Shockingly, in decades of theatregoing I’ve never seen Lorraine Hansberry’s pioneering 1959 play about a multi-generational black family trying to get ahead in still-segregated Chicago. Tinuke Craig’s fine-grained revival therefore comes as a delight and a revelation.
How modern, how prescient this debut work is, staged on Broadway when Hansberry was 29: and how awful that she died of pancreatic cancer at just 34. Craig’s production features terrific performances from Doreene Blackstock as matriarch Lena and Solomon Israel as her loved but unreliable son Walter.
She takes the script at its own unhurried pace. It’s almost three hours long, but there’s no real fat to be trimmed and the quality of the writing is delicious.
Lena, descended from “five generations of slaves and sharecroppers”, lives in a cramped, rat-trap apartment with Walter and her daughter Beneatha, Walter’s wife Ruth and their 10-year-old son Travis. She and Ruth work all the hours god sends as kitchen domestics. Walter is a chauffeur prone to intemperate domestic blowouts who fantasises about opening a liquor store.
Politically-alert Beneatha cherishes an ambition to be a doctor beneath a flighty exterior, and bridles against the presumptions of her two black student suitors, wealthy American George and Nigerian Joseph, who is preparing for Africa’s inevitable wave of independence. The family hopes of social and geographical mobility rest on a $10k insurance payout for Walter Sr, who worked himself to death.
When Lena puts a deposit on a house in a poor white “cracker” neighbourhood, family tensions escalate. The two-dimensional white character Karl, who descends at a late stage like a deus ex machina, his surface civility undermined by repeated references to “you people”, feels like Hansberry’s righteous revenge for the historic stereotyping of black characters.
Here, issues emerge through personality. The upright, austere warmth that Blackstock brings to Lena is at the very core of the play. Israel fully explores Walter’s zest for life and his self-sabotage, his charm and his brutality.
Joséphine-Fransjila Brookman brings an exuberant energy to Beneatha, Cash Holland a bone-deep weariness to Ruth. The supporting cast are all strong, even Jonah Russell’s Karl, but a special shout-out goes to Kenneth Omole who makes Joseph charismatic rather than pompous.
Hansberry’s writing is passionate, strident and frequently very funny. Craig’s direction is facilitative and unshowy for this co-production between the Lyric, Nottingham and Leeds Playhouses, and Headlong.
She has deep trust in her actors, I think. Designer Cécile Trémolières supplies a set of sparse furniture and stippled walls that become transparent to show the impact of onstage action on offstage characters.
Hansberry’s play deserves its elevated reputation. I’ve felt its reverberations as an influence on later writers and a direct inspiration for works including Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park and Kwame Kwei-Armah’s Beneatha’s Place. How wonderful that a new generation – as well as me – can experience a magisterial revival of the original.
Lyric Hammersmith, to November 2; lyric.co.uk
