Review Trouble In Mind

Trouble In Mind
by Alice Childress

Black And Blue
http://www.the-print-room.org/

Earlier this year, an entertaining and thought-provoking new play by a young American writer riffed from a modern perspective on racist stereotypes in a 19th century play, An Octoroon, considered controversial in its time.

The new play seemed original and striking but playwright Alice Childress's 1955 drama Trouble In Mind is in many ways a much braver piece, taking on contemporary theatre and movie stereotypes of the 1950s during the time of civil rights turmoil and the Hollywood blacklist [sic].

Wiletta Mayer (Tanya Moodie) had and still has dreams of stardom on her own terms. She's a veteran of stage and screen dramas and musicals  - in minor roles defined by her colour and the perameters of roles allocated to black actors by even the most liberal part of the theatrical and film establishment.

But Wiletta turns from compliance to increasing anger during rehearsals for a misguided if well-intentioned anti-lynching play, focussing also on the right to vote.  Chaos in Belleville is directed by WASPish haughty Al Manners (Jonathan Slinger) who seems blind to the insulting portrayal of the play-within-a-play's black characters.

Childress's backstage comedy drama was a groundbreaking piece of its time, not only grappling with race but gender and the treatment of actors in a precarious profession dominated by money from several different directions.

It acutely observes the minutiae of reheasal room politics with the swallowed responses to slights and the power play. Indeed the exchanged glances and desperation endured in silence make it a very televisual play - something which seems to be acknowledged with recorded canned audience applause in a satirical side swipe in the latter half of Trouble In Mind.

Laurence Boswell's production is a transfer to London from Bath with several roles re-cast, athough Tanya Moodie reprises the part of  the actress with the Germanic sounding name, Wiletta Mayer, in a carefully calibrated central performance.

Seeing this in preview, there was a sense that perhaps the play and ensemble needed to bed in on the Print Room At The Coronet stage, although the individual performances pick out every nuance in a play that cleverly mixes broad brush and method acting styles.

After all, a new member of the Belleville cast, John Nevins (Ncuti Gatwa) has, he says, been going to acting classes.

He hardly heeds the warning of experienced Wiletta that the white directors prefer to think of black actors as "natural", and by implication uneducated, performers.

It's an ingenious dramatic debate about theatre types, in all senses of the word, with even the white-haired Irish doorman (Pip Donaghy) sliding into type but explaining another legacy inherited from colonialism.  

For the black performers the prospects are limited. The mutual humorous teasing between Wilmetta and Millie (Faith Alabi) about this has a bitter edge. Millie, says Wiletta, has played all the flowers in the garden, Petunia, Chrysanthemum, Gardenia, while Millie bats back with "And you've done the jewels ... Crystal, Pearl, Opal ..."

Meanwhile the fellow veteran of racist typecasting and manoeuvring, Sheldon, is also constantly wary. Both Wiletta and Sheldon, who are cast as a black mammy and her sharecropper husband,  try to warn actor John not to get too familiar with the director's choice of female lead, pretty privileged white acting ingénue Judy (Daisy Boulton), straight from Yale.

Geoff Leesley  gets under the skin of an old guard actor who teeters on the verge of racism, as much because his life revolves around words put into his mouth as a wish to blank out anything that may interfere with his career.

There's able support from the uncomprehending but ambitious stage manager (Andrew Alexander) and a deft set design from Polly Sullivan with  the director Manners disappearing into the upstairs office with actress Judy.

Trouble In Mind is a sophisticated, finely wrought and humane play about crude times and attitudes still recognizable, even if it feels like period piece. There are a few lags but the layers of artifice and the reality of the situation come through on many levels. For a play and production  absorbingly and fiercely twisting up racial and professional concerns, it's a /green light.

Review Terror

Terror
by Ferdinand Von Schirach

A Question of Intent
https://lyric.co.uk/

In Peter Weiss's searing stage docu-drama The Investigation using extracts from the real-life Frankfurt Trials after World War II, there is a small but telling moment when we hear that there was a form of justice within Nazi concentration camps.

Military guards were disciplined for stealing from the piles of belongings gathered from those incarcerated and murdered in the camp. This was seen as a major infraction, whereas what was happening in the camp was seen as routine and legal.

