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.