The cast of Clybourne Park
(Picture: Photo by Mark Douet)This exquisitely discomfiting riff on race and property by US writer Bruce Norris won the Evening Standard Best Play Award in 2010 and Oliver Kaderbhai’s punchy revival proves it’s become more, not less, relevant since then. The play begins in the Eisenhower-era Chicago of 1959 and ends in 2009 with a suggestion that Barack Obama’s election has changed little. As well as his beady scrutiny of how home ownership, colour and class intersect, Norris pretty much predicted our current culture wars.
The opening gives little hint of what’s to come as Russ (Richard Lintern) and Bev (Imogen Stubbs) prattle about ice cream and pub-quiz geographical trivia. Slowly we learn they are mourning a son who killed himself upstairs after committing atrocities as a soldier in Korea. Now, Russ has taken revenge on the indifference of their Wasp-y, churchy, Rotarian neighbours by selling the tainted – and therefore cheaper – house to a black couple. Although Bev affects a friendship with their black maid Francine (Aliyah Odoffin), ingrained prejudice and the capitalist imperative lurk just below the surface.
In the second half, a relative of those pioneering incomers (Odoffin again) listens to white gentrifiers witter about façade heights and heritage in Mametian fashion. Norris explores who gets to speak, who gets to be offended, and what’s funny, through a series of deliberately offensive jokes, before the past is literally unearthed.
The mawkish epilogue remains unnecessary but otherwise plot and dialogue are constructed with brutal precision. Norris is acute on the euphemisms his characters clutch at to avoid saying what they really mean. And on the self-delusion of self-professed liberals. Bev tells Francine’s husband Albert they should come over for dinner with “the two children”. “Three children,” he gently corrects.
Stubbs is stronger after the interval as a lawyer who makes every topic, from race to disability to rape, about her. Lintern is very good in his dual roles, as is Andrew Langtree, playing two characters who are basically throbbing forehead veins, and Downton regular Michael Fox, as a dishy pastor and a gay yuppie. But it’s the newcomers who really impress: Odoffin, quietly assertive in her stage debut; former dancer Eric Underwood, a delightfully laconic partner to her in both time frames: and Katie Matsell, a young actor with hearing loss who brilliantly plays one deaf and one hearing character, both wildly different and both pregnant.
Norris’s play was inspired by Lorraine Hansberry’s pioneering A Raisin in the Sun, which premiered in 1959 and also explored race and property ownership. You don’t need to know the original work to enjoy it, but you do probably need to be in a robust state of mind. Clybourne Park was shocking when it premiered at the Royal Court in 2010 and it’s still not for the faint of heart.
