The Authenticator | Daily Mail Online

Tangled theatrical thriller about passing problems between generations

Year: 2026

Watch now on National Theatre At Home

When artist Fen (Sylvestra Le Touzel) inherits her stately family pile, she finds a trove of old family diaries and brings in a pair of academics – Marva (Cherrelle Skeete) and her mentor, Abi (Rakie Ayola) – to check their authenticity and untangle her family’s tricky history when it comes to slavery. Such is the scale of the job that the two women move in to accomplish it, and it’s then that what starts out feeling like a gentle, lightly comic dig into the horrors of the past takes an altogether darker turn. Especially once they all go into the basement.

The Authenticator becomes a Gothic psychological thriller about how the actions of one generation fall on the next, however much that next generation may try to outrun them. That generational story is shaped by the bonds between the three characters in this play – they are the only characters, and they’re all linked in some way – and it’s the very opposite of a po-faced exploration of the topic. The fact that Fen spends a lot of the play sporting a Mohawk gives you some hint of that, and the story as a whole barrels forward at a decent pace, running without an interval and twisting towards its conclusion with jabs of humour to alleviate the tension. (90 minutes)