CLYBOURNE PARK

11/2/11, Wyndhams

2 hrs. Every bit as good as they say it is (which is always a relief and a pleasure to report): scabrous, funny, discomfiting and superbly acted, an absolutely riveting expose of the continuing cancer of race in American society. At several moments there was that rare complete stillness in the theatre which seems to happen less often in the West End than in the subsidised/Off West End sector: pure theatrical magic.

Not having seen Lorraine Hansbury's Raisin in the Sun I had no idea, until we read Matt Wolf's excellent essay in the programme at half time, that Bruce Norris's play is a riff on that one -- related to it, according to Matt, in much the same way as Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is related to Hamlet.

In Act One we see a white couple and their neighbours, plus their black maid and her husband, as they argue over the couple's plan to sell their house to a "colored" family. The husband Russ (Stuart McQuarrie) is sunk in gloom; the wife (Sophie Thompson) maintains a brittle jollity. In time we learn their son, convicted of killing civilians while serving in Korea, had committed suicide upstairs (the maid found his body). The central encounter comes when a neighbour, Karl (Stephen Campbell-Moore), argues against the sale on all the expected grounds: it will depress property prices, the neighbourhood will go down the pan, "these people" live differently, eat differently, will be more comfortable if they live separately in their existing neighbourhood. The act climaxes with the confrontation between Karl -- unable to comprehend that his intervention is utterly unwanted, that his arguments have entirely failed to persuade -- and Russ.

Act Two brings us to the present day. A young couple (Campbell-Moore again, wonderfully insensitive, and Sarah Goldberg) have bought the now thoroughly dilapidated house and want to demolish and rebuild; they are meeting the local residents' committee, including a black couple Lena and Kevin (Lorna Brown and Lucian Msamati), to discuss the proposal. Superficially the new owners and the residents' committee all belong to the affluent middle classes. But underneath black and white still have their differences. An elliptical remark from the Brown character leads by degrees to a competitive joke-telling session which is at once hilarious and horrifying: the jokes themselves aren't funny; the characters' reactions are.

How this toxic confection would play in other hands doesn't bear thinking about. With this director (Dominic Cooke) and this cast, playing it with a kind of stylised, heightened naturalism, it's mesmerising and jaw-droppingly effective. And they are good. Though it's invidious to single anyone out, Campbell-Moore plays two very different characters, buttoned-up (literally) 50s suburbanite and Rotarian and superficially liberal but actually boorish 90s man in shorts, and does it brilliantly: they are the two key characters since it's their intervention which propels the action in each act. It's a measure perhaps of what a strong ensemble this is that Lucian Msamati, one of our favourite actors, is here not exactly outclassed but doesn't stand out.

RUINED

21/4/10, Almeida

3 hours (?). Multi-award-winning American play by Louise Nottage, a reversioning of Mother Courage set in the modern Congo with the focus on the ghastly treatment of women: raped, abused, mutilated, abandoned, their children murdered etc etc.

The set by Robert Jones (who also designed the David Tennant Hamlet and Greta Garbo Came to Donegal) was fabulous: a wonderfully detailed tin shack on the revolve. This was Mama Nadi's whorehouse, where she entertained rebels and government soldiers indiscriminately and took everyone's money.

The rebel leader was a staring-eyed ranter; the commander of the government troops an equally terrifying man first seen in a truly hideous bright yellow shell suit with white T-shirt and sunglasses. Both were clearly psychopaths.

Sophie (Pippa Bennett-Warner) was a young girl who'd been "ruined" -- horribly mutilated, to the point where sex was impossible and she was in constant pain, by having a bayonet thrust into her. Salima (Michelle Asante) was a woman who'd been raped and held captive in the bush for five months after her baby's head was crushed beneath a rebel's boot, and after escaping and returning home had been thrown out by her family for dishonouring them. In one of the less-plausible subplots her husband, called Fortune, now a soldier comes looking for her but she refuses to see him even though he spends all night outside the shack.

Lucian Msamati (a marvellous actor we've seen in Death and the King's Horseman at the NT, The Overwhelming about the Rwandan genocide at West Yorkshire Playhouse and Ubu Roi at the Lyric Hammersmith and who was the male lead in the TV version of The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency) played the salesman who brings the girls to apparently hard-as-nails Mama Nadi (Jenny Jules) in the first place and courts her unsuccessfully... until the final scene in which she confesses that she too is "ruined" and he nonetheless embraces her. In one sense it was a marvellous theatrical moment: the house was utterly silent. But it was also a sentimental cop-out: a bleak play about a bleak subject, man's inhumanity to man, especially woman, and the utter inhumanity of war, should have ended bleakly as Mother Courage does and as The Overwhelming did. Such American sentimentality compromised what was otherwise an outstanding piece about an often-forgotten human disaster.

Directed by Indha Rubasingham.

DEATH AND THE KING'S HORSEMAN

21/04/09, National (Olivier)

2hrs 20 mins. A big play (in all sorts of ways) by Wole Soyinka, about the clash of cultures in colonial Nigeria. Reviews were mixed: we thought it was a cracker.

I've left it too long (nearly three weeks) to write this up, so this is an impressionistic account.

Lots of movement and dance, combining the work of a Nigerian called Peter Badejo and the western choreographer Javier de Frutos. Especially liked the white folks' ball, with everyone in 18th century fancy dress and the numbers swelled by dancers bearing dummies on milkmaids' ... things (yokes?).

The principal setting an African market with loads of people, colourful costumes and an extraordinary central bit of set from which at one point long lines off which hung clothes were stretched out to the far corners of the set.

The colonial Brits were played by black actors in white face, in a neat reversal of the old convention that had black characters played by blacked-up whites: it worked well for the most part, not least because the colonial officer was played by Lucian Msamati, a wonderful actor we've also seen as Arturo Ui at the Lyric and in a top-notch play about Rwandan genocide at the West Yorkshire Playhouse called The Overwhelming. They are of course British actors, so the fact that they can do upper-class British accents should come as no surprise. Only one failed to convince: a young subaltern was far too thickset.

At the heart of the play was a nice ambiguity: a month after the king's death, on the day of his burial, the king's horseman is due to commit ritual suicide to escort him into the afterlife. But he doesn't. Is it because the Brits, appalled at the notion, have stepped in to foil him at the last moment? Or because he finds life (and his new wife, taken for the occasion) too appealing to leave? The question is left open.

At the play's tragic end, though, the horseman's son, sent off to London to train as a doctor, commits suicide in his place and the old man hangs himself.

Rufus Norris, the (white) director, apparently spent some years in Nigeria as a young child.

Claire Benedict, an actress I haven't always warmed to, played the part of the wise old woman with tremendous authority. Nonso Anozie (new to me) played the horseman with enormous relish.

The language was poetic, the accents quite thick and it took a while to get attuned to. But once attuned, it was rewarding.