Millennial’s howl of race rage leaves us gasping
White Noise (Bridge Theatre, London)
Verdict: Prepare to be riled ★★★★✩
HERE’S a millennial’s howl of frustration at the emotional legacy of long-ago slavery.
A long stage thrusts defiantly into the audience: eventually it’s a shooting range, but first it rolls us into the bedroom and kitchen of two interracial American couples as their old college friendship disintegrates.
Suzan-Lori Parks (a Pulitzer winner) in 2016 called it her ‘angry play’; reworked for this European premiere directed by Polly Findlay it is angrier still, after George Floyd’s murder. The young people’s hidden attitudes glide like monsters under a smooth veneer of well-meaning wokery.
Leo is a nervy, insomniac black artist living with Dawn, a right-on white lawyer; Ralph is a well-off liberal lecturer whose girlfriend Misha runs a whoopingly cheerful online show called ‘Ask A Black’. Showily supportive, Ralph is actually seething at losing a promotion to a Sri Lankan.
Meanwhile, Leo has been abused by police. Dawn wants him to sue, but he doesn’t trust the system and instead demands that Ralph buys him as a slave. ‘Back in the day,’ he reckons, a powerful man’s slave would have protection as a chattel. It is mad and tasteless, even for the 40 days Ralph unwillingly agrees to do it.
It plays on, sometimes for laughs but increasingly frighteningly as Ralph gets a taste for being Master. One scene has the whole audience gasping. It is peppered with monologues, sometimes too long but rich in ideas about racial misunderstanding and the hostility that gets a friendly gesture condemned as ‘white saviour!’.
It tangles with other human discomforts: unequal relationships, money and class.
Ken Nwosu is amazing as Leo, Helena Wilson every inch the liberal lawyer in a permanent bind of guilt, and Faith Omole beautifully evokes the irritation of a sophisticated black woman who, to get attention for her show, has to play the cartoonish bouncy diva her audience expect.
It is a stretch to believe how rapidly the slavemaster experience turns Ralph (James Corrigan) into an utter fascist, but that’s the only cavil.
If the message is that none of us can escape our slaver-or-saviour mentality, it’s a grim one.
On the other hand — irrespective of race — you notice that it’s the men who go nuts, and the women who don’t. Make of that what you will.