Review An Octoroon

An Octoroon
by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

Down The Brer Rabbit Hole
https://www.orangetreetheatre.co.uk/

Playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is a product of the US educational system - a graduate with a masters in drama from New York University, he's additionally an alumnus of a Julliard playwrights' programme. And he also happens to be black.

His 2014 play An Octoroon scoops up out of the syllabus a populist nineteenth century melodrama of almost the same name, The Octoroon. Wikipedia terms Irish dramatist Dion Boucicault's play an "anti slavery potboiler" and it scored a pre-Civil War success at the playwright's Winter Garden Theatre in New York in 1859.

Jacobs-Jenkins satiric comedy drama begins very firmly in the 21st (ok maybe 20th century) with playwright BJJ (Ken Nwosu)  - ah, yes of course Jacobs-Jenkins comes out of a university course! - in therapy for depression of the psychological rather than the economic kind

Whether the therapist is black or white, we never know but she or he suggests the playwright writes a riff on The Octoroon, a top hat and crinolines' barnstorming melodrama. The heir to a bankrupt antebellum Louisiana plantation falls for demure, but in legalistic terms racially flawed, Zoe (Iola Evans) and villainous shenanigans are afoot in the shape of a nouveau riche ex-overseer.

BJJ mounts a production but this means unexpected if not entirely unforeseeable casting difficulties. The playwright finds himself uncomfortably forced to double and triple up and don white face, even if a ressurrected Boucicault (Kevin Trainor) becoming a literal red face Native American redskin, takes it all more casually as part of the theatrical stock-in-trade. 

Jacobs-Jenkins seems to share something of Boucicault's canny commercialism and eye on the main chance when he put together An Octoroon. This is not a criticism - 'twas ever so in theatre and An Octoroon's mix of middle-class academic high japes, cinematic commercialism, low comedy and genuine melodramatic potency makes the play something of a quadroon itself.

Before we mix you up with all these 'oons, we should explain, dear reader, our terminology. Originating in the time of slavery, an octoroon is of one eighth black descent. A quadroon is someone of one quarter black descent. These were legal definitions with huge ramifications, for before the abolition of slavery unless the octoroon had been proveably freed from slavery, he or she remained a slave.

We felt the biggest influence, in its melding together of race, finance and sharp ironies, irrationalities and humour, was Chinese-American David Henry Hwang's ingenious and rather more compact earlier Yellow Face.

But of course black history in the US is its own very particular often brutal, back and forth history. Directed by Ned Bennett with set by Georgia Lowe, threaded through this baggy, thought-provoking play is also a tale of black performers - minstrelsy, their representation in folk tales, abolitionist novels, cinema - finally emerging in the age of sub prime mortgages.   

Where Jacobs-Jenkins scores is the recognition that melodrama renovates the creaky house of realism. It strips it of its pretention to rationality, with lives inside and outside fiction assailed by irrational desires and dangers.

The 21st century play An Octoroon may be clunky and self-conscious, but there is also strength in its raw red marrow uncovered.

By the end of An Octoroon, the focus has shifted away from the problematic beatification of  octoroon Zoe and away from the men including the middle class playwright to the two dark skinned slave women, Minnie (Vivian Operah) and Dido (Emmanuella Cole)

Their initially peripheral situation and dependence for their existence on auctions and melodramatic paperwork devices provide a knotty resonance for more contemporary crises.

Faced with forces beyond their control, they raise An Octoroon from mere parody or a clever intellectual exercise about the black experience into a resonant piece about skin colour, women and property in modern America. In one stroke, An Octoroon becomes a much braver and original green light piece of work.   

Review Hay Fever

Hay Fever

by Noël Coward 

Bohemian Rhapsody

http://www.atgtickets.com/shows/hay-fever/duke-of-yorks/

“Why is Hay Fever called Hay Fever?”, mused TLT and her ruminating roadster about Noël Coward’s play, still in preview, as they gazed at the white stucco facade of the Duke of York’s Theatre in the heart of London’s theatreland. 

Barely two hours later, after the final curtain, this exquisitely structured, melodic (and like Private Lives), “comedy of bad manners”, written by a young Coward in 1924 following a trip to the USA, nevertheless  struck us  as rather sinister (or should that be, in Coward’s case, dexter?).

Are we meant to infer hay fever as feverish disruption and disarray? Or sexual peccadillos as in “a roll in the hay”? Or was it already slang for marijuana or cannabis or for ready cash?  Or should we reach for the anti-histamines? And what about scenes where house guests “play up” to hosts from hell like sane detainees in a mental home feigning madness to advance the career of the chief psychiatrist? 

