. Reality breaks in, albeit of a tragic-comic variety. And that is still the wonderful thing about Matura’s Playboy as with Synge’s - its interweaving of the light-hearted and horrific (you can see where Martin McDonagh first got his ideas) , fantasy with honesty and gullibility against exposure of the cult of the killer-hero.

In some ways that exposure resonates even more strongly here than in the original. As Mac, Ken’s supposedly dead father staggers in once again (cut down at least twice by his bullied, desperate son, he refuses to die), Ken, recently feted by the villagers for his reggata prowess is seen, trussed up as if for a lynching by the self-same people. Murder, patricide has suddenly become, in Peggy’s words, `that, nasty, dirty thing out there.’

A vivid moment in a production of many, Adrianne Lobel’s wooden lean-to shebeen takes us to the heart of a community in which Malcolm Fredericks’ rum-soaked patriarch, Mikey, presides with bombastic serenity over a gloriously individualised ensemble from Ben Bennett’s spineless but aspiring suitor, Stanley, to Shango Baku and Larrington Walker’s couple of old soaks, from Joy Richardson’s lascivious obeah woman, Mama Benin to Remi Wilson and Tracey Saunders’ goggle-eyed young hero-worshippers. They don’t come better. Perfect alternative Christmas fare."

Carole Woddis