Mom, How Did You Meet the Beatles? review – moving account of a Black female playwright in 60s London

Minerva, Chichester
Rakie Ayola excels as Adrienne Kennedy, whose John Lennon play was taken up by Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre while she was sidelined, in this crystal-clear production of her autobiographical tale

By the mid-60s, Adrienne Kennedy (b.1931) had won her first Obie award, for Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964), while her drama The Owl Answers was being performed at the Theatre de Lys in New York. A producer approached her: “What do you want to write?” Kennedy’s answer led to a trip to London with her younger son, Adam, aged about 10. She had replied: “A play [based on] John Lennon’s nonsense writings.”

Mom, How Did You Meet the Beatles? (2008) tells the story of how Kennedy’s The Lennon Play: In His Own Write (1967) came to be staged – and its author relegated to its sidelines. Co-written by Adrienne and Adam, Mom, How Did You Meet the Beatles? records a conversation mother and son had some four decades later, prompted by the question that became its title.

Mom, How Did You Meet the Beatles? is at the Minerva, Chichester, until 8 July