Review Torn

Torn
by Nathaniel Martello-White

The Broken Branch
http://www.royalcourttheatre.com/

Another play about a family tree cracking and snapping but this time the roots of the familial problems go deeper than First World Problems in Nathaniel Martello-White's Torn directed by Richard Twyman in the Jerwood Theatre upstairs at the Royal Court.

We enter what appears to be an institutional room with wooden floor, moulded plastic grey plastic chairs for the audience in a round - a few raised up at the back like bar chairs, the only concession, along with lighting and sound, to the theatrical space designed by Ultz. 

Already in the room is Angel (Adelle Leonce) who converses with the audience, helps herself to a drink from the tea urn on a table in one corner. So Angel is aware that people are watching as she draws out chairs for the family members, we are about to learn, she has drawn together. But for what?

Maybe at first it seems like a showdown - we know from Angel's first anouncement to us, something bad happened - but after a while, it seems that even Angel does not even know why she has brought the eight family members together and what she expects. Except she knows, we have seen this at the beginning of course, she is showing us.

Although the family at first trickle in with few words, just uncertainty as to why they have been called together, the trickle of words soon turns into a deluge. The audience has to adjust to the criss-crossing conversations and rising cadences as emotions boil up and over.

At one point an analogy to a flock of  birds of prey becomes explicit and it seems this is how the play is structured. The lone one at first and gradually more and more flock in and greet and peck at each other.

And they are dangerous issues to peck at: the consequences of mixed race, yes, harking back to past slavery but also feeding into current issues. Slave owning and present day debt collection merge together with child abuse emerging from both.

At just over ninety minutes, the story shifts and turns around fractured family and time lines. It's a hard ask for an audience to concentrate intently all the time and there are moments when the action seems to sag into too much intricacy, shouting matches and huge-eyed Angel can only be static, standing apart as a bystander.

Yet a story with many layers over time and space does emerge of a child torn from the mainstream of her family by past and present economics, a family pitted against itself and manipulated in spite of itself by a criminal stepfather. It's not perfect as we've indicated but stand out performances do emerge from Leonce as Angel, her mother known only as Twin 1, Indra Ové, Roger Griffiths as Angel's father Brian, Kirsty Bushell as both fairer Aunty J and white Irish Nanny and James Hillier as stepfather Steve.

Director Twyman with lighting by Charles Balfour and sound by Gareth Fry keep up the pace  and it's an amber/green TLT light for this difficult but rewarding play.

Review Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

by August Wilson

The Day The Music Died 
www.nationaltheatre.org.uk

Coming home from Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, directed by Dominic Cooke, TLT could have sworn the exhaust of her normally sober little hatchback emitted a series of sobs. But she couldn't ask due to the - ahem - lump in her own throat.

Written in 1982 by Frederick August Kittel Jr, otherwise known as August Wilson, the play follows a band of Chicago session musicians on a day fifty five years earlier when the eponymous Gertrude "Ma" Rainey (Sharon D Clarke), the Queen Bee of the blues, is about to record a new album of songs.

But it's the drones who are at the centre of the action relegated to a basement rehearsal room. Meanwhile, in Ultz's telling set design  the control room is perched on high with white studio boss Mel Sturdyvant (Stuart McQuarrie), allowing only Ma's white management Irvin (Finbar Lynch) to climb the stairs from the studio.

In the words of the play, the musicians are the "nuts in the stew" pulled in to facilitate the session. The bookish Toledo (Lucien Msamati), given to lecturing, neatly playing the piano. Cutler (Clint Dyer) the trombonist and band leader "One, two, you know what to do ..." aware where his bread is buttered.Slow Drag (Giles Terera) on the bass wanting an uncomplicated life. And finally Levee (O-T Fagbenle) the trumpet player, young, vain,  quivering with brashness and undisciplined talent, eager to form his own band.

Seemingly a riff on the music industry and the history of black migration to northern cities from the rural south, the play reaches much further and picks at the scab on the bent knee of collaborative money-driven creativity with intricate precision.

The musicians tell their competing histories, both asserting their right to exist and as a kind of confessional. With the lightest of touches, the playwright evokes the patterns of nepotism and corruption replicated at every level before they blend into anonymity for the recording of the star turn.

This isn't an open ended play of rights and wrongs though, far from it. Ma Rainey sashays in late after a fracas with the police, permitting (yes, that is the correct word in the all-too-human power play of this saga) her manager to bribe the officers.

She battles for control of how she sings her own songs bringing her into conflict with Levee who, having produced modern up-tempo arrangments of Ma Rainey's songs,  believes he has formed an alliance with the white boss.  

How the best-laid plans go wrong is for the audience to discover and the hurt  radiates long after the trap finally snaps shut.This has been a long playing piece since its first performance in 1984 for a reason and TLT gives a green light for this pitch perfect production.