I wish we had London theatre culture in the States

Acclaimed American playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins talks to Nick Clark about black out nights and Bake Off

- MATT WRITTLE, MARC BRENNER

A DECADE ago, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins wrote a play about a high school reunion only to put it away in a drawer in frustration.

Fast forward to a recent alumni event for his own high school, and the feted American playwright learned that a 10th of his class had died in the intervening 20 years. “That is kind of an outrageous number because none of us are 40 yet. A couple from Covid, some suicides, some strange illnesses.”

And so he returned to the drawer and wrote The Comeuppance, which opens tonight at the Almeida Theatre. It feels at once a deeply personal take on friendship, mortality and the pernicious nature of memory; but it’s also a state-of-the-nation play about issues from broken politics to collapsing healthcare. Most of all, it seeks to grapple with the impact of Covid. “I thought, we haven’t had closure on what was a multi-year trauma for the world.”

When we meet, the 39-year-old — described by the New York Times as “one of [the US’s] most original and illuminating writers” — is chipper. In a knit jumper and khaki trousers, he is relaxed and quick to laugh — even as the chat veers into the morbid.

He tells me that during Covid he reconnected with people he hadn’t seen in years and was constantly surprised “at the shape of their lives when stacked against the version of them I knew” — the urge to reach out for many, he adds, was partly a “memento mori thing”, a newfound awareness of their mortality.