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Caroline or Change – Playhouse I don’t understand the recent-ish fashion for standing ovations. These days, in New York, the audience will stand for anything, including the set, which is jolly annoying if you're trying to listen to the play. I believe that If you have appreciated a good production or performance, it is sufficient to remain seated and clap loudly. The cast will be happy and other members of the audience will be even happier without the ear-splitting shrieks, whoops, and whistles which these days often accompany the final curtain, along with half or more of the audience clambering to its feet while either applauding or donning their coats. For me, a standing ovation comes when I find myself on my feet at the end of a show, standing because I simply cannot stay in my seat. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of deserved standing ovations I meet during the course of a year’s theatregoing, remembering a year’s theatregoing for me is something north of 150 performances. This week I found myself on my feet twice, clapping ‘til my hands hurt. One of them was Caroline or Change. Caroline or Change has finally landed in the West End from runs off-Broadway, on Broadway, at Chichester, and recently, at Hampstead. It is the felicitous collaboration between playwright Tony Kushner (Angels in America) and composer Jeanine Tesori (Fun Home) and, along with Hamilton and Ragtime, is one of the truly important musicals of recent years. It started as a memoir of Kushner’s childhood in a middle class Jewish family in Louisiana, and, because he is a great playwright and can’t help turning the simplest of material into a work of art, it became a major examination of race relations in America. The catalyst is Caroline, Sharon D. Clarke in a career-defining performance as the family maid. Caroline is not nice. She doesn’t fit into the cuddly, nurturing black maid stereotype so often played in the movies by Butterfly McQueen and Hattie McDaniel. When asked why she had agreed to play so many maids, Hattie McDaniel memorably replied, “I’d rather play a maid than be one.” The more we see of Caroline’s life, the more we understand that. Caroline is mean, even to the lonely little boy who adores her. Caroline is terminally mad at everybody, at the family which employs her, at her friends, even at her children whom she is trying to bring up alone on a maid’s salary. The ‘change’ in the title refers to the nickels and dimes, coins the family carelessly leaves in the pants they give her to wash and that the mistress of the house well-meaning but insulting, tells her to keep. She stops just short of insubordination, she needs this job, but there is no doubting her disappointment and fury at the way her life has turned out. Until at last she makes her stand against all the unintended insults, the dismissiveness, being taken for granted, the perceived invisibility that makes her life intolerable. Sharon D. Clarke plays Caroline with a conviction born from experience and technique. She is electrifying, even at her most grumpy (the first time we see her smile is at the curtain call), and the magnificent gospel-tinged voice which tells us what Caroline thinks and feels is alone worth the price of admission. Every character gets their say. Kushner and Tesori have, with music and words, offered us some understanding of every character, human or inanimate, from child to washing machine, to socialist grandfather, to upwardly mobile friend, to alcoholic ex-husband and all the others. Caroline’s only friends are the appliances that accompany her in the sweltering basement where she works – the washing machine (Me’sha Bryan), the tumble dryer (Ako Mitchell), and the radio (a spectacular doo-wop trio of Dujonna Gift-Simms, Keisha Amponsa Banson, and Tanisha Spring) – and her life is overshadowed by worry for her children until, in the final moments, there is a transformative moment and we see a glimmer of hope for Caroline and all who are like her. Change is coming – the play is set in the 1950s – and soon the civil rights movement will take hold and life for black and white will be transformed. Change, then, is what’s coming. We hope. Sweat – Donmar Warehouse If you’ve been wondering who on earth voted for Donald Trump, look no further than the Donmar Warehouse where the play of the year will explain it all. Sweat is a magnificent play by double Pulitzer Prize-winner Lynn Nottage. This was my second standing ovation of the week. A fine cast embodies her characters with such exactitude you can smell the engine grease. It is about the American working poor who are not so different from the British working poor. In work, they can just about make ends meet until there’s a medical or family emergency or somebody gets laid off or the company installs robots to replace the workers and then all certainties are up for grabs. Then, they either get another job or their worlds collapse. These are the miners, the factory workers, the mill workers, the steel workers. These are the people who work all their lives in the same plant only