The seemingly kooky hosts, inappropriately surnamed Bliss, reside in a manor house on The Wind In The Willows banks of the River Thames in the village of Cookham. 

The Bohemian “independent family”:  Veteran actress – and tippler --planning-a-comeback Judith (Felicity Kendal as a delicious domestic tyrant); Pot-boiler novelist David (Simon Shepherd looking just a tad like Coward biographer, the late Sheridan Morley) and late teens’ children Simon (boisterous Edward Franklin) and Sorel (boyishly played by Alice Orr-Ewing) settle down for the weekend, each having, unknown to the others, invited a guest. 

For Judith, Simon and, more ambiguously, Sorel, love trysts with a hearty sportsman, Sandy Tyrrell (a Wodehousian Edward Killingback), a society vamp (authoritative Sara Stewart) and  diplomat Richard Greatham (willing-to-break-protocol-by-the-play's-end Michael Simkins) are respectively on the cards. 

Meanwhile David wants to “observe” a young female flapper, Jackie Coryton (an equally pitch perfect performance by Celeste Dodwell) as a prototype for a character in his novel.  Funny – but rather sinister.

Coward famously said of Hay Fever that “it has little plot and remarkably little action”. 

Well, maybe at its own 1925 opening, there were more than enough plots going in countries mentioned in the play: Spain (military dictatorship and bullfights), Italy (dictatorship and lira crisis), Japan (Imperial Royal Family and US immigration quota) and Russia (Soviet Union? 1920s? Enough said). 

As Coward added, the play depends on “expert technique from each and every member of the cast”. But in TLT and her automotive sidekick’s opinion, every character, including dresser cum housekeeper Clara (Mossie Smith), who by the end has participated by proxy in the world of international finance, is inventing his or her own plots, trying to best the other characters. Plus it’s difficult to say how long any short-lived peace will reign.

Drawing on the music-like play structures of Bernard Shaw (there are more than a few Shavian references in Hay Fever), maybe there’s also  a clue in the hiccups which the sportsman Sandy Tyrell suffers in the final act.  

The play hiccups along like a guffawing playwright-erly musical hocket, an alternation of notes, pitches or chords for several voices.  Hocket from the French word hoquet meaning a sudden interruption -  or hiccup. 

All the characters are sucked into the playacting, the melodramatic tropes, the creation of literary works, the coming together in, then breaking of alliances and the injured parties. While even the apparently bumbling diplomat doesn’t care about throwing around other people’s baggage, as long as his own diplomatic bag is safe. 

Perhaps the family itself is a construct for the press. This is a play which delights in its own technical prowess and nuts and bolts. Maybe the father of the family David Bliss’s definition of his work in this febrile international atmosphere, where novelists, actors, playwrights, artists, diplomats, sportsmen, newspapers, critics (!!) and anyone with a secret play a dangerous tactical game, is sinister:

“The only reason I’ve been so annoying is that I love to see things as they are first, and then pretend they’re what they’re not”

This Theatre Royal Bath revival directed by Lindsay Posner benefits from a terrific Judith Bliss in scion of a theatrical family herself, Felicity Kendal. Backed all the while, with home county midsummer lighting (Paul Pyant) flooding through the French windows, by the finely-detailed wood-panelled galleried set design by Peter McKintosh, becoming a character in itself.

The production has toured extensively nationwide and in Australia before coming into the West End and shows every sign of bedding down nicely. At the same time, it may need a look at the pacing in the first act and some tightening to hone its brittle humour. But TLT and her hatchback are unashamed Coward groupies and present a coveted emerald-green light.

But we still haven’t learnt the definitive explanation as to why Hay Fever is called Hay Fever ;).

Tickets to Hay Fever courtesy of 

Official Theatre www.officialtheatre.com

PS Interestingly, as well as supposedly being inspired by an American couple, actress Laurette Taylor and Anglo-Irish playwright Hartley Manners, there was a Bliss family around at the time of Hay Fever. 

Between 1923 - 1925 the composer Arthur Bliss, whose career had taken off after 1918 and became famous at the same time as Coward, lived, met his wife in 1924 and married a year later in California. His wife's mother, aunt and uncle were all actors with her uncle also being a playwright.  Arthur, whose American father was from Massachussets, of course shares a surname with the family in Hay Fever. 

Does one mention of the name MacKenzie refer to  Compton (known as "Monty") McKenzie, (writer, actor, Scottish nationalist, member of British intelligence and later supporter of the abdicated Edward VIII (along with his drug-taking brother George, Edward also knew Coward)? Compton MacKenzie's sister Fay Compton also appeared in Coward's plays. But TLT and her cabriolet are only willing to share Google search hunches with the reservation that they are definitely only vaguely circumstantial and nothing more ...