And it doesn't seem as if any of the guards in their defence protested "You're killing and robbing  thousands, millions and you're accusing me of stealing?"

This could be seen as satire - if it hadn't really happened. 

We didn't know the background of Ferdinand von Schirach, the writer of Terror,  the "You decide" courtroom drama directed by Sean Holmes and translated by David Tushingham, before we read about him after the event.

Terror strikes us as a couched - rather too couched - satiric analysis of legal misdirection and diversion where the supposed moral conundrum can easily be dismantled in one sentence and the binary vote at the end is a palpable nonsense.

A rapid response military fighter pilot Lars Koch (Ashley Zanghaza) deployed when a civilian airplane is highjacked by a terrorist makes the decision to shoot the plane down against orders and against German constitutional law.

The motivation?  The plane carrying just over 160 passengers was heading for the Allianz stadium in Munich where there were 70,000 people. Is he guilty of murder?

All the audience aka voters are promoted flatteringly by judge (Tanya Moodie) to the status of "lay judges" and the very narrow remit laid before them.

If you decide to go to Terror, by the end you might be ruminating on a seemingly knotty moral conundrum.

Alternatively you might agree even a seemingly democratic electronic voting process can become the gateway to a coup if the judge, pilot, lawyers and even the court usher, who also stands by, are so inclined.

You might, on the other hand, accept the authority of the court and view the statements made by the judge, the lawyers and the questioning of two witnesses as transparent.

Or you might question why there are only two witnesses, the military air traffic controller  Lieutenant Colonel Christian Lauterbach (John Lightbody) and a passenger's wife named as "joint plaintiff" Franziska Meiser (Shanaya Rafaat) with everything else second hand through the judges and lawyers.

We'll make no bones about it. Having heard the evidence from two witnesses, the questioning and speeches of the prosecution (Forbes Masson) and defence (Emma Fielding) lawyers and something from the pilot, TLT refused to vote.

She might not be the only one because the number of abstainers was not counted - in fact we don't even know whether the final result was truly the way the audience voted.

TLT will also nip in here and say that a fact laid out by the prosecution and confirmed by the military witness demolished all subsequent arguments, although it was not included in the topsy turvy process when the judge summed up after the verdict.

We don't want to give too much more away but we'd put it like this. If TLT were a journalist covering this trial - which many will find rather dry and abstract - there is a startling news angle and headline  buried in a witness's testimony and then never referred to again. A spoiler hint about the course of action which could have been taken is on this link, if you want to click on it.

Now we'll reveal what we didn't realise until after the show. Ferdinand Von Schirach, the playwright, is the grandson of the head of the National Socialist Youth movement, Baldur von Schirach,  who also took part in the transportation Jewish citizens to concentration camps.

So the playwright, who is also a lawyer, has had plenty of years to consider how a murderous regime and a head of state can be voted in democratically under a seemingly "legal" veneer.

He seems also to have considered how people aren't that precise about analysing the facts against superficially logical arguments, even when it involves sacrifing hundreds of fellow citizens  - if these citizens are not their nearest and dearest or vital to their well-being.

Giving this away may seem like a partial spoiler, only ... there was nothing to flag this play up as a satire and not a courtroom drama and, if they could still be bothered, many left still trying to weigh up ponderously-put moral arguments.

In other words, this was for us about words and so-called moral arguments beguiling an audience away from an indisputable fact, judging (no pun intended) by the cross section around us.

We're willing to be corrected if it's not satire and it's just that nobody's noticed previously there is a prolonged section which contradicts the whole premise.

But, although we're vain, we're really not that vain, and a postscript to the published text, with the playwright expressing his admiration for Jewish German satirist Kurt Tucholsky, does seem to give a clue.

It's perfectly good acting and direction with a suitably awe-inspiring court designed by Anna Fleischle, even if the script becomes somewhat ponderous. In other circumstances, we might give it an amber light.

However  with the play marked not as a satire but as an interactive drama, "a worldwide phenomenon that's stirred debate across the globe", it feels fundamentally dishonest. For that alone we feel it should be a red light review.

It's a highly unusual situation for a TLT review - but we've laid out our prosecution and the defence. You decide.