In Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun, the African American Younger family are visited by a member of the residents committee from the largely all-white Chicago suburb where they plan to move. He tries to buy them off. How far we have really come in 50 years is the question at the heart of Bruce Norris’s thoughtful, slyly provocative play, which is directly inspired by Hansberry’s classic, and suggests that our willingness to love our neighbour evaporates when property values are threatened.
In act one, set in 1959, a grieving couple – shattered by the suicide of their son in the house – are so eager to move that they’ve sold their property to the Youngers at a knock-down price. The excruciatingly funny second half, which utilises some effective doubling, is set in the same house in 2009. A young white couple moving into the now mostly black neighbourhood are astonished to discover that the community are anything other than grateful for their arrival.
Norris’s play was explosive at the Royal Court in 2010, and is likely to prove incendiary in this finely acted revival, directed by Daniel Buckroyd, which will tour leafy suburbs with some of this country’s highest property prices. It’s a drama that drives a bulldozer through liberal pieties and all attempts to use labels to disguise what we really think. It skewers the audience with a gleeful lack of political correctness, particularly in a volcanic climax in which racist jokes are traded, leaving the audience convulsed with laughter and the characters entirely speechless. Fiendishly clever.
• At Richmond theatre until 30 April. Box office: 0844 871 7651. Then touring.
