One senses that actors of colour in the UK are intimately familiar with the “look of noble forebearance.”
This grew on me. The beginning was about as on-the-nose as you would expect a Broadway-intended play from the 1970s about decolonization to be. Positions are stated, views are expressed. I think of this as margin-asterisk drama, intended for the student to note when the Important Exchange (ECONOMICS) has occurred. There’s even a character named “Torvald,” which--spoiler alert--suggests something (IBSEN) might be awry in his house. I left at interval thinking that Hansberry’s mode of household drama was ill-suited to writing this sort of play.
The second half convinced me otherwise. Partially this was just due to great NT production. In particular, I remember one dutiful speech from a world-weary foreign doctor made electric by a supernumerary African maid sweeping loudly--it echoed through the theatre--on the side. But Hansberry’s canny use of the dynamics of the household gave the play the feel of the exploration of a united psychology and an account of the dissolving of a white settler colony. The family elements meant that certain ties within the characters remained powerful even after they were broken--this despite an ending that was a bit playwriting 101 (HE STABS HIS BROTHER). In the end, the play (and this production) suggest, the end of the house may mean the end of our ability to put a representation of a society onstage; what follows is necessary--this house needed to burn down--but also past what can comfortably be put on stage.
This play mostly exceeded its time, a neat trick for anything performed during the 1970s (or, one supposes, any time, ever.) I will confess that I never warmed to the silent spirit of pan-African female something, who strode slowly and nakedly about the stage, waiting to cuddle the protagonist away from his family in England--although she represents a very deliberate creation on Hansberry’s part, and (the more that I think about it) tracks intriguingly with the play’s refusal to show anything past what the house-centric drama could comfortably realize. I like talky plays, and even I felt myself drifting at points--or not so much drifting as wanting to skim, guessing what was going to be said next. Of course that resistance to skipping is one strength of the debate play in performance. I don’t know if I could recommend this in the same way without the universally interesting performances--although I’d probably still rather be one of the people who get to speak, rather than the mostly-naked sprite of the unrealized.
The production was even willing to play slightly lame elements of the script as lame. The American journalist here to write the “truth” of the situation is played as broad, dim, and kind of right-on-brother politically. I think the actor kind of nailed this, bounding like Tigger over the set rather than acting like an adult. And by having everyone tell him, endlessly, that he needed to “write the truth” of the situation--a truth he seems unable even to have gotten near--the play accorded powers to what the theater itself can add to journalistic descriptions of decolonization. Even if it needed to come to an end, the arrangement that the play first shows on stage--with a native chorus watching the events--seemed on certain levels preferable, or at least more stable, to the implied violence that follows.
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