Eclipse Theatre’s UK première of Don
Evans’ 1982 comedy toured the country in autumn 2011, when it was
described as the link between Restoration comedy and
The Cosby Show. On watching Dawn
Walton’s recast production on its London visit, I can see the point of
either comparison, but wonder how factitious they are.
True, the principal setting in a middle-class black household in
Philadelphia bears a basic similarity to that of Cosby’s Huxtable
family, but Evans’ preacher Avery Harrison (Karl Collins) and his
snobbish, malapropising wife Myra have none of the Huxtables’
implicitly admirable qualities; indeed, throughout the play runs a vein
of criticism of the pretensions of what young Felix Harrison’s more
“street” girlfriend Li’l Bits calls “bourgie niggahs”. As for the
Restoration side, virtually the entire complement of characters are
broad types: the Harrisons and Li’l Bits, club owner Caleb (Clifford
Samuel) who has wandered in from the set of a blaxploitation movie,
Avery’s niece Beverley (Rebecca Scroggs) who has been willed into
Caleb’s guardianship and makes the standard Restoration journey from
country innocent to too-knowing urbanite, and so on. But I am far from
convinced that such caricaturing works in this context.
Nor, perhaps, is Walton. She has staged the play as if it were a studio
shoot of a 1970s sitcom, with “On Air” signs, taped bursts of applause
on cast members’ first entrance and the like. The aesthetic is clearly
“retro” even from the date of Evans’ writing, yet there is no
indication that the play was originally intended as a period piece.
(Nor would any ’70s sitcom, much less a black one, have dared to make
major business out of a clandestine copy of
The Joy Of Sex.) If it is
considered necessary to “buy” both the comedy and the commentary by
means of setting them in a camp, consciously artificial version of the
past, then what weight does either the serious or the comic aspect
truly have in 2013? Of course, this begs the further question of what
standing I have as a white Northern Irishman to find problems with a
play about black Americans. Nevertheless it strikes me (to cite a song
broadly contemporaneous with that from which Evans took his title) as a
case of too much monkey business.
Written for the Financial
Times.