Appropriately for a play in which seven of the eight characters are prone to quote from the Bible, Perseverance Drive is thematically a case of old wine in new bottles. Traditional elements of early-twentieth-century English drama – a family reunited for a funeral, the reading of a will with a twist, comedy clerics – are turned to the service of an emergent twenty-first-century strain of British playwrighting: the stories of black history.Unusually – and, to some, contentiously – the author of Perseverance Drive, Robin Soans, is white, although he has a record of translating to the stage non-personal experience in verbatim plays such as Talking to Terrorists and The Arab-Israeli Cookbook. His latest play began as another biographical enterprise – talking to a