Caroline or Change, Minerva Theatre- 1st June 2017

I travelled up to Chichester the week before the start of my A Levels to try and escape from the madness and the stress and dread of revision. Chichester is perfectly placed in comparison to suburban London as a spot to escape to. From passing what likes a settlement from Game of Thrones (which is in actuality Arundel- but from afar could be Kings Landing) on the terrible Southern train journey to the quaint English village (Chichester is a city in name only!), it was very easy to forget the terror of the upcoming few weeks.

The show, Caroline or Change, was mightily impressive; a through-sung musical investigating Southern race relations in the 1960s through the prism of a black maid working for a Jewish household. Tony Kushner's initial dramatic act of anthropomorphising the household objects in what is otherwise a piece of musical naturalism helped to heighten and open the audience up, like in Angels in America, to the extraordinary nature of this very ordinary story. Jeanine Tesori's music formed occasionally moved into the operatic, using a range of musical influences from gospel to traditional Jewish modes to form a unique sound-world. Michael Longhurst direction was characteristically clear. As best demonstrated in his productions of Amadeus, They Drink it in the Congo, and A Number, Longhurst has a real skill for making very small stylistic decisions which best shines light and focus on the strengths of the written work as opposed to major changes which draw focus from the work to the director. In Caroline, this took the form of the use of a revolve, allowing the story to be effectively told to all three sides of the Minerva. Sharon D Clarke gave a showstopping performance, keeping in an anger that is only truly released in an Act 2 showpiece aria 'Lot's Wife'. The Broadway transfer of this production has just been postponed due to the virus but hopefully this underappreciated musical gets the audience it really deserves in it's first revival on Broadway.

An Octoroon, Orange Tree Theatre- 29th May 2017

I have seen Ned Bennett’s Production of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ An Octoroon three times at both the Orange Tree theatre in Richmond and in it’s successful transfer to the National Theatre and each time was a profoundly different experience. In the Dorfman on the third visit, Bennett had added pyrotechnics and crazier eccentricities to scale up the show to fit the bigger space and to try and shock much the same audience who had seen Katie Mitchell’s Cleansed in that same space just a few years earlier. The second visit was towards the end of it’s first run at the Orange Tree, and word had got around about just how stunning this production was. Bringing my friend Harvey with me, we at 18 fitted into an uncharacteristically young audience in the Richmond space; the production had found its audience and had attracted the same crowd that flocked to see Pomona. However, it was the first visit to this production that sticks in the memory most.

It was early in the run and the matinee audience was filled with the regular Richmond matinee crowd- elderly and, I would venture, on the conservative side of theatrical taste. They had seen that the theatre company that has made its name on revivals of Rattigan and Shaw plays were mounting an adaptation of a quaint melodrama by Dion Boucicault and thought it might make a fun afternoon at the theatre. One of the joys of watching this profound and challenging play was seeing the unease as Ken Nwosu as BJJ walked into the centre of the theatre in his underwear before sitting within the audience in his opening monologue on being a ‘black playwright’. That unease turned into profound terror as Nwosu and Kevin Trainor (playing a representation of Boucicault) circled each other screaming, before the theatre was plunged into darkness as Snoop Dogg blared throughout before a live cellist accompanied a tap-dancing br’er rabbit. As the melodrama itself started up, I could see one old lady rocking back and forth with her hands over her ears. This visit, more than any other time, I could see an example of an audience being really challenged about what theatre was and could be, whether it was appreciated or not.

Re-reading the play yesterday as the video of the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis policeman circulated around social media, I was taken back to the fourth act of this play. Boucicault’s 1859 play is a melodramatic entertainment surrounding a white, slave-owning protagonist George Peyton saving an ‘octoroon’ (one eighth black) girl Zoe from evil, slave-owning McClosky. The fourth scene, which Jacobs-Jenkins describes in his play as ‘the sensation scene’, revolves around the Native American character Wahnotee exposing McClosky’s villainy by showing a photo of McClosky killing Paul, a ‘slave boy’. ‘BJJ’ breaks out of the play at this point to consider how to effectively convey the shock of this moment to a modern-day audience, at which point a large projection of a lynching is projected.

In Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview, the overwhelmingly white audience is directly asked to stand on the stage and let ‘people of colour’ live their own lives free from the white gaze. That moment in the fourth act of An Octoroon expresses much the same thing. Whether it’s the developed photograph of the murdered Paul, the countless sickening photos of lynching, the reports and videos of countless numbers of black people being racially profiled by police in America and in the UK; there is something sick about the white population that feeds off this need to see stories about black people suffering at the hands of ‘evil’ white people. Yesterday, seeing less people share the video and instead share examples of overt and covert white supremacy was a step in the right direction at least yet still demonstrating a kind of stasis in the brutalisation of black lives since the 19^th century.

Jacobs-Jenkin’s only major diversion from the plot of the original melodrama is in the final act where, diverting away from the reunited George and Zoe to a reflective and comical discussion between Dido and Minnie in which, like most modern audiences trying to rationalise the plot of a melodrama, they find that they either ‘zone out’ or find the whole thing pointless.  The genius of this adaptation is that Branden Jacobs-Jenkins transforms a pretty offensive and dated melodrama into a truly nuanced and engaging work; one that really demands action from it’s audience and only seems to gain ‘relevance’ over time.