POWER, MAJESTY AND JUSTICE
Very good to see this intense three-hander by Ryan Calais Cameron (who gave us “For Black Boys..” ) migrating to Shaftesbury Avenue with increased vigour. And, God bless it, the same central star in Ivanno Jeremiah as Sidney Poitier, early in his career a decade before his Oscar. Jeremiah is, as I wrote before, a great treat. But his new co-stars are pretty ace, too.
The play fits the paranoid cancel-culture age by taking us back to the 1950’s : not just the McCarthy witch-hunt against communists but an America still wickedly ill-at ease about black skin. The set is a movie lawyer’s office – pitch-perfect down to the movie posters and drinks cabinet – where nervous screenwriter Bobby (Oliver Johnstone) is telling the NBC lawyer that his new TV script needs to star his friend Sidney Poitier, who’s made a hit in The Blackboard Jungle. “He’s black – not Belafonte black, black, black” he says. Which causes the lawyer – Stanley Townsend a magnificent silver-haired monster – to greet the arriving Poitier with a lot of embarrassingly patronizing street-talk “what’s the tale nightingale, what’s buzzin, cousin?” – and making it clear the cultured, intelligent Bahamian is in his view something from “the ghetto”, panhandling and open to bribery.
He pours a lot of drinks , which Poitier doesn’t want, and carries on making both the others uncomfortable. At one point leading a reluctant singsong of the Banana Boat Song. Ouch. Oh, and forcing Poitier to have a whisky he doesn’t want, given that it’s just past breakfast time, and to loosen his tie in faux camaraderie. Told you Townsend was doing the full-monster: indeed he is horribly entertaining at it, little skips and poses of boss-man malice. Jeremiah evokes the difficulty this very young, new actor is in : dignified, wary, knowing there are traps being laid for him every minute.
Earnest liberal (“I’m the most black white guy”) Bobby has written a script in which Poitier is an overseer of white dock workers. The lawyer can’t cope with this, and goes into an even more embarrassing encomium of how Hattie McDaniel (Best Supporting, 1952) had said it was better playing the maid in Gone with the Wind than BEING a maid, so.. Poitier though is sick of playing the ‘good little negro” and says so. Bobby is torn between ambition to get his show on screen by placating the lawyer and a real liberal desire to push forward the social barriers (still, in the 50s, very strict and segregated in much of the US).
But of course it all gets nastier: Parks the lawyer calls Bobby a slimey little beatnik trying to break all the rules, and berates Poitier (I cannot overstate the energetic, elegant dignity and power of Jeremiah) for turning down the part of a passive black janitor, accusing him of being paid to reject it . Moreover, Parks wants him to sign a denunciation of Paul Robeson and Belafonte as commies. Bobby struggles with his ‘allyship” but when Poitier holds firm and delivers a fantastic speech hot with his rage, his daily rage at racism and contempt, you see him visibly wither in a kind of confused shame.
Its 90 minutes straight, and at the Kiln I called it less than perfect, even claustrophobic (we’re stuck in a room with a bully, a weakling and a hero without faults, after all). But this revival feels sharper, harder, tougher, and often funnier (thanks to Townsend’s monstrous Parks). And Ivanno Jeremiah is terrific, catching a turning-point in the history of black American advance in dignity and achievement. “We’re here. We’re coming. Get Ready” says Poitier. More than once the audience whoops approval. It’s proper fire.
Box office nimaxtheatres.com to 14 June
Rating 4.
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