“A Raisin in the Sun” at Lyric Hammersmith
Jeremy Malies in west London
18 October 2024
“What happens to a dream deferred?” In his poem “Harlem”, Langston Hughes speculates that the worst outcome of stifled ambition can be an explosion of hatred. Lorraine Hansberry quotes this at length as a preface to her 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun. The play premiered in a year that saw landmark speeches by Martin Luther King, but Eisenhower’s major piece of Civil Rights legislation was only passed in the following year.
Photo credit: Ikin Yum.
Amid brilliant acting, staging, and logical unfussy direction by Tinuke Craig, it’s Hansberry’s sheer prescience that became my main takeaway. The play is marinated in a theme of frustration. This stretches from man of the house Walter (Solomon Israel) telling sister Beneatha (Joséphine-Fransilja Brookman) that the extent of her medical ambitions should be qualification as a nurse at most, to Walter’s wife Ruth (Cash Holland) bemoaning renters’ rights. This is a topic that was being debated in Parliament the very day I saw the play. “Lord knows, we’ve put enough rent into this here rat trap to pay for four houses by now …”
These are gender and economic issues that are not limited to ethnicity. Of course the thrust of the play is about racial prejudice, and the theme of the family using their inheritance money to move from a black to a white neighbourhood is predominant. But I believe that Hansberry’s focus is broader than is usually acknowledged, and Craig’s handling of the plot underlines this.
Brookman is compelling as she shows her character being prompted (by a student colleague from Nigeria) to consider her assimilation into mainstream Eurocentric culture. Is it an unthinking consumption of superficial music and trashy fiction? Should she examine her heritage fully and find an additional (true) identity or are her goals here in Chicago likely, if achieved, to see her lead a worthwhile life in medicine? Brother Walter is resigned to tending car doors as a chauffeur for his white employer. But just why he should rebel against this to the point of losing wages and proving irresponsible with money are plot elements that I don’t believe Hansberry fully ties up. Israel is a standout in a uniformly fine cast and excels with repeated put-downs for his sister’s two would-be boyfriends from her college campus.
I marvelled at how Brookman balanced wide-eyed wonder at the cultural (including Afrocentric perspectives) that are opening up for her with a streetwise cynicism. But the starting point is disturbing. She mistakes Nigeria for Liberia and asks: “Why should I know anything about Africa?” I find her consistently interesting and endearing as a character and I’m glad that Kwame Kwei-Armah saw fit to give her another iteration by having her leave Chicago for Nigeria soon after the plot here in the 2013 play Beneatha’s Place performed at the Young Vic last year.
None of this is over-didactic or worthy. The text as written is stuffed with wisecracks, physical humour, and amusing moments of misunderstanding that are presented skilfully. Beneatha says of one of her admirers from campus: “He doesn’t care how houses look, Mama—he’s an intellectual!” Craig is blessed (right down to Oliver Dunkley playing the schoolboy son) with a set of actors who have natural comic talent. I have seen the gags in other productions fail spectacularly and undercut the impact of the serious political and cultural content.
There is a resourceful turn by Jonah Russell as Karl, the one white character. He has a dense extended speech in which he must outline the sinister consequences the family might experience if they wish to have white neighbours. Russell manages to make us laugh guiltily at the edgy humour when his character talks about a welcoming committee and how the other residents might help their new neighbours to assimilate. (Assimilation again though in an ironic context.)
The family are not shown as being transient, but you guess that they cannot really settle in this kind of rented accommodation. The set by Cécile Trémolières is in shades of beige that suggest the walls of the home are not much better than plyboard. Craig has offstage characters stand behind sheets of gauze, not to indicate eavesdropping but to reinforce the claustrophobic nature of the living conditions. Trémolières (together with costume designer Maybelle Laye) excels with late-Fifties props and costumes ranging from a gramophone correct down to the precise year to elements as simple as the cut of a pair of pyjamas.
Despite all this detail and sense of place (a copy of the Chicago Tribune describes the detonation of a military bomb the previous day) nothing is distracting. Narrative flow and social issues trump everything. Hansberry’s social observations include having Beneatha tell Ruth that “the only people in the world who are more snobbish than rich white people are rich colored people!”
To an extent, the group shown is a matriarchy. Walter’s mother Lena, played by Doreene Blackstock, can spin the mood of the theatre when she wishes as though she were an Old Testament prophet. Blackstock is outstanding as her character speaks about the many generations of the family who have lived as free people in Chicago and how they will not accept tainted money from whites who want to dictate to them.
In the opening scene, even though the backdrop is urban, lighting designer Joshua Pharo gives us a sense that it is dawn as the characters squabble over time spent in the bathroom and prepare for their day.
The play has proved fertile territory for other brilliant playwrights and there is a second wonderful spin-off in the form of Bruce Norris’s 2010 Clybourne Park during which (it has two time schemes) Karl the neighbourhood representative appears having just left Hansberry’s action here.
The play is a plea for dialogue and acceptance. “How we gets to the place where we scared to talk softness to each other?” asks Walter. A Raisin in the Sun is as relevant as ever, as urgent as ever.