Above Charles Allen as Bert and Albert Mwangi as Kenneth in PRIMARY TRUST
The Ensemble Theatre’s latest production is the Australian premiere production of Afro American playwright Eboni Booth’s 2023 play PRIMARY TRUST which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2024.
In Booth’s PRIMARY TRUST, a contemporary drama, is set in the fictitious town of Cranberry Lake in New York in the 1990s. The main character Kenneth is a very insecure man in his late thirties in a suburban town in the hurly burly of New York.
His life is thrown a big curve ball when he loses the job he loves working in a small bookstore where he has been working for the latest fifteen years. The owner announces his retirement, signifying the closure of the bookstore.
Kenneth confides the news to his best friend Bert who assures him that he will be ok. There’s just one hitch, Bert isn’t real. He is Kenneth’s imaginary friend. He doesn’t have any ‘real’ friends.
Kenneth has no alternative but to forge on. He manages to find a job with a local bank by the name of Primary Trust – hence the show’s title. He manages to negotiate the first few clients he sees at the counter, bluffing his way through, but will he able to keep it going? Will he be able to hold down his job? What is going to happen to Bert?
Darren Yap’s production serves the play well. The staging is excellent. The centre down stage area is reserved for the Tiki bar Wallys which is Kenneth’s haunt. Various waitresses come in and out of the nightclub with a hilariously wide range of attitudes and expressions. When the nightclub scenes finish, the doors are neatly closed, and the main stage action continues.
There is good use of the left and right side stage areas/wings in James Browne’s set which also features, above the main stage area, a series of doors indicating the entrance doors to various apartments around Cranberry, reminding one of American folk legend Pete Seeger’s song Little Boxes.
There is a disconcerting, unsettling undertone/undertow, dissonance in Verity Hampson’s lighting design and co-designers Max Lambert and Roger Lock’s soundscape.
The performances were all good. As a sidenote it was great to see three of the four performers are black, as is the playwright.
Albert Mwangi gave a good performance as the fragile, extra vulnerable Kenneth. Charles Allen gave a touching performance as Kenneth’s gentle, wistful confidant and mentor.
My two favourite performances were by the two actors who played multiple roles, and received excellent reactions from the audience, especially in the play’s lighter moments.
Veteran performer Peter Kowitz played a super cool muso, an elderly bookshop owner, a cranky restaurant owner, and primarily Clay, a kindly bank manager who sees past Kenneth’s obvious difficulties and employs him.
Angela Mahlatjie’s is high energy, vivacious and brilliant, played a very temperamental, theatrical waiter, and a variety of customers who turn up at Primary Trust’s front counter, and Kenneth has to help. And then there is her poignant performance in her main role as waitress Corrina who befriends Kenneth. Hopefully we will be seeing more of Mahlatjie on Sydney’s main stages.
This play’s central theme is that a deep level of kindness can be found even for the most vulnerable in society.
This is a heartfelt, touching Ensemble experience.
Eboni Booth’s PRIMARY TRUST opened at the Ensemble Theatre, 78 McDougall Street, Kirribilli on the 24th June and is playing till the 12th July 2025.
Production photography by Prudence Upton
