Showing @ Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh until Sat 25 Feb

Culture, history, language, family – they make us who we are but should they define us? Writer Tawona Sitholé’s Zimbabwean drama takes a wry and honest look at the pulls of culture and family, and gives us a play that doesn’t sentimentalise ideas of lost wisdom or demonise the West. Instead, it speaks of the complications and confusions of the modern world where heritage takes its place alongside consumerism and the present still pays its dues to the past.

Mwana (Denver Isaac) is the family’s golden boy following in his doctor father’s footsteps returning home from university for his brother’s wedding; trailing the culture of Glasgow via Compton – baggy trousers and high top trainers as well as Kirsten (Mairi Philips) his new white girlfriend and a secret that will pull his family apart.

Whilst there’s plenty of drama and tension in this story, it’s handled with a deftness of touch by Sitholé and director Shabina Aslam. The clash between both Mwana’s laid-back western, nightclubbing lifestyle and his parents’ traditional but social climbing attitudes is done without any didacticism; and the changes in Zimbabwe itself are beautifully personified by Nicola Gardner as Mwana’s class-concious mother.

Gardner’s performance typifies the quality on offer throughout the cast although if one has to pick a stand out then its the dignified and decent Joe, Mwana’s brother underplayed to perfection by Moses Hardwick. The only false note is struck by Mairi Philips’s Kirsten. Philips gives a fine performance but the role is underwritten and by making her character an anthropology PhD student, her cultural clumsiness becomes more unbelievable as the show goes on.

There have been deeper and more profound takes on the same subject but Ankur Productions‘ show is a timely and well crafted view of our cultural confusion in the age of globalisation. With it’s mix of audiovisuals and witty dialogue, it also provides a fresh view on Zimbabwe itself from the desperate bleakness of the new reports.