If I see better theatre this year, I'll be a very happy bear indeed--but I'm not hopeful. Since I've moved to the UK, the Orange Tree has been one of my most consistently happy surprises. I'm near-evangelical about it: this is a proper theatre company, with maybe the most intelligent and interesting selection of plays I've seen presented by one venue in London. To date I've particularly associated them with good minor Shaw and older stuff from the Royal Court--both of which, might I say, are vital to the theatrical conversation in London.
This, however, was a theatrical coup. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' play is--if I may--hugely significant: as an attempt to resurrect the nineteenth-century drama, and in a sense to say that we're all still living in the midst of its heady combination of spectacle and heavy stereotyping. I feel the full weight of the thirty-odd hits this blog gets when I praise actors--it seems silly to do this, like I'm Michael Billington or something. But Ken Nwosu's lead performance, from the (great, won't give it away) first line onwards, was one of the small marvels of the year for me.
Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon (1859) was one of the most popular plays throughout the nineteenth-century world, famous for its slave auctions and exploding boats. Horrifyingly for us today, it is also full of what the melodrama found amusing: blackface, redface, and heavy sentimentality. What can we do with scripts like this? Years ago, I saw the Wooster Group Emperor Jones--which, like this production, dealt with an older script made problematic by changes in how we represent race on stage. And that production--although not without its complexities--struck me as slightly gutless: as an attempt to distance itself from anything not fully bien-pensant, frittering any resonances in the script away into abstract stylization. This did something far more complicated, leaving in enough of Boucicault to let the sentimental drama work in its own terms, without abstracting stylization. I felt like patting myself on the back: these old plays really have something to them! And then one stage effect--which I would not dream of giving away--reminded us what else the nineteenth century found spectacular, and indeed what else still works on us. I felt sickened in the best and most thoughtful possible way.
But, stage effects aside, this was a full-on production--well-thought-out, down to the tiniest details--of a great chamber play, down to the cast pausing to completely disassemble the floor for the famous slave auction scene. After this and Low Level Panic, I've started to admire the Orange Tree for its use of plumbing: for water, heavy sets, and other thoughtful fixtures onstage. They do what great sets do: make the play resonate out between the theatrical space and our world. All praise to the actors for what must have been a formidable job of rehearsal jumping around this set, nearly tripping over the elaborate fixtures and terrifyingly-close audience members alike. I felt terrifyingly complicit in this, in the best possible way--I left wondering what of the things I enjoy will wind up seemingly ghastly in 150 years, hoping that they would make out as well for future spectators as the tap-dancing rabbit did in this production.
This isn't to say that any of this was overwhelmingly heavy--this play is, among other things, a fucking blast, from beginning to end. But no part of that spectacle comes easily. Weeks later I remain unsettled by this. See it.
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