The Authenticator review – echoes of Sherlock Holmes as thriller takes on toxic legacies with lightness of touch

Comedy infuses Winsome Pinnock’s disarming but ebullient drama about two Black academics who are given the job of authenticating the diaries of an enslaver

You don’t imagine many laughs in a story about enslavement legacies and erased Black histories. But comedy infuses Winsome Pinnock’s ebullient drama about two Black academics who are given the job of authenticating a cache of 18th-century diaries written by an enslaver.

Fen (short for Fenella, played by Sylvestra Le Touzel), is a direct descendant of Henry Harford, now managing his illustrious country estate, and it is she who finds the diaries that catalogued life on his Jamaican farm run by enslaved people. She gives Abi (Rakie Ayola) and Marva (Cherrelle Skeete) full rein of the diaries, so that they can authenticate them for posterity. Harford showed every sign of having been an abolitionist, she says in mitigation, although Abi and Marva’s investigations turn up disturbing evidence of his brutality in Jamaica.

Those two women have a tutor-pupil relationship that seems like a twist on Holmes and Watson, and through whom Pinnock deftly captures the intersections of class and race: Abi is from a privileged, Oxford-educated background, of Nigerian descent, whose family history has its own complicit connections with the slave trade. Marva is Abi’s mentee, a bright young working-class woman whose mysteriously disappeared grandfather had a personal history intertwined with the Harfords.

Those connections are a little too convenient, serving the flurry of plot twists and reveals that come at the end, rather like the mechanical setup to an Agatha Christie story. But you can forgive this contrivance because the humour and zesty dialogue in this play is so cleverly barbed.

And entertaining, too. Pinnock really has made this story of soiled inheritance, unrecorded Black histories and racial appropriation an enjoyable experience. Some of it is through her send-up of the haunted house drama, which takes place on designer Jon Bausor’s witty traverse set (empty gilt-edged picture frames and trapdoors that lead to the cellar’s dirty secrets). There is dimmed candle or torchlights, too, along with nervy string sounds (violin, viola, cello) to add their winks to the ghostliness.

But most of the laughs come in the satire around Fen, a tweedy do-gooder, ostensibly keen to atone for her family’s sins, but quick to let herself off the hook, it transpires. A thoroughly plummy type, she once paraded as a cockney punk at Oxford – we get a reprise of that past version of herself on one drunken night. She blames the men in her family for its historic inequities and it sounds like Knives Out, with post-colonial overtones, at times.

Through her, Pinnock also pokes mischievous fun at the aristocrats who hire out their homes for cash (a grime artist is making a video by the fountain as the authenticators arrive, and a resident ghost has been dreamed up for visitor tours to the house).

There are very real hauntings here, though. One is symbolised by the “Blackamoor statue” which has had to be stashed away following debates around colonial heritage and British statues, after George Floyd’s murder. Another is in the missing pages of the diaries, which carry suggestions of violence towards an enslaved woman called “Black Sarah”.

The production’s tone switches, the humour receding, and director Miranda Cromwell steers through these tricky moments deftly. All three performances contain verve and you laugh but still recognise the guilt, shame and buried pain of their characters.

It all courses along with a lightness of touch that works. What a disarming way to serve up important contemporary questions around investigating histories, facing up to toxic legacies and atoning – or at the very least apologising – for them.

• At the Dorfman theatre, National Theatre, London, until 9 May