Mom, How Did You Meet the Beatles? review – an affecting memoir of a thwarted playwright

Minerva, Chichester
Rakie Ayola is superb in a story about the exploitation of a Black female playwright by the great and the greedy of London’s theatreland

It’s quite a title. Adrienne Kennedy – now a belatedly revered American playwright – impulsively came to London in 1966, young son in tow. She met John Lennon and sort of premiered a play at Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre. A fairytale becomes a devastating sliver of a fable about artistic greed.

In this short 2008 play, Kennedy recounts the events to her son and co-author Adam. Portrayed by Jack Benjamin, he strums a quietly insistent guitar and asks few but telling questions. Mostly, we’re enraptured by the superb Rakie Ayola as Adrienne, describing how a casual idea to base a play on Lennon’s nonsense poems gathers momentum when she arrives in London.