RACE, LAW, CIVIL RIGHTS AND COLONIALISM
Classic stage production for turbulent times
Les Blancs
YouTube July 2
The British National Theatre, now on lockdown, has been steaming some of its classic productions on YouTube on Thursdays and this week’s production, Les Blancs—The Whites by Lorraine Hansberry, from 2016, has obviously been chosen to fit in with the current upheaval in racial tensions. Hansberry, the granddaughter of a freed slave and herself a highly educated member of a middle-class black family, was passionately involved as a writer and activist in civil rights and liberal political movements throughout her short life. She died of cancer in 1965, aged 34.
When her father, Carl, bought a house in a white neighbourhood of Chicago in 1938, a court case was taken against the family by Anna Lee, a member of a local white property association that specifically excluded black ownership. Lee won her case in the Illinois State court, but that decision was overturned in 1940 by the American Supreme Court on a legal technicality, not on the racial issue. However, despite winning, Lorraine Hansberry and her family were subjected to what she described as ‘hellishly hostile’ treatment afterwards.
Her best-known play, A Raisin in the Sun, was the first play by a black woman on Broadway and also a successful film, starring Sidney Poitier.
She began writing Les Blancs in 1960, and it was unfinished when she died. It was completed and restructured by her former husband using her original draft and notes she had left, and was first performed on Broadway in 1970.
Set in the fictional African country of Zatembe, it is a strongly symbolic work, an impassioned expression of all Hansberry’s political ideology about race and power. It explores the bitter legacy of white colonial rule in Africa and its effects on the indigenous population.
Tshembe, the son of a black African family, married to a white European, returns from London, torn between his European values and the violent aspects of African liberation movements.
It’s been described as a flawed, preachy and passionate, work, but the production by the National Theatre was praised as powerful and sensuous.
For Hansberry, the lives of African people and African Americans were inextricably bound together. Both, of course, have changed considerably since 1960, though not always for the better.
Streaming from 7pm, Thursday July 2, until 7pm on July 9, nationaltheatre.org.uk. To see all the
July 9 stream, you must watch from 4.15pm
Hansberry and her family suffered ‘hellishly hostile’ treatment