Act II: American Racial History Plays in London - New York Times

By BEN BRANTLEY

Published: January 1, 2006

LONDON

Act II: American Racial History Plays in London - New York Times: "After several decades of the catchall approach called postmodernism, a style so festooned in quotation marks that you couldn't always see what was being quoted, the London theater has returned to tackling period pieces on their own terms. It's an attitude that is evident in the powerful current revivals of Ibsen's 'Wild Duck' (at the Donmar), John Osborne and Anthony Creighton's 'Epitaph for George Dillon' (at the Comedy) and the inevitable Williams entry, 'The Night of the Iguana' (at the Lyric).

Most surprising, though, is the extension of this sensibility to vintage works by and/or about African-Americans - plays that would seem at best dated and at worst downright offensive in accepting stereotypes that no one wants to remember. One of last year's happier West End musical diversions was the Young Vic's production of 'Simply Heavenly,' a 1957 show with book and lyrics by Langston Hughes. This story of a comic-strip-simple naif in Harlem named, well, Jesse B. Semple was staged with a straightforward cheerfulness that might have equally suited other minor musicals from the same era about innocent ditzes, 'Bells Are Ringing,' say, or 'Where's Charley?'"
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Indeed, the play's first act is so fresh and clear-eyed in its take on big-city racial oppression that I wondered why I hadn't heard of it before. Despite the comforting presence of Andy's feisty old grandmother (Carmen Munroe) and virtuous girlfriend (Ony Uhiara), you can see why he feels that only outside of the United States can he avoid a fate like that of his spineless father (Joseph Marcell), a lifetime redcap. (Another character memorably says of him, "Charlie, I wish I had known you when you were alive.")

It's in the second act that "Walk Hard, Talk Loud" " shows its age,
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The last time I saw "The Emperor Jones" (10 years ago), the title role was played by a white woman in black face, the extraordinary Kate Valk, in the Wooster Group's dazzling, technologically layered deconstruction. O'Neill's play became a black man's tale appropriated and distorted by years of ruling-class perceptions and middle-class entertainments.

No such indirection for Ms. Sharrock, who is also represented this season (in a testament to her versatility) by Tom Stoppard's adaptation of Gerald Sibleyras's "Heroes" in the West End. Mr. Joseph's "Emperor" is undeniably a black man of intimidating strength and presence. But from the beginning, he is palpably on the edge of a breakdown; his eyes feverishly aglitter, he suggests that fear is the flip side of his fearsomeness.

His subsequent journey into the jungle and into madness uncovers the legacy of that fear. The phantoms that materialize among the trees take the forms of members of a chain gang, of participants in a slave auction, of shackled men in the hold of a slave ship. And you start to feel that the heart of darkness O'Neill portrays is as much societal as it is psychological.

Because of the physical intimacy of this production and the intensity of Mr. Joseph's performance, these scenes register with a visceral sense of entrapment that makes everyone watching feel, like the Emperor, angry, guilty and scared. By heightening elements that have always existed in "The Emperor Jones," Ms. Sharrock allows O'Neill to speak for himself once again. His voice emerges as firm, clear and abidingly, damningly relevant. //end

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FOR years, Eugene O'Neill's "Emperor Jones" has usually been looked upon with a wince. It is as if this stark psychological parable from 1920, which charts the degeneration of a self-appointed black emperor from regal swagger into primal fear, were some formerly famous, deeply embarrassing old relative - the kind you introduce into polite company only with winks and mouthed apologies behind his back.

But the United Kingdom, whatever its official immigration policy, has a way of taking in and rehabilitating the cultural castoffs of the American theater, especially difficult or ostensibly lesser works by masters like O'Neill, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. Now a small London company called the Gate has wrapped the unloved "Emperor Jones" in a bear hug of a production that allows no room for protective self-consciousness or irony. The results have left audiences and critics dazed, disturbed and gasping for superlatives.

Gasping also, I might add, for air. Presented in a second-story space in Notting Hill that is roughly the size of a walk-in closet in Mayfair - with the audience overlooking a deep, dirt-floored pit of a stage that brings to mind a safari trap for big game - Thea Sharrock's production is guaranteed to induce claustrophobia. So is the literally in-your-face performance of Paterson Joseph in the title role of the American railroad porter turned island despot, who stares at us staring at him with eyes that both accuse and consume. Intellectual distance is not an option.