“Outrage, scandal, and sarcasm – delicious, delicious sarcasm.” That’s how the directorial team sums up By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, and if that doesn’t intrigue you, nothing will. This play, a razor-sharp satire by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lynn Nottage, takes the audience on a dizzying journey from 1930s Hollywood to a 21st-century academic symposium, unravelling questions of race, representation, and the stories we tell about the past. But don’t expect just a solemn history lesson: this show is “bright, punchy, and hilarious.”

The creative team behind this production knew they had something special on their hands. “I pitched this show because I wanted something that centred Black stories,” says producer Nadia Hussein. “But I also wanted it to be fun. This is a play about race that doesn’t feel like it’s patting itself on the back. It’s smart, subversive, and just a little bit chaotic.” The production team leaned into that chaotic energy, crafting a show that plays with time, genre, and expectations.

“This is a play about race that doesn’t feel like it’s patting itself on the back”

Set in Hollywood’s Golden Age, the first act follows the ambitious Vera Stark (Idara James), a Black maid with dreams of stardom, navigating an industry that only sees her as a supporting character. Fast forward to the second half and we’re in the 21st century, watching a panel of academics dissect Vera’s legacy with all the self-importance and intellectual posturing of a Cambridge supervision. “We told the actors: picture your supervision partner saying something insane, but they’re 100% convinced they’re right. That’s the energy we want,” Nadia explains.

But it’s not just the plot that’s ‘delicious’; the entire mise-en-scène has been carefully crafted. To bring the era-hopping story to life, the set had to be both dynamic and functional. “The spaces in this play are so distinct,” Nadia says. “We’ve got Gloria’s lavish 1930s living room, the Brad Donovan talk show in the 70s, and an academic panel in the 2000s. We needed a design that could shift seamlessly between them.” Enter layered set pieces, a clever use of house tabs, and even a particularly glamourous chandelier. “We spent a ridiculous amount of the budget on it,” she confesses. “No regrets.” Music plays an equally vital role, acting as a bridge across decades. The show starts with smooth 1930s jazz, shifts into funk, and lands in modern hip-hop. “We didn’t just pick period-accurate songs, we traced the lineage of Black music,” says the sound designer Sinclair. “The blues feeds into funk, which gets sampled in hip-hop. The play is about how history echoes, and the music reflects that.”

“The roles for Black actors here are limited, and the same people tend to get cast over and over […] We wanted to break that cycle”

All of these considered, the predominant thing one is sure to take away from the play is just how funny it is. The humour in Vera Stark is both outrageous and piercing, walking a fine line between satire and slapstick. “The play is full of moments where you laugh, then think: ‘Wait, why was that funny?’” says assistant director India Thornhill. “We’ve leaned into that discomfort, making sure act two lands just as well as act one. A lot of productions struggle with the shift, but we wanted to highlight how both acts are funny – just in different ways.” One of the show’s biggest challenges? Pushing the actors to go bigger. “If you think you’ve gone too far, you haven’t gone far enough,” says director Ivan Alexei Ampiah. “This play doesn’t do subtlety. It throws everything at the audience, then winks at them and says, ‘What do you think of that?’”

This isn’t just a play, it’s a moment for Cambridge theatre. “We made a conscious decision to cast new faces,” says Nadia. “The roles for Black actors here are limited, and the same people tend to get cast over and over. We wanted to break that cycle.” This show is an introduction not just to Vera Stark, but a whole new wave of talent.

Audiences should expect the unexpected. There are film sequences woven into the stage action, wigs that transform characters before your eyes, and even a deliberately ridiculous monologue that, according to the directors, “will have us muzzling ourselves to stop from laughing in the auditorium.”

At its heart, By the Way, Meet Vera Stark is a show that forces you to think about memory; whose stories get told, who gets to tell them, and how we fill in the gaps. “Act one shows you what happened,” explains India. “Act two shows you six different versions of it. And then the play turns to you and asks – what do you remember?”

This is theatre that entertains, challenges, and lingers in your mind long after the final bow. Miss it, and you’ll be missing something special.

‘By the Way, Meet Vera Stark’ is showing at the ADC Theatre from Tuesday 4 until Saturday 8 March, at 7:45pm.

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