“I en’t fillin my eye with water for no man!” cries the orphaned, defiant Rosa collapsing on the sun-bleached boards when she realises that her man means what he says about taking the emigrant ship from Port-of-Spain. But Sophie, older and long acquainted with the sweet struggle of family life in that shabby backyard, knows better. Her own man is in bad trouble and her heart breaks for him, and for “the many times he was worth a bowlful of tears”.
The evening was nearly over: I was spellbound since the start, thrilled by one of the 20th century’s great neglected plays. Apart from an outing in Nottingham in 2003, Errol John’s story of Trinidad in the 1940s has not been around since a 30th anniversary revival in 1988. Seeing it for the first time I mourned that he gave us only two stage plays.
In its vigorous poetic vernacular, heart, truth and evocation of vibrant life under stress, it does for its community what Synge, Wesker and O”Neill variously did for theirs. Its warmth is universal.
Michael Buffong directs and his cast — appropriately a Trinidadian rainbow from pale Creole to darkest African — displays what brilliant black British actors we now have (the 1958 production upset Equity by importing American leads). Martina Laird is a lovely Sophie: witty, impatient, warm, scolding, the eternal matriarch holding it together. She brilliantly does the cruel, wrenching moment of self-doubt, too: the shiver of a woman who realises that be she never so dutiful at washtub and cradle, she may get it wrong. Young Tahirah Sharif gives the child Esther a luminous innocence; Danny Sapani as the emigrant powerfully conveys the battle between ambition and self-disgust, and Jenny Jules is a disgracefully funny, strutting, thrustingly tarty neighbour dragging American servicemen up her rickety stairs. Jude Akuwudike as Charlie is most poignant of all, grey now but remembering his glory days as a fast bowler and a cricketing career cut short after he dared complain about islanders being put in dirty boarding houses on tour.
The only cavil is the physical format: the yard is lovingly detailed, from the distressed, sun-cracked wooden porch to the communal tap. But Soutra Gilmour sets it between opposing banks of seats. So at crucial moments half the audience sees a key actor’s back, and when characters talk of the great Caribbean full moon your eye follows theirs, and finds pale faces and green exit signs. Suddenly you’re back in a theatre, not a world. But it’s the only flaw: lets hope this lovely production migrates to other stages. Meanwhile, just go.
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Box office: 020-7452 3000 to June 9. Production sponsored by Neptune --