Ilford Boy

Ilford Boy follows a mixed-race teenager growing up in the 1990s in a household that is coming apart faster than he can keep track of. Ted is depressed, funny about it, and largely on his own — until Patrick turns up and starts showing him that other kinds of life are available.

Patrick brings art, clothes, an unembarrassed love of show tunes and a way of being in the world that Ted has never seen up close. What grows between them is a chosen family, built out of taste as much as affection, and set against the one Ted was born into. Danny Lee Wynter's play is about the ghosts people carry out of childhood, and about who happens to turn up in time to make a difference.

This is a new play receiving its first production. It suits audiences who want contemporary writing about class, race and growing up that is funny well before it is sad, and it works best live, where a small room and a young man talking straight into it is the whole point of the form.