THE BROTHERS SIZE. To 15 December.
London
THE BROTHERS SIZE
by Tarell Alvin McCraney.
Young Vic (The Maria). To 15 December 2007.
Audio-described 8 Dec 7.45pm
Captioned 3 Dec.
Mon-Sat 7.45pm Mat Sat & 5 Dec 4pm.
Ruins 1hr 30min No interval.
TICKETS: 020 7922 2922.
www.youngvic.org
Review: Timothy Ramsden 15 November.
New names on the block should ensure queues all round it.
Apart from its lighting designer, I’d heard of no-one connected with this production. Not the American author, nor the director, new artistic head at atc (which toured this Young Vic co-production before its arrival in London). I look forward to hearing from them again soon, especially as playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney apparently has a sisters play as sibling to this one.
Mind you, I think Patrick Burnier has a cheek taking a design credit. A few splashes on the floor apart, the only design element on the central stage is a chalk circle – and that’s drawn by the actors as the play starts.
It’s the only thing potentially Caucasian about the evening, which draws on Yoruba myth to tell its modern story of mechanic Ogun and wildcard brother Oshoosi Size, poor Black citizens of the southern USA. Osi, as his brother often calls him, is fresh out of prison, followed by ex-inmate Elegba, a substitute brother from the days of incarceration. He has his own reason for following Oshoosi, and their lives merge around a car he brings with him. It’s Ogun who makes it go; the others revel in its freedom and speed.
McCraney writes a loose-looking free verse, but the impact in performance is dazzlingly varied. There’s poetic recounting of dreams, vigorous short-sentence confrontation, novelistic narration and a virtual poem of desire. At times the speech tattoos like drumbeats, making irregular stabs in the air, at others it’s like a flowing stream of images. For director Bijan Sheibani it’s a calling-card production, assuring he has both the enterprise in repertoire and theatrical instinct which have long marked-out atc.
The cast are immaculate. Nyasha Hatendi’s Ogun and Obi Abili’s Oshoosi are similar in build and features, but made utterly diverse by their contrasting characters, the one stolidly intense, the other energetically mobile. Nathaniel Martello-White’s Elegba looks markedly different, and inserts himself insinuatingly into a relationship which he challenges but ends up confirming. All three are alive to the shifts in mood between energy and reflection and to each nuance of described action and every response to each other’s behaviour.
Ogun: Nyasha Hatendi.
Oshoosi: Obi Abili.
Elegba: Nathaniel Martello-White.
Musician: Manuel Pinheiro.
Director: Bijan Sheibani.
Designer: Patrick Burnier.
Lighting: Mike Gunning.
Music Advisor: Elspeth Brooke.
Choreographer: Aline David.
Assistant directors: Ellen McDougall, Josh Giles-Burnette.
2007-11-19 12:29:21