BIG WHITE FOG
Almeida Theatre, London N1
Opened 17 May, 2007
****
It's not intended to be racist (and I apologise if it appears so) to
note that different cultures respond to theatre with different degrees
of vocality. It's also notable that the gasps and ejaculations
sometimes heard in significantly black audiences have seldom in my
experience resounded in the auditorium of the Almeida Theatre. They did
so, though, on the press night of Big
White Fog. Artistic director Michael Attenborough has said that
he would like his theatre to be as diverse as the borough in which it
is situated; this production of Theodore Ward's 1938 play about a black
family in Chicago is both a clear signal in that direction and a long
overdue extra-U.S. première for a strong, impassioned piece of
writing.
Ward's play is full of historical points that have little or no
resonance in Britain. We scarcely know of the Great Migration of
1915-1920 when hundreds of thousands of Southern rural black folk made
their way to Northern cities, and Marcus Garvey, leader of a
back-to-Africa movement in the 1920s and eventually imprisoned as a
conman, is recognised in today's Britain only vaguely as a buzz-name in
roots reggae lyrics. American socialism, too, seems more strident to us
today perhaps because it was further outside the political mainstream,
even during the Great Depression. And yet all these ingredients, so far
from seeming distant or even academic, serve to enrich the drama.
The narrative arc is almost entirely predictable: the play follows the
Mason family in a steady decline from 1922 to 1932, ending not
unexpectedly with a fatality at the hands of The Man. The action lies
in the interplay of ideas. Time and again Ward has his characters
debate differing views of the way forward for black Americans. The
separatism of father Victor's Garveyite views conflicts with the
integrationism of his socialist son Lester; Victor's idealism
repudiates the economic strategy of his brother-in-law, who becomes a
rack-renting landlord in search of financial self-sufficiency; as the
Depression begins to bite, daughter Wanda faces a more urgent and
humiliating issue of principle versus pragmatism, having to decide
whether to succumb in secret to a white sugar-daddy in order to pay the
family's rent. There is even black-on-black racism, as Victor
excoriates his mother-in-law as the illegitimate offspring of a rape by
a white man and she in turn, proud of her "Dupree blood", uses the
N-word on him. The title itself is Les's image of the impossibility of
making any headway against an oppressive white establishment.
Ward's achievement, like August Wilson at his best (though without the
fantastical episodes of the latter), is to keep these ideas firmly
connected to people, rather than just being rhetorical positions loaded
on to fleshly vehicles. More impressive still, amid all these
privations and all this strife – we see mother desert daughter,
brothers sunder, another sibling decline into wino-hood – there is not
a single character who is not at bottom a good person. They differ only
in their choice of path. The family is led by Danny Sapani's Victor, an
imposing and articulate man whose clarity of perspective deserts him
when it comes to the failings of Garveyism, and Jenny Jules as his wife
Ella, who can smile and utter conciliating words even as her eyes
betray the desperation with which she is trying to keep the household
from shattering.
In one respect, the most trenchant point is made not in Ward's play
itself, but in its performance history: it premiered under the auspices
of the Federal Theatre Project, part of FDR's New Deal package to
combat the Depression for all Americans regardless of colour or creed.
Written for the Financial
Times.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights
reserved.
Return to index of
reviews
for the year 2007
Return to master
reviews
index
Return to main theatre
page
Return to Shutters
homepage