Alisha Bailey as Ruth, the mother, and
Ashley Zhangazha as the dad. Pictures: Johan Persson
A Raisin in the Sun
Coventry Belgrade B2
*****
IT'S no surprise that the inspiration for
Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965) to become a dramatist should have been
her encounter with the plays of Sean O'Casey.
A Raisin in the Sun,
is given a marvellously vivid, edge-of-seat staging by at Coventry's
Belgrade Theatre B2 venue in a collaboration with Sheffield Theatres and
the Eclipse Theatre Company.
The work, rarely seen in this country, is a
typical example of the Belgrade's 'Hidden Histories' season. It focuses
on plays that are unduly neglected or rarely seen, and accords with the
spirit Hamin Glen has brought to the theatre since he first took it
over, when rare Brecht and little-known Chekhov, not to mention plays
from the Marlowe and Jonson era, typified the sort fo thing he made the
Belgrade's own.
Later this season he
will resurrect Wipers,
by Ishy Din, a story of the Indian soldiery who took part in the later
Ypres campaigns and whose impressive memorial can be found a few miles
south of the city.
Not only is A Raisin in the Sun rightly classed as 'a landmark in the American
canon' from an era that coincided, and succeeded, and was infused with,
the great plays of Albee-Tennesse Williams-Arthur Miller.
It was the first play by a black woman writer to
be seen on Broadway (in 1959), one which picked up the New York Drama
Critics' Circle best play award for that year, and one that had the
power to alter views and question assumptions, in its own way criticising black people for self-pity and urging them to stand on their
own two feet if they wanted equality to be a fact and not just a dream.
Angela Wynter as grandmother Lena with Alisha
Bailey as mother Ruth
'What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore . . . ' These lines
(from 'Harlem') by poet Langston Hughes give both the title and the
impetus to Hansberry's play.
Focusing on a close family in a plain but not
shabby tenement apartment in southern Chicago, it gives us their hopes
and their disappointments, shows them embattled and reconciling, and
speaking a lot of plain truths.
One of the treats - there are many - is when
grandma (Lena Younger, played as a commanding materfamilias by Angela
Wynter) observes 'The only people in the world more snobbish than rich
white people are rich coloured people.' This play shoots from the hip.
Blacks are proud to be black, but that doesn't stop them forever
complaining about what they don't have and being subject - as well as to
effective segregation - to some scathing criticism themselves.
What brings this
intimate, closely argued play its O'Casey feel is especially the fact
that in it - like in Juno and the
Paycock - a central character comes
into a substantial amount of insurance money that turns out to be a
chimaera (in this case, the father rushes off and invests it in a scam
deal with a mate that leads to all the money being lost).
Walter Kee Younger, the
Dad (Ashley Zhangazha), a chauffeur but a natural loser, is to all
intents the weakest figure on this household. Zhanghazha plays him
skilfully - impetuous, bossy, smugly proud, prone to mild explosions,
and in essence utterly ineffectual. His young ten or eleven year old
son, Travis, has a great deal more nous
than his father has, and Solomon Gordon gave a beautifully polished
performance as this lad possessed of a great deal of common sense, who
knows that the ones to listen to are the women.
It's strange, but in
many ways this doesn't feel like a play about race at all. Hansberry has
proved so effective in showing us a
normal family, bickering and lecturing
and reconciling, that the whole outfit, while cash-strapped, feels as
white as white can be.
Yet that's not to diminish it: the fact that the
characters are all black enables us to see that a huge amount of wisdom
and common sense resides with a black family, if anything all the more
when living in straitened circumstances. They make do with what they
have. They manage adversity. They cope. And they show a great deal more
courage, one might surmise, than those ultra-rich people on the other
side of the city. More O'Casey.
Amid a wealth of both shrewd and memorable pieces
of acting, it was Alisha Bailey (Ruth, the Mother) who won me from the
start. She has a wonderful expressiveness - to her face, to her moves,
to even the mildest utterance - which picks her out as an actress of
charm as well as talent.
A lot of the opening sequence involves characters
queuing to get to the communal bathroom (shared with neighbours). Just
managing her family in and out of the side passage is part of her task.
She cooks, and irons a lot. This is a demanding life, and somehow with
slightly shrunken shoulders she showed us this, scene by scene. I
thought this a delicious performance, and arguably, within a cast rich
in talent, the best and the most affecting.
But enter the other women. There's a demanding
sister (Beneatha, Susan Wokoma) who gives us some of the funniest lines,
partly because with a very different body language she is such a natural
comic. She's independent, like a kind of suffragette; she tends to push
the others around a bit, but also acquiesces and concedes where peace
demands it.
She collects various men (slightly gung-ho George
Murchison and Joseph Asagai, a Yoruba from Nigeria, affable and perhaps
a bit wet (Arou Julius plays both the suitors with nice contrast); she's
a handful, though not an impossible one, and Bolshy ('God is just one
idea I don't accept. I don't like God taking credit for everything man
achieves'). Does she really feel that strongly? Or is she simply winding
up her god-respecting family?
One person she can't wind up is her Mom. Angela
Wynter's Grandmother (Lena) gave us a splendid take on the real head of
the family, who doesn't suffer fools gladly (including her own son), has
a nice and believable relationship (as they all do) with Travis, the
patently affectionate, amenable grandson, keeps her own offspring under
a measure of control, and finds that the best way to deal with some of
the obnoxious segregation found in Chicago, from post-war up to the
Sixties, is to let it be and live your own life. If subservient jobs are
the best you can aspire to, stick with them and perform them well.
There's fun along the way, not least a cheerful,
hearty dance sequence launching part 2, and they pick on some amusing
butts, like College boys: 'They have to talk about something nobody
ain't heard of'.
Dawn Walton's direction works, arguably, because
she tends to lay off and allow the words to speak for themselves without
undue intrusion or irrelevant invention.
Amanda Stoodley's set does the same: plain, dull
furniture and typical fifties wallpaper, but actually in no way
suggesting abject poverty (a Soviet family would give their right arm
for that flat): you feel that with Travis's generation this family could
pull itself up by the bootstraps. And with an experienced, totally
committed cast like this, the script does speak for itself.
We lost to the cutting shears Mrs Johnson, the
nosy neighbour who adds a comic touch and a degree of common sense.
Instead, nicest extra role was Mike Burnside as the slightly unctuous
yet in essence pretty unsavoury figure who seeks to buy the family out
of moving to a white neighbourhood. Gross. No wonder everyone shows him
the door. To 26-03-16
(in 1959), one which picked up the New York Drama
Critics' Circle best play award for that year, and one that had the
power to alter views and question assumptions, in its own way criticising black people for self-pity and urging them to stand on their
own two feet if they wanted equality to be a fact and not just a dream.