By, John Nathan
1 min read
ByJohn Nathan, John Nathan
American writer Bruce Norris's dissection of racial politics is a defining play of our time.
Dominic Cooke's exquisite production opened to gasps of shock at the Royal Court last year. There were even one or two heckles. A couple of cast changes and a West End transfer later, the play has lost none of its power.
Norris's play is umbilically attached to A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 classic which follows the fate of the African-American Younger family who, just as they are about to move out of poverty and their run-down tenement, are visited by Karl, the only white character in the play, who offers them money not to move into his white neighbourhood.
Clybourne Park, which was first seen in New York last year, is set in the Younger's intended new home. The white owners (Stuart McQuarrie and Sophie Thompson, pictured with Lorna Brown) are in the process of packing when they are paid a visit by Hansberry's Karl (Stephen Campbell Moore), here accompanied by his deaf, pregnant wife.
In Karl's horrifying attempt to persuade his hosts to stop the sale, he picks at two of the period's most painful wounds until they are raw; the legacy of the Korean War and slavery, the latter in the presence of the black maid Francine and her husband (Brown and Lucian Msamati).
If this scene sets your political correctness radar twitching, the second act, set 50 years later in 2009, will have it spinning off the scale.
A white couple have moved into the house (Campbell Moore and Goldberg again), which is now located in a black area. Negotiations with their new black neighbours (Brown and Msamati) about their building plans evolve into charged exchanges that culminate in a series of racist jokes, the last one of which, even though it's a joke, is possibly the most explosive line of dialogue ever uttered on stage.
Revisiting the play, what struck me was the skill with which Norris creates a dialogue between two periods. Almost every action and line of speech in the second act has its equivalent in the first. White, liberal assumptions that have evolved from the openly racist 1950s to an era of enlightened tolerance are utterly dismantled. This is the most electrifying play about modern attitudes since David Mamet's Oleanna attacked political correctness in 1993.