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.