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Making the work invisible: Trish Cooke on Alterations

Alterations – which will be available to stream on the National Theatre At Home platform from 12 August – is a seminal work by RLF Fellow Michael Abbensetts (1938 – 2016). Set in a tailor’s shop and focusing on the Guyanese experience of 1970s London, the play illuminates the aspirations and sacrifices of the Windrush generation. When the National Theatre staged Lynette Linton’s Alterations earlier this year, another RLF Fellow, Trish Cooke, was invited to work on the adaptation.

This Windrush Day, Trish tells us about working on Alterations and what it’s like to develop another writers’ work.

In September 2024, director Lynette Linton – who I had previously worked with at the Bush theatre – asked if I would be interested in working with her on a new production of Michael Abbensetts’ play Alterations for the National Theatre. Lynette had selected Alterations from the Black Plays Archives (BPA), an online catalogue of the first professional production in the UK of plays written by Black British, African and Caribbean playwrights.

At that time, I had heard of Michael Abbensetts but I did not know the play. Abbensetts was a Guyana-born British writer. His debut play Sweet Talk was performed in 1973 and Alterations was written in 1978, the same year Abbensetts’ drama series Empire Road, the first to be conceived and written for a Black cast about the British Caribbean experience, aired.

Once I had read Alterations I knew it was something I wanted to be involved in, as it contained themes I had explored in my own early playwriting with characters from the Windrush Generation. I met with Lynette and Nina Steiger, Head of Play Development at the National, to establish my role, going through the existing script. They wanted me to work on characters, rework and add scenes and partial scenes, tweak and add new dialogue, make some cuts, mark the main character Walker’s crisis, and create more dramatic conflict. We agreed that my credit should be Additional Material by Trish Cooke and that my main focus should be on Darlene (Walker’s wife, the only female character in the play). She needed to have some agency. I also needed to work on Mr Nat, the Jewish tailor, and give his character more depth. We could also see that, having been written in the 70s, the play needed updating to work for an audience today. Alterations was first performed at the New End Theatre in Hampstead which had a seating capacity of 80. This time the play was to be staged at the National Theatre’s 890 seater Lyttelton. It was clear we would have to expand some of the themes to make the play work on a much larger stage.

The challenge for me was to respect what Abbensetts had written from the perspective of a West Indian man of that time and not lose the authenticity of that world, and at the same time allow the voice of Darlene to be heard.

Cherrelle Skeete as Darlene Holt in Alterations at the National Theatre. Photo by Marc Brenner.

So I set to work. In its original form the male characters in Alterations were strong but the voice of Darlene was getting lost. I wanted to know who she was. I wanted to create a woman of that time who knew how to survive whilst still showing her strength, vulnerability and resilience. I had plenty of references to draw from – my mother, my aunts, my friends’ mothers – all of whom had travelled from the Caribbean in the Windrush years, all of them strong women, and I did not want to let them down. Cherrelle Skeete had already been cast as Darlene, and I knew she could bring the gentle fierceness that was required. The challenge for me was to respect what Abbensetts had written from the perspective of a West Indian man of that time and not lose the authenticity of that world, and at the same time allow the voice of Darlene to be heard. Once I started working on Darlene’s character the changes I made impacted on characters such as Walker, Horace and Mr Nat and as I unpicked and unravelled the script, I was able to create back stories. This helped me integrate the changes successfully and build the dramatic tension between the characters.

For my work on Mr Nat, I had to do a different type of research. Nina introduced me to Ilana Epstein, Lecturer and Educator of Jewish history, and I spoke to Jewish friends about their family history. I asked lots of questions to get to the core of Mr Nat’s character and from there I was able to find something that connected Walker and Mr Nat as men. Both were creating a legacy for future generations, and despite what it looked like from the outside, their families mattered to them. I was able to explore this by introducing more of Mr Nat’s personal story and historical background. Amplifying this, alongside the stories of Darlene, Walker and their daughter Janet, and Walker’s colleague Buster and his wife Hortense having a baby, added further to the theme of legacy. This is something that Lynette was keen to shine a light on in the transition scenes.

Colin Mace as Mr Nat in Alterations at the National Theatre. Photo by Marc Brenner.

My first draft was delivered on 20 November. Following that, we had a two-day workshop with the actors in December. Hearing the script with the additional material out loud, and taking part in the discussions that followed, was very useful. From there I could implement any new thoughts that had come up and work them through in the next draft. I had a couple of days after the workshop to deliver this draft, which was sent to the Abbensetts Estate to be approved before rehearsals began in January. As Lynette and the actors worked on the play, and the actors began to embody the characters, more tweaks were made on the script throughout the rehearsal period. I attended some rehearsals, run-throughs, previews and gave feedback and notes through Lynette, Nina, and Ola Animashawun, National Theatre Associate and Connections Dramaturg. The final production was an hour and 55 minutes, with no interval. Michael’s original script had been approximately 65 minutes long.

Reflecting on my work, I would say my biggest challenge was making the work I did on the script invisible, as if the script was coming from one voice, and for the alterations to Alterations to be seamless.

The best feedback I got was when people acknowledged that any changes that had been made blended in to the original. We had such a brilliant cast and creatives, with some fantastic audiences and rave reviews. The Telegraph called it a “revelatory work”, London Theatre hailed it as “glorious” and the Evening Standard concluded: “Cooke and Linton don’t just revive this finely tailored play. They make it burst at the seams.”

The success of this play highlights the importance of the Black Plays Archive and why more plays from the archive should have revivals. With Donald Trump’s administration and the attempts at erasing Black history, it is even more important today that stories from a Black perspective are archived and produced. If audiences are only allowed to see stories from one lense, then this is a limited and distorted view of the world. Having new productions of plays like Alterations from the BPA gives us an opportunity to explore Black history with a new audience and new creatives, and this can only aid in creating a brighter, more promising future. Without the BPA many of our classics will be lost.

You can find out more about the Black Plays Archive here. Trish Cooke’s entry in the Black Plays Archive is here.

This article originally appeared on our Substack.

All photography, including cover photo, by Marc Brenner for the National Theatre.

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