to have it close or get taken over. These are the people who live in towns where the plant or the factory they work in is the only employer in town and sending the jobs to Vietnam or Korea can destroy a whole mini-society. These are the people the politicians forgot. Until Trump’s campaign advisers remembered there was a huge swathe of people in the middle of the United States who felt themselves unrepresented, undervalued, and unloved. They made up a load of tosh about reopening the steelworks and the coal mines and the ship yards, and thereby scooped up all the votes that the Clintons never bothered to ask for. Sweat is set in a local bar where all the regulars work in the local factory as did their fathers, as do their sons. But this is Pennsylvania in 2008 and as the economy dissolves, the effects inevitably fall on the working class, women and men, white and black, with Hispanic elements beginning to enter the arena too. They’re all going to be swept away, lose their jobs, be unable to feed their families, while in New York and California and London the bankers open another bottle of champagne and the politicians bail out another bank. Who voted for Donald Trump? They did. The Cane -Royal Court I tried really hard to care about the three characters in Mark Ravenhill’s new play The Cane because I have great respect for Ravenhill’s writing. In it, an unruly crowd of schoolchildren from the local comprehensive are besieging the dilapidated house of a retiring teacher because they have heard that he used to cane boys in the school. So far, so farfetched. The teacher and his fawningly supportive wife receive an unexpected visit from their estranged daughter, also a teacher, who offers to help them cope with the fallout from the angry children and school board by apologising for his past misdeeds. Three first rate actors, especially the wonderful Alun Armstrong who is most welcome back to the stage, Elizabeth Sprigg, whose disdain for the daughter is worth seeing, and Nicola Walker, who is familiar from playing every role not currently inhabited by Olivia Colman, were unable to persuade me to give a damn about ancient cruelty when there is so much current cruelty in our schools. We never do find out why these parents hate their daughter or she them, nor why she suddenly decides to bury the hatchet after many years. There are a few wisps of background such as stories of the daughter as an unruly teenager attacking the living room walls with an axe (which they have left unrepaired) but they never satisfactorily resolve. The cane itself, the one the father used to use, many years ago, on the boys in his class, is kept in the attic wrapped in a blanket as a kind of icon but there is no through line and nothing they do or say endears us to any of them. I wasn’t curious about them, I just wanted to get away from these peculiar people and pray that no child I love is ever taught by any of them. The Tragedy of King Richard the Second – Almeida It’s hard not to make the obvious joke about the walls being more riveting than the play, so I won’t. (But the walls are tin with rivets in them. Just saying.) Joe Hill-Gibbins’ post-modern version of Richard 11 or, to give it its full ceremonial title, as Shakespeare and the Almeida do, The Tragedy of King Richard the Second, is blessedly short and it has Simon Russell Beale. That’s the good part. On the other hand, it no longer has any plot or sense so that’s the bad part. Are you familiar with this play about power, its acquisition and its loss, its ambition and collateral damage? No? Well you are unlikely to be any more familiar with it after watching a much too small cast running around the tin walls, spouting, rather than speaking, many lines from the play without actually performing the play itself. The characterizations are gone, the drama is gone, and all that is left is a wounded ego (Richard) and a petulant schoolboy (Bolingbroke) arguing over a Christmas cracker crown. That Simon Russell Beale is able to inject any humanity into the selfish King who doesn’t know whether he wants the bother of monarchy or not is a tribute to a truly great actor marooned in a production he spends the evening trying to escape while being crowned with many indignities, not least having a bucket of soil solemnly upended on his head, followed by a bucket of water, helpfully labelled Water. But then, he has previously thrown a different bucket, this one labelled Blood, over a random group of his own courtiers. Or maybe they weren’t random. Each actor plays enough parts with no change of jeans or t-shirt, that maybe I was supposed to identify them all huddled together in a corner of the stage, and couldn’t. I wondered vaguely, while watching this, whether Shakespeare himself would have recognised his own work. There were a few enthusiastic souls who were generous enough to give Simon Russell Beale a standing ovation. Brave though he is, I wasn’t one of them.
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AuthorRuth Leon is a writer and critic specialising in music and theatre. Archives
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