Debate offers not only an argument for, well, argument, but also the revelation, to me, of a sympathetic venue in the middle of London. Stone Nest, originally a Welsh Presbyterian church can bring its audience close up to the action, encircling it as if they are indeed about to vote.
As if responding to James Graham’s galvanising Best of Enemies, which dramatised the television wrangle between William F Buckley Jr and Gore Vidal, and to which James Baldwin crucially contributed, Debate stages the 1965 Cambridge Union tussle between Baldwin and Buckley. The motion, supported by Baldwin, was that “the American dream has been achieved at the expense of the American negro”.
Christopher McElroen’s production is clear, frank, effective. A film of the debate’s opening moments is played on a tiny black-and-white telly, barely big enough to contain the vanity of the BBC’s introducer, the Tory MP Norman St John-Stevas. Then the actors take over: the words are as recorded, the characterisation is light, uncontaminated by mimicry. The result is a salutary concentration on what is actually said (MPs would profit by attending), exhilaration at Baldwin’s subtlety and penetration, dismay at how little the circumstances he describes have changed.
Eric T Miller is a convincingly condescending Buckley, not least because he does not overdo the superiority that drips from him in the archive footage, imprinted on his lolling demeanour and vocabulary: his antagonist is said to deal in “luridities of oppression”. Teagle F Bougere’s Baldwin, often relaxed with hands in pockets, is commanding. He seems simply to lean into Baldwin’s remarkable speech and let it carry him to his audience. The words that captured Cambridge would you think capture anyone (though not, apparently, an early audience of Republican women). The calm excoriation is blasting. As is the easy switch of register. Baldwin moves from describing the corruption of America’s sense of reality to acute personal image: as a child, you root “for Gary Cooper shooting Indians”; when you grow up, you realise “the Indians were you”.
Black Superhero is brimming with talent, new and established. It bristles with ideas – and with emotion. It pushes against conventions about who and what is put on stage. It is sexy. Yet, despite vivacious direction by Daniel Evans, the evening is too often one of glittering inertia.
Danny Lee Wynter, who has a leading role in his own first play, began his theatrical life as an usher at the Royal Court. He tilts against the white realism with which this theatre has long been associated, tracing the inner life of David, a black queer actor, through his obsession with a fantasy superhero. The appearances of this marvel are dazzlingly conjured, even if, like me, you hate superheroes: lit by Ryan Day, Joanna Scotcher’s design of neon triangles melts into a swirl of dark smoke through which swoops and swaggers a giant figure, glistening in latex.
There is a complication. David – delivered by Wynter with fine earnest dolefuleness – is a jobbing actor, perpetually up for Horatio, not for Hamlet. The part of the latexed crusader has been given to an old friend, King (Dyllón Burnside), who has risen to wealth and adulation. There is a jostle of envy between the two men: Burnside tempers King’s swagger and pleasure with uncertainty. And then there is another complication. King declares his marriage to a white man (a simpering but beady Ben Allen) is open; David, who has always loved King, jumps into bed with him, where he turns out to be an expert at identifying pubic hairs. Recrimination is crisply dispensed in a strong performance by Rochenda Sandall.
Some of this leads naturally to discussions about representation on screen and stage and to debating the extent to which anyone in public life has a right to privacy or a duty to speak out. Naturally but over-extendedly. There is shimmer in the attacks on movies (Moonlight is not named, but not far away) about gay life that dole out dirges to the sound of oboes, and which don’t feature sex, but not everything needed to be spelled out, particularly when the sexual encounters here are beautifully, muscularly choreographed, with the help of movement director Gerrard Martin.
There’s more, not least David’s predictable sad backstory – daddy trouble has led to demoralisation, sexual quirks – and a wish for superhero intervention. Too much and too much explanation. Someone should have got their shears out. Wynter will write a better play next time.
It is 23 years since Further than the Furthest Thing was first produced, at the Edinburgh festival: freighted with inquiries, laden with a cargo of metaphors; intriguing rather than dynamic. Two strands have stuck in my mind: its quizzical response to colonialism and its creation of a striking idiom. Together, these built an atmosphere: delicate, elusive, exasperating, beguiling. This holds true in Jennifer Tang’s production.
Drawing on the memories of her own mother, Zinnie Harris based her play on the experience of the inhabitants of Tristan da Cunha, the British overseas territory in the South Atlantic, who in 1961 escaped a volcanic eruption, moving first to Cape Town and then to England. The islanders were discouraged from returning home by being told, wrongly, that their homes had been utterly destroyed. The ploy did not work.
This is a drama of dark secrets and portents. Before an unwanted pregnancy is revealed, precious eggs are dropped and smashed. A capitalist arrives on the island: he manufactures jars but makes nothing to put in them. Still, the interest lies not in plot, but in the evocation of place and manner. The unadorned nature of the inhabitants’ way of life is conjured in Soutra Gilmour’s design and Ian William Galloway’s videos: there is no domestic clutter; a sheet drawn across the stage ripples with Hokusai-style waves; Shapla Salique keens, beautifully if all-purposely. The dialogue still startles. Syntax is distinctive: “I is forgetting … ” As is pronunciation: egg becomes “hegg”; in the case of “Henglish” for English, this is used as a subtle display of irreverence. Jenna Russell embodies the idiom beautifully, with a Quakerish style: direct look, steady demeanour, fearless speech. She is the heart of a scattergun production and its main tug.
Star ratings (out of five)
Debate: Baldwin vs Buckley ★★★★
Black Superhero ★★★
Further than the Furthest Thing ★★★
