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Winsome Pinnock tells a good backstory. This is a deft tool because Pinnock’s plays are built on a foundation of big histories. Combining a historical backstory with a lineup of fierce female characters, Pinnock, in The Authenticator, pointedly addresses the popular saying “history is written by the victors”. That there are victors in relation to historicity tells us that there are human costs to telling a story. Every human story has different perspectives, in essence a story of winners and losers, where the loser’s perspective never surfaces. The worst losers historically, we know, have been disenfranchised black women. It is these black women, and their stories within the history of slavery and colonialism, that Pinnock seeks to recompense in her plays. 

A backstory of academia belies the feistiness of the all-female cast of The Authenticator. Each character displays a degree of feistiness in her unique way. All the actors were stellar and their dialogue flowed seamlessly holding your attention. Rakie Ayola as Abi the Nigerian senior academic and Sylvestra Le Touzel as Fenella (Fen) Hartford, both veterans of stage and screen, deliver commanding performances with their characters. The comedy of Fen channelled by Le Touzel glided nicely against the dignity and restraint of Abi played with precision by Ayola.

The central character Marva, played by Cherrelle Skeete, starts off demure, and unmistakably to the audience, morphs into fierceness. A serendipitous irony was seeing Skeete on stage just after watching her play an MI5 heavy in the Apple TV UK hit series Slow Horses, with a cast led by Kristin Scott Thomas and Gary Oldman. Playing an MI5 heavy opposite Oldman and then a demure academic shows Skeete’s range as an actor. All three characters had a backstory of being chameleons, however it was Skeete who got to morph on stage before the audience.

The fourth character of the play was the set. Designed by Jon Bauser, the set morphed right before our eyes, just like the characters it supported. The metamorphosis gave the set the apt air of a spooky stately home with physical, metaphysical and historical secrets. 

In The Authenticator Pinnock continues her theme of a pedestalled British history poisoned by the legacy of slavery, that she portrayed in Rockets and Blue Lights. Rockets and Blue Lights was also staged at the Dorfman Theatre, National Theatre shortly after the Covid lockdown. The Authenticator presents Pinnock’s ingenuity in showing how a horrible history can come full circle and give a voice to the historically voiceless. Furthermore, Pinnock the suggests creative forms reparation can take. 

The Authenticator is on at the National Theatre, South Bank until 9 May 2026.