Beneatha's Place - Young Vic
Jul 1, 2023 23:34:26 GMT
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Post by Steve on Jul 1, 2023 23:34:26 GMT
I really enjoyed this: the first half is a good thriller; the second half is an ok comedy.
Some spoilers follow. . .
Back in 2010, I saw "Clybourne Park" at the Royal Court and laughed till I cried. At about the same time, Kwame Kwei-Armah saw it, and was enraged.
I thought I saw a play about race, in which everyone was revealed to share a common humanity despite everyone saying self-interested outrageous transgressive things. I thought I saw a play where there was progress over the decades, with racism declining, even if there was still plenty to argue about in 2010.
Kwame Kwei-Armah saw a reactionary play which smugly affirmed that 1959 white flight racists were shown to be right about what happens to a neighbourhood when black people move in.
This play was his response to that play, (though you don't need to have seen the one to appreciate the other) and it's very good, though it's less cynical about human nature, less funny, more disjointed.
Both plays are in fact responses to Lorraine Hansberry's classic, "A Raisin in the Sun," both plays grabbing characters and situations from that play, and riffing on that play's themes about how racism oppresses and divides people. (You don't need to have seen that play either to enjoy this play).
Anyway, Beneatha, a character from Hansberry's play, goes to Africa with her husband, Joseph Asagai, as Hansberry intimated they might, where they move into a new house. In the second half, we revisit that house with an old Beneatha in the present day (just as Clybourne Park revisited the Chicago house, Beneatha abandoned, in the present day).
The first half is in fact nothing like Clybourne Park. It is a straight-up political thriller, that is actually quite thrilling, where colonial corruption threatens to eat up anybody who isn't corrupt.
Cherrelle Skeete is terrific as Beneatha, proud and dignified, yet worldly wise, a quality her otherwise more easygoing and more apparently compromising husband (Zackary Momoh, also terrific) lacks. The way these two have to swim along, with such excellently characterised political sharks as Jumoke Fashola's Aunty Fola and Sebastian Armesto's Daniel Barnes, is what gives the first half significant bite.
The thrills vanish in the Clybourne-esque comedy of the second half, where a much older Beneatha, now a University Dean, must debate with her University colleagues what classes to teach, as they visit her old Lagos house. The humour is less funny than Clybourne Park cos it's less boldly shockingly transgressive, but Armesto is a hoot as a white Head of African American Studies jabbering away about teaching "white privilege" (um, you've taken over the African American studies department, buddy!), while a coterie of his colleagues snap back at him, advocating for their own particular niche obsessions, all while wise and wily Beneatha tries to steer them in the same direction.
Weirdly, with the US Supreme Court abolishing affirmative action this week, and Presidential contender, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida banning the teaching of critical race theory, this play is at once incredibly topical (it's about the fight for racial equality) and also quite quaint - the second half is about whether a class in "Critical Whiteness" (teaching white people about their privilege) should supplant a class in "African American Studies" (teaching black people about their worth) at a US University - when in fact the forces of DeSantis and half of America would like to trash ALL of it!
Anyhow, I was moved and thrilled by the first half, massively impressed by the cast, in particular Skeete, Armesto and Fashola, and I laughed in the second half, despite having the sense that Armah's comic take on race teaching amounts to fiddling while Rome burns.
4 stars from me.
Some spoilers follow. . .
Back in 2010, I saw "Clybourne Park" at the Royal Court and laughed till I cried. At about the same time, Kwame Kwei-Armah saw it, and was enraged.
I thought I saw a play about race, in which everyone was revealed to share a common humanity despite everyone saying self-interested outrageous transgressive things. I thought I saw a play where there was progress over the decades, with racism declining, even if there was still plenty to argue about in 2010.
Kwame Kwei-Armah saw a reactionary play which smugly affirmed that 1959 white flight racists were shown to be right about what happens to a neighbourhood when black people move in.
This play was his response to that play, (though you don't need to have seen the one to appreciate the other) and it's very good, though it's less cynical about human nature, less funny, more disjointed.
Both plays are in fact responses to Lorraine Hansberry's classic, "A Raisin in the Sun," both plays grabbing characters and situations from that play, and riffing on that play's themes about how racism oppresses and divides people. (You don't need to have seen that play either to enjoy this play).
Anyway, Beneatha, a character from Hansberry's play, goes to Africa with her husband, Joseph Asagai, as Hansberry intimated they might, where they move into a new house. In the second half, we revisit that house with an old Beneatha in the present day (just as Clybourne Park revisited the Chicago house, Beneatha abandoned, in the present day).
The first half is in fact nothing like Clybourne Park. It is a straight-up political thriller, that is actually quite thrilling, where colonial corruption threatens to eat up anybody who isn't corrupt.
Cherrelle Skeete is terrific as Beneatha, proud and dignified, yet worldly wise, a quality her otherwise more easygoing and more apparently compromising husband (Zackary Momoh, also terrific) lacks. The way these two have to swim along, with such excellently characterised political sharks as Jumoke Fashola's Aunty Fola and Sebastian Armesto's Daniel Barnes, is what gives the first half significant bite.
The thrills vanish in the Clybourne-esque comedy of the second half, where a much older Beneatha, now a University Dean, must debate with her University colleagues what classes to teach, as they visit her old Lagos house. The humour is less funny than Clybourne Park cos it's less boldly shockingly transgressive, but Armesto is a hoot as a white Head of African American Studies jabbering away about teaching "white privilege" (um, you've taken over the African American studies department, buddy!), while a coterie of his colleagues snap back at him, advocating for their own particular niche obsessions, all while wise and wily Beneatha tries to steer them in the same direction.
Weirdly, with the US Supreme Court abolishing affirmative action this week, and Presidential contender, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida banning the teaching of critical race theory, this play is at once incredibly topical (it's about the fight for racial equality) and also quite quaint - the second half is about whether a class in "Critical Whiteness" (teaching white people about their privilege) should supplant a class in "African American Studies" (teaching black people about their worth) at a US University - when in fact the forces of DeSantis and half of America would like to trash ALL of it!
Anyhow, I was moved and thrilled by the first half, massively impressed by the cast, in particular Skeete, Armesto and Fashola, and I laughed in the second half, despite having the sense that Armah's comic take on race teaching amounts to fiddling while Rome burns.
4 stars from me.
