Nobody in the Martin house gets any privacy. Doors are there to hide behind, walls are there to listen through, and every room is fair game for someone to burst into mid-argument. At the centre of it is Ted, a shy, withdrawn teenager dealing with the loss of his grandmother, whose funeral opens the play. Grief sits underneath everything he does: the anger, the defensiveness, the sense of a young man who doesn’t yet know how to carry what he’s feeling. The play then weaves through time, going back to the 1980s to show how the family is shaped, and what gets passed down without anyone choosing it.
Leo Whitfield-Harris makes his stage debut as Ted, and he’s captivating. He plays the defensiveness and the awkwardness, but you can always see the vulnerable kid underneath. Lindsey Coulson’s Eileen is seen in flashback and in the moments Ted carries her with him, showing just how missed she is. She is the gravitational pull the whole family orbits around. You understand, watching those scenes, exactly what has been lost. Patrick, played by Craig Stein, arrives with style, humour and show tunes, showing Ted another side of life just as he needs it most. But Patrick’s storyline carries a real emotional weight beyond mentorship or friendship. Set against the AIDS crisis of the 1990s, his relationship with Ted becomes about visibility, prejudice, mortality and the urgency of living as yourself while you still can.
My favourite scenes were the three sisters: Tillie, Jackie and Ann. They argue, tease, interrupt and wind each other up constantly, but they’d go to war for each other. Ria Zmitrowicz’s Tillie is warm and protective, Jodie McNee’s Jackie is dry and blunt, and Charlotte Jaconelli’s Ann has her own distinct energy. If you have sisters, aunties or a mum who talks like this, you’ll recognise every word.
What I hadn’t expected was how deeply the play explores masculinity. Ken, Raj and Trevor all represent different versions of it: damaged, ambitious, passive, controlling, quietly unhappy. Through them the play shows how men can be shaped by expectation, silence and the pressure to provide, while Ted is left to work out which version of manhood he wants for himself.
Ken, Ted’s dad, played by Gershwyn Eustache Jnr, is someone Ted sees from time to time. When we first meet him he’s the suited and booted businessman, brash and distant. But through the flashbacks you see things weren’t always this way. Ryan Dawson Laight’s hair and costume design and the music set the scene perfectly — the years have changed not only his clothes, but the way he carries himself. There are quips about Thatcher’s Right to Buy, but it never becomes a history lesson. Race, class, money, sexuality, grief and hope are just in the house, in the conversations, in the people.
In Danny Lee Wynter‘s Ilford Boy, he has written something that feels like life: messy, funny and painful, sometimes all in the same scene. His characters are so specific you’ll spend the whole play recognising someone you know.
By the end it felt less like Ted’s coming-of-age story and more like a portrait of a whole family learning. Ilford Boy doesn’t tidy itself up at the end. It just lets the family be who they are, and somehow that’s enough. The best British play I’ve seen in a long while. Go and see it.
NEED TO KNOW: Ilford Boy plays at the Donmar Warehouse until 28 Nov 2026 | See listing.
