Leave to Remain play review: Bloc Party frontman Kele Okereke brings sparkle to this relationship drama

Bloc Party frontman Kele Okereke and co-star Matt Jones play a pair of troubled young lovers in this touching, physically impressive play that dwells far less on Brexit than its title suggests.

If follows smitten couple Obi and Alex who, after 10 months together, risk being parted when Alex’s company posts him to the Middle East. They decide marriage is the best option to keep American Alex in the UK, but while his parents are easy-going, Obi’s are strict Roman Catholics with a domineering patriarch desperate to impress the local pastor by discrediting his son’s same-sex marriage.

The meat of the play is getting to know the leads and the intriguing inner workings of their families, with an interconnected mosaic of plots and subplots, all tied to the young lovers, which build to a satisfying climax.

Despite the serious subject matter, Leave to Remain is littered with fantastic jokes. Cross-cultural fauxs pas are used to good effect throughout, providing both tension and laughs. Obi’s reserved, conservative father Kenneth – brilliantly played by Cornell S John – has many of the show’s best lines, his performance skilfully navigating the line between bathos and pathos.

Okereke’s influence on the soundtrack is unmistakable, its pulsating rhythms falling somewhere between his own work and Paul Simon’s Graceland. Some of the standout sequences occur when the beats are matched to on-stage choreography, resulting in some pleasing physical theatre that breathes life into the disco scenes and group therapy classes.

The naming of the play is questionable, with Brexit just one plot point among many. And thank goodness, because the real story behind this play is far more interesting.