YELLOWMAN. To 19 June.
London
YELLOWMAN
by Dael Orlandersmith
Hampstead Theatre To 19 June 2004
Mon-Sat 7.45pm Mat Sat & 10 June 3pm
Audio-described 19 June 3pm
BSL Signed 16 June
Captioned 8 June
Post-show discussion 8 June
Runs 1hr 45min No interval
TICKETS: 020 7722 9301
www.hampsteadtheatre.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 26 May 2004
Hampstead may have had a faltering season to date, but this one's a runner.Dael Orlandersmith marks herself out among American writers by individual use of two familiar things. Technically, her play's made up of intercut monologues. But their use reinforces the characters' relationships. Childhood friends and youthful sweethearts, the form always suggests a division between them. Even together, they speak apart rather than converse.
Thematically, this is another play about colour prejudice in the USA. But it's internalised in the South Carolina where Alma and Eugene grow up, within the Black community. And often directed inwards, characters despising themselves and others for being dark and not light; the highest lightness-rating is to be called yellow, not black.
When dark' is not a term of contempt or self-hatred, then light' and yellow' become objects of redirected hate, indicating the presumed effeminacy of light-skinned punks'.
This post-slavery community has its own identities which confine as much as they identify. It's only when Alma breaks free to New York, and Eugene eventually bursts the limits of his home-town ambition to join her they swing free. It's a funeral that brings them down to earth, showing the past's deadly cling.
Indhu Rubasingham deploys her two actors with remarkable flexibility about the stage, avoiding any sense of the static, just as the massive house behind them can be lit up or in gloom to reflect action and mood, without the effect becoming intrusive.
And what actors they are, creating not only their main characters from childhood to young adult, but friends, associates and, above all, family. It's there most tensions lie. Cecilia Noble moves between the lithe, bright Alma and her large-bodied, slow-talking mother, while Kevin Harvey brings a range of resonant and characterful voices to male family members. Both give outstanding, minutely detailed performances that present full-born people without a hint of technical strain.
You can see the way things are going until they near the end, where they veer shockingly. Harvey is magnificent in Eugene's ultimate conflict, a working-out of the play's themes and tensions. It's there that hate and self-hatred drive their final wedge, reducing love to a melancholy lyricism.
Eugene: Kevin Harvey
Alma: Cecilia Noble
Director: Indhu Rubasingham
Designer: Liz Ascroft
Lighting: Chris Davey
Sound: Crispian Covell
Composer/Musical Director: Paul Englishby
Voice/Dialect coach: Neil Swain
2004-05-27 06:35:40