Writer: Lorraine Hansberry
Director: Tinuke Craig
Reviewer: Jay Nuttall
Headlong Theatre is turning fifty. A champion of new plays it has produced premieres of modern classics such as Lucy Prebble’s Enron and Duncan McMillan’s People Places and Things. Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 groundbreaking A Raisin in the Sun has been chosen for their anniversary production to tour this Autumn. A powerful piece of theatre, this excellent production maintains Headlong’s high standards and deals with universal themes of race, ambition, prejudice as well as a myriad of themes and nuances.
Three generations of the Young family live cramped in a cockroach-ridden Chicago apartment block: eleven-year-old Travis (Josh Ndlovu) sleeping on the pull-down sofa next to a basic kitchen. Recently widowed matriarch Lena (Doreene Blackstock) presides over daughter Beneatha (Josephine-Fransilja Brookman), son Walter Lee (Solomon Israel), his wife Ruth (Cash Holland) as well as their son, Travis. Awaiting the arrival of the life insurance of Walter Senior (a sum of $10,000) the play fundamentally deals with the differing expectations and desires of how such a life changing amount of money should be spent for the good of the family. College student Beneatha breezes through the family with youthful confidence and a belief that, indeed, nothing should be beneath her despite her gender and colour. Lena and Ruth want desperately to leave their squalid rented accommodation and Walter Lee wants to invest in himself, becoming the businessman he always dreamed to be. When the money does arrive, Hansberry’s drama ramps up and inevitably the Young family begins to implode.
As with other great American plays of its ilk by Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams, A Raisin in the Sun, is a familial drama that acts as the microcosm for the much wider society. Surprisingly, for a play written in the 1950s dealing with themes of oppression and prejudice, Hansberry’s writing is laced full of humour. This is hugely complemented by Tinuke Craig’s fresh feeling direction and excellent all round company performances. The contemporary feeling dialogue allows the story to breathe and it certainly doesn’t feel like a sixty-five-year-old piece of theatre and despite a long running time in today’s standards, the production keeps focus and attention throughout: a complement to the strength of the writing as well as this production. Hansberry gets straight to the heart of what makes good drama: she lays bare and exposes the characters’ wants and what is stopping them from achieving them. “Money is life” Walter Lee asserts, the brutish and frustrated husband of Ruth desperate to operate equally in a white world and rise above his job as a chauffeur. Solomon Israel is excellent, encapsulating Walter Lee’s crushing frustration one minute and his inherent misogynism the next.
The play steps up another level when, after Lena puts a downpayment on a house in Clybourne Park (a white area of Chicago), the family is visited by Karl (Jonah Russell). Under the guise of the representative of the Clybourne Park ‘Improvement Committee’ it soon becomes apparent that his welcome to the black family intending to move into the neighbourhood is anything but. It is testament to the strength of Hansberry’s play (her debut and the first black woman to be produced on Broadway) that this scene inspired Bruce Norris’ 2010 play Clybourne Park which went on to be awarded The Pulitzer Prize. Here the play steps out of microcosm and into macrocosm – a damning inditement of the way ‘coloureds’ were treated.
Cecile Tremolieres’ set design is sparse – the walls and doors splattered with paint alluding to the neglect it has suffered throughout the years. Interestingly, the production incorporates the ‘wings’ offstage to an extent. We see the characters briefly before they enter or occasionally in a trance like ‘slow-motion’ state when not onstage. The effect is powerful, adding a deeper layer to the character’s inner thoughts. Tinuke Craig has directed a compelling revival of a play that still resonates today. It is delicate, heartbreaking and tough in equal measure. The passion, anger and love it is written with is matched in performance and tenacity in this production. It is a story that will wrap you up and spit you out: exactly what good theatre is meant to do.
“He could never catch up with his dreams” Lena recollects about her late husband. It seems to be the over-riding theme that preoccupies A Raisin in the Sun. A groundbreaking play in 1959, it hasn’t lost any of its strength. Headlong have produced an outstanding production of an outstanding play that deserves all the acclaim it is bound to attract.
Runs until 18th September.
The Reviews Hub Score
Powerful theatre
