The London stage has always been a very white place. The Royal Court is helping to change that. Upstairs, Nathaniel Martello-White’s Torn shows a ripped-to-pieces family in which a mother acknowledges her white but not her black children. Downstairs, Suzan-Lori Parks’s Father Comes Home from the Wars supplies the early instalments of a nine-part epic tracing a history of African American lives.
Parks’s saga has a precedent in the late August Wilson’s Pittsburgh cycle. But Wilson, with a play for each decade of the 20th century, was predominantly urban and jazzy. Parks’s plays – there are three of them at the Court – have a longer historical reach and unfold like a ballad. They begin in the American civil war. They have a classical structure, with a Chorus, a messenger (in the shape of a dog) and a main character called first Hero then Ulysses. They have a lolling, beguiling guitarist on stage, and strong stories to tell: about a slave who has to decide whether to go with his “owner” into the Confederate army to gain his freedom. And a strong theme: what makes people – a “slave”, a wife – cleave to people who harm them?
But the words never swell into action. Jo Bonney’s production is so static that it is hard to see why the play is being staged rather than read on radio. Gleaming with good intention, it is – so far – more of a project than a play.
