RADIO GOLF. To 1 November.
London.
RADIO GOLF
by August Wilson.
Tricycle Theatre To 1 November 2008.
Mon-Sat 8pm Mat Sat 4pm 7 15, 22 Oct 2pm.
Runs 2hr 25min One interval.
TICKETS: 020 7328 1000.
www.tricycle.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 13 October.
The last instalment of August Wilson’s mighty Decalogue. Now what’s needed is a chance to see all ten plays as a cycle.
It was a magnificent scheme, writing ten full-length plays exploring the lives of Black Americans in each decade of the 20th-century. Thank goodness the idea came to August Wilson, who wrote dialogue that melts into the mind, contriving crises naturally through intriguing characters whose talk moves firmly, yet unobtrusively forward.
Radio Golf (the title refers to Black assimilation into mainstream business and social activity) is set in 1997, though it concerns a house from Wilson’s earliest-set play. But Aunt Esther, its former owner, is long-dead, her home now a piece of prime real-estate. Involved in its redevelopment are two black businessmen. Harmond Wilks is also seeking election as the town’s first Black mayor, a stage on his way to the Senate (and, it might now seem, possibly the Presidency).
His partner, the perhaps significantly lighter-skinned Roosevelt Hicks, is climbing the ladder of business success, and has no scruple about using his ethnic credentials to front a White businessman’s commercial expansion.
As with Harmond’s wife Mame (who seems to exist merely to make the point), fast-forward is Roosevelt’s only way to go. But Harmond’s increasingly influenced by the deadbeat segment of local society, former school bully turned itinerant decorator Sterling Johnson and Elder Joe, with plentiful convictions and an uncertain income.
Wilson doesn’t produce a happy-end rabbit from this plot, though as the future of the development seems fixed, Paulette Randle’s production ends with Harmond assertively rolling-up his sleeves, having discovered a literal kinship with the Elder, and an identity as a Black man. Quite what this is, or whether compromising his political career will be positive or negative for his co-ethnic citizens of Pittsburgh, remains unresolved.
It leaves the play with unanswered questions about the way ahead; yet perhaps that’s part of the point. The 1990s play was always going to set a problem, with little historical development to provide a context. But Danny Sapani’s forcefully sympathetic Harmond, Ray Shell’s sterling performance as the nimble-witted Sterling and Joe Marcell providing firework-like energy and sympathy in Joe's certainty and unpredictable responses, make this an intriguingly unresolved end to Wilson’s mighty work.
Mame Wilks: Julie Saunders.
Harmond Wilks: Danny Sapani.
Roosevelt Hicks: Roger Griffiths.
Sterling Johnson: Ray Shell.
Elder Joseph Barlow: Joseph Marcell.
Director: Paulette Randall.
Designer: Libby Watson.
Lighting: Matthew Eagland.
Sound: Al Ashford.
Dialect coach: Rick Lipton.
2008-10-14 11:23:18