A queasily entertaining look at crude stereotypes

An Octoroon National Theatre

In 1859, a melodrama set on a slave plantation began a seven-year run on Broadway. The story of a love affair between the owner and his former slave, the octoroon of the title who is one-eighth black, it became the once celebrated Irish playwright Dion Boucicault’s biggest hit. Its treatment of slavery was relatively progressive but it also indulged in crude racial stereotypes. What might such a play look like today?

This piece by Branden Jacobsjenkins both re-stages Boucicault’s original and completely dismantles it. In doing so, it undermines the play while exposing the extent to which the outmoded images it trades in retain an enduring cultural power. “Hi everyone, I’m a black playwright,” are the first words we hear from Jacobs-jenkins, played by Ken Nwosu, as he walks on stage in socks and pants and proceeds, by use of face paint, to turn himself into a white man to the beat of sexually derogatory hip hop. It’s a breathtaking collision of taboo and cliché.

Then we are off – into the sensationalist realm of Boucicault’s Victorian melodrama where Nwosu is now the (relatively) well-intentioned plantation owner, George Peyton, and also his nemesis, M’closky, the former owner who is intent on buying it back. It’s queasily entertaining; everything is grotesquely exaggerated. M’closky is a pantomime villain with long black cloak; Alistair Toovey blacks up to play an Uncle Tom-like slave. Director Ned Bennett (we’ll be hearing more from him) gleefully sends up every artifice of theatre, while Jacobs-jenkins turns racial politics into a sometimes jaw-dropping theatrical fun house. It’s messy, exhilarating and quite unlike anything else.

Until Jul 18. Tickets: 020 7452 3000; nationaltheatre. org.uk

Racial politics: Nwosu and Toovey