Uncomfortable as it is to say so, I find Alice Walker’s Pulitzer-winning story of black American rural female experiences in the early 20th century misandrist. The gradual, partial redemption of some male characters is not bought either by their suffering or protagonist Celie’s, nor (contrary to much critical opinion) is their earlier monstrosity contextualised by personal history or social factors. This is especially true in the adaptations from the novel; lacking the playing time to deepen the picture, all that scriptwriter Marsha Norman and songwriters Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray can do in their stage musical version (receiving its British première some eight years after its Broadway opening) is show us men being bad and then being not so bad.
    
Walker’s tale begins up to its oxters in bleakness, with 14-year-old Celie being raped by her stepfather who later takes the resulting baby away from her and, she and we presume, kills it. Not a great opener for a musical. Russell et al. digest it, therefore, within a bout of hot gospelling in the local chapel; thus, long before Celie expresses her disillusionment in God (as being just another man), we have already seen it pre-empted by the jubilant, uniting aspect of the same notion. Time and again the show lets us off too easily. Audiences may be enraptured by the ultimate affirmations of the piece, but in the end the message of enduring and being true to yourself (unless you’re a man, in which case what you need to do is mend your ways) is no more than the vapid American-if-not-universal-dream message of all too many musicals, films etc. The composers also have to square the circle between a work so inextricably concerned with blackness and the crossover appeal necessary for stage-musical success: it’s noticeable that the more poignant a musical number, the less distinctively “black” it is, less obviously rooted in soul or blues and more prone to the impassioned melisma which now afflicts almost all popular genres.
    
I freely admit that on press night I was the ghost at the feast. At the curtain call, I saw only one other person not on their feet to applaud John Doyle’s characteristically simple yet versatile staging and Cynthia Erivo’s committed central performance as Celie. But so be it. Walker’s novel is problematic in itself, more so when adapted for a broader-appeal medium, and more so still when exported to a country with a quite different narrative of racial history.

Written for the Financial Times.