What Paul Miller has done at the Orange Tree is exceptional. He took over the tiny, congenial, staid theatre three years ago, just as it was stripped of its Arts Council grant. He has made a name for it as a beacon of experiment. New writers. New directors. New actors. But he has also combined invention with rediscovery. Rarely performed Shaw, DH Lawrence and Mustapha Matura.
And now, ingeniously a play that is both new and old, and which hinges on being two-faced. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon is bold, excessive, surging. It reworks an 1859 melodrama by Dion Boucicault, in which a plantation owner falls for a girl who is (she gives the play its title) one eighth black. It tips its hat to the original – to its dramatic dash, and its almost progressiveness – but also shreds its assumptions. Everyone has a mask. A woman may switch in an instant from niminy-piminy to hard-talking, hard-smoking. Black faces are made white and white faces black. All of which is cleverly alluded to in a joke when a man comes on with a bright red face. Is he a Native American? No, he is someone with a sun allergy.
Director Ned Bennett and designer Georgia Lowe, who worked together on the hit Pomona, excel in showing the subconsciousness of a play. The stage is dismantled to reveal an underworld; surreality wanders on in the shape of a tap-dancing rabbit. Villain and hero are played dextrously by Ken Nwosu, who is required to take both parts in a fight: dark moustache versus a blond wig. Kevin Trainor is a fine, buoyant Boucicault. Special honour is due to Vivian Oparah who, fresh from the National Youth Theatre, mesmerises as a gorgeously gobby slave girl. An Octoroon ended its sold-out, extended run yesterday – but it will bob up again. Meanwhile, Jacobs-Jenkins’s Gloria can still be seen at Hampstead theatre.
