★★★★☆
Race, class and money: the American writer Bruce Norris unerringly fingers three of the tenderest spots of liberal sensitivity and gives them a vigorous and insistent jabbing in his explosive 2010 play. In Lorraine Hansberry’s classic A Raisin in the Sun, the Youngers, an African-American family, meet with horrified resistance when they plan to move to the white Chicago neighbourhood of Clybourne Park. Norris’s drama presents an oblique, 21st-century response to Hansberry’s work that incinerates politically correct platitudes and lays bare the prejudices, pretensions and greed stirred up by the issue of property.
Daniel Buckroyd’s touring production of Clybourne Park for Colchester’s Mercury Theatre lacks the lethal precision of Dominic Cooke’s UK premiere at the Royal Court six years ago. Yet it displays a keen relish for the writing’s wicked intelligence and it is often savagely funny.
The two acts, separated by 50 years, with the actors doubling up to play a different character in each period, are set in the same house. The first act is set in 1959. The owners, Russ and Bev, are selling to the Youngers to escape the memory and social stigma of the suicide of their son, a traumatised Korean War veteran. As hostilities with residents boil over, the couple’s black domestic help, Francine, and her husband are dragged into the ugly debate.
Five decades later, Clybourne Park has become an area ripe for gentrification and a well-heeled young white couple clash with Lena and Kevin, two representatives of the now-predominantly black community, when they snap up the house, intending to give it a grandiose makeover.
As the tone swings from blatant bigotry to strained civilities and clumsy euphemism, Norris mercilessly ratchets up the excruciation. Buckroyd’s production permits us a glimpse of the pain beneath the manic cheeriness of Rebecca Manley’s Bev and the tense, quiet rage of Mark Womack’s Russ, before plunging us into the acid bath of the later scenes. In these Manley is transformed into a fast-talking real-estate lawyer and Gloria Onitiri, mutedly seething as Francine, becomes incendiary as the laceratingly articulate Lena. This is theatre that delights in saying the unsayable: a provocative, painful pleasure.
Touring to May 28, mercurytheatre.co.uk