Brilliant production, flawed play, seems to be the critical consensus around this rare revival of Lorraine Hansberry's drama, which she started writing in 1960 and didn't quite finish by the time she died of cancer at 34 in 1965.
However, I'm more inclined to think that the play, with its thrillingly articulate, racially charged argument, and its audacious historical and territorial sweep across colonised Africa, has finally got the production it deserves. A little context wouldn't go amiss here.
With the Chicago-set A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry was the first African-American woman playwright to be staged on Broadway. Although Raisin was populated mainly by a black family, one of its unforgettable scenes involves a white man who attempts to prevent them from living in his white neighbourhood, something which Hansberry's family experienced when she was a child in the 1930s.
But the political mind behind what became a modern classic about the African-American condition had the ambition to break out of the world in which Hansberry was raised. And it was this that, with the help of her Jewish former husband Robert Nemiroff, drove Hansberry to turn her focus to Africa under colonial rule. For this production, the latest play-script has been honed further by director Yael Farber with the help of dramaturge Drew Lichtenburg, and Nemiroff's stepdaughter Joi Gresham, who is also the trustee of Hansberry's work. The result is quite unlike any play about race I have seen. Farber, a South African-raised Jewish director with a track record of deploying black African, Xhosa ritual in her Africa-set productions, uses that theatrical magic to stunning effect here. The play begins with the stage, shrouded in shafts of smokey light, encircled by four chanting black African women whose music is, as the play puts it, "half lament and half marching song." Equally haunting is a lone, semi-naked woman, described in Hansberry's script as a dancer "painted for war" but who, in Farber's production, is a tall figure (Sheila Atim) as fragile as she is formidable and who moves with a haunting lope.
