Giving America’s trauma an urgent voice
Notes from the Field Royal Court
★★★★★
We have already been treated to one solo tour de force this year at the Royal Court: Carey Mulligan in Girls & Boys, written by Dennis Kelly and examining masculine violence in a domestic setting. A deserved hit, it has newly transferred to New York. Now, hailing from the other side of the Atlantic and a different realm of theatrical endeavour, comes another triumph of the monologue form, premiering here courtesy of the London International Festival of Theatre (Lift). Where Girls & Boys is a work of fiction, Notes from the Field is the result of more than 250 interviews conducted by a doyen of the verbatim theatre form, the actress Anna Deavere Smith. Best known for playing Dr Nancy Mcnally in The West Wing, and making her return to the London stage for the first time in more than 25 years, Smith gives us the inside scoop on what has been termed the “poverty to prison pipeline” in the US.
Relaying some 17 testimonies and speeches, she cumulatively lambasts her country’s trigger-happy approach to policing, its incarceration-addicted justice system, its under-funded education provision and the toxic spin-off in terms of social opportunity and race relations, a malaise that long preceded Donald Trump.
The scope is almost Shakespearean: the voices range from policy professionals to people on the street. If there’s an over-arching thrust to the evening – directed by Leonard Foglia, with Marcus Shelby providing a double-bass accompaniment – it lies in the suggestion that the struggle for civil rights is ongoing: the legacy of segregation, its trauma too, endures and reasserts itself.
Far from being divisive and accusatory, the piece offers tentative hope, but it’s never pat, or unaware of the scale of the challenge ahead. The considerable effort of performance becomes Smith’s inspiring means of participating in the political struggle. Donning the odd item of costume to effect switches of character, she subsumes herself within the personalities of her interviewees, capturing subtle facial expressions and myriad vocal tics, the better to honour their sentiments.
In a sense, she’s operating on the front line of language, where dumbfounded incredulity – evidenced in broken-down syntax and inarticulate repetitions – meets with a powerful urge to express anger, grief and dignified resolve. We see distressing footage of the fateful police arrest of Freddie Gray in Baltimore (Smith’s hometown) in April 2015, and the ensuing public disorder. The actress assumes the persona of a deli worker who videoed the outrage, which resulted in the 25-year-old Gray later dying with a severed spine. The bystander unleashes a torrent of words, poetic-indignant: “A crushed larynx – can you DO that to yourself?” Not for the last time do we hear the reflection that the country is broken and that a single glance can get you in trouble with the law. Often shocking, the material is also sometimes almost shamefully entertaining in its unadorned, grassroots honesty.
Perhaps most stirring is the young woman (Niya Kenny) who saw her classmate being violently thrown across the room for an obedience issue by heavy-handed security, and was arrested in turn for protesting. She stayed defiant: “He threw a whole girl across the classroom – how can you mind your business? That’s something you need to make your business.”
We need to make it ours, too.
Until June 23. Tickets: 020 7565 5000; royalcourttheatre.com