Samira Wiley and Osy Ikhile in Blues for an Alabama Sky
(Picture: Marc Brenner)Samira Wiley, mainstay of the Handmaid’s Tale and Orange is the New Black, makes an auspicious London debut in Pearl Cleage’s all-black American tragicomedy, written in 1995 and set during New York’s Harlem Renaissance in 1930. This is no star vehicle, though, but a bittersweet ensemble study of hopes largely dashed, where superb homegrown talents Giles Terera, Sule Rimi and Ronkẹ Adékoluẹjo also shine. It’s given a beautiful, light-footed production by director Lynette Linton.
Wiley is Angel, a singer cast off by her white gangster lover and falling yet again on the mercies of her flamboyantly gay costume-designer friend Guy (Terera). Their dowdy, awkward neighbour Delia (Adékoluẹjo) is trying to found a birth control clinic in Harlem, against heavy opposition. Meanwhile louche, wealthy doctor Sam (Rimi) delivers black babies into impoverishment by day then parties by night.
These characters’ dreams of freedom – racial, sexual, creative, reproductive – are curtailed by the Depression and old orthodoxies. And like all epochal parties, the Harlem Renaissance seems to be happening elsewhere, to other people.
Pioneering black, gay writers Langston Hughes and Bruce Nugent throw offstage soirees. The unclassifiable, irrepressible entertainer Josephine Baker is in Paris. Guy daily awaits Josephine’s call to join her as her designer. Angel decides to grab at a nearer lifeline, in the shape of churchy Alabama widower Leland (Osy Ikhile, solid in a stolid role).
Angel is a dazzling character: seductive, ballsy, lost, loyal, and utterly selfish all at once. Wiley plays her with a dancer’s poise and impeccable timing. She unveils a powerful, bluesy voice during the occasional onstage musical interludes too.
Terera, who stole the London production of Hamilton as Aaron Burr and is soon to play Othello, is a delicious blend of camp and tough as Guy, recoiling in horror from a hideous frock but facing down queer-bashers on the street.
The tentative romance between Sam and Delia is sweetly hilarious but ultimately heartbreaking. Rimi is charming as the genial reprobate suddenly glimpsing a different future in his 40s. Adékoluẹjo is so radically and convincingly different to the roles I’ve seen her play before I had to check the programme to make sure it was her. She’s a mercurial, thrilling performer.
The plot isn’t exactly unpredictable and the humour is sometimes broad, but Cleage’s writing is fluid and musical and her assertion of personal choice seems ever more timely, 27 years after she wrote it. The set and costume design by Frankie Bradshaw are gorgeous, the incidental music evocative, and kudos is also due to Cynthia De La Rosa for the immaculate soft waves in the actors’ wigs.
Though Wiley’s face dominates the publicity material, I’d wager that she, Terera, Adékoluẹjo and director Linton – who runs the Bush Theatre and makes her National directorial debut here – each provide a different but potent draw to audiences. Certainly, they all contribute to the alchemy of a deliciously funny and deeply affecting piece of theatre.
National Theatre, to November 5; nationaltheatre.org.uk
