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 The Alchemist

On a trip to Stratford-Upon-Avon, Francis Beckett relishes a classic city comedy by a contemporary of Shakespeare.

The Alchemist

By Ben Jonson

Greed Is Good

https://www.rsc.org.uk/

This production of The Alchemist by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), currently running at the Swan Theatre in Statford-Upon-Avon, zips along nicely, even if it isn’t quite up to the National Theatre’s splendid 2006 rendering. 

Yet it manages to  find for us the fun that the original 1610 audience would have found in Ben Johnson’s satiric London tale of confidence tricksters and their prey. 

Whereas the National Theatre offered the likes of Simon Russell Beale, the RSC gives us a solid, reliable and  accomplished cast – no one great standout performance, but a talented troupe of actors who make us laugh at and care about the characters at the same time.

For me, the nearest to a standout performance is Mark Lockyer’s Subtle, a cynical, world-weary alchemist, bamboozling all around him and taking their money. 

For others it might be Ken Nwosu as his collaborator Face, the manservant who grasps his chance when his master, Hywel Morgan's Lovewit, decides to find respite from the plague outside town. 

Then again it could be Dol Common, played here by Siobhán McSweeney, delightfully and amusingly, as a podgy and cynical whore..

There are some fine cameo performances. Sir Epicure Mammon – Ben Johnson's names often describe his characters – is a greedy, priapic, self-indulgent upper class oaf, brought to bibulous life by a fine character actor, Ian Redford. 

Timothy Speyer as Tribulation Wholesome (there, you know almost everything about him already), a pastor of Amsterdam. Driven out for his faith from his home city – as he never tires of telling anyone who comes within earshot  – is all pious, self-righteous whingeing.

Listening to him, I understood something about religious persecution. For, when every sect is attacking the other, anyone might tend to be cynical about a man persecuted for his religion who, given the chance, would persecute in turn.

Director Polly Findlay’s production scores over the National in its minimalism.  The National these days seems obsessed by complicated, massively expensive and, generally, entirely unnecessary sets, and technical tricks for their own sake.  Here we have a table and chairs, and an uncomplicated, unchanging backcloth; simple, and all the better for it.  

 

She also scores with her decision to cut twenty minutes off the play.  People are often frightened of cutting classics like Johnson, but each generation requires things to happen faster than the last, and a twenty first century audience will not tolerate the length of speeches that a Jacobean audience would find normal.

Altogether this is a fine rendering of a play which manages to be funny and to tell us something uncomfortable about human greed, earning a green light from this reviewer.