Taxi drama takes us on a ride back to the Seventies
Jitney (Old Vic, London, and touring) Verdict: Gutsy ★★★★✩
Playboy Of The West Indies (Birmingham Rep) Verdict: Laboured ★★✩✩✩
WE HAVE grown all too accustomed in theatre to being treated like children in need of correction. But the pleasure of this gutsy and absorbing revival of August Wilson’s 1970s taxi- office drama is that it spares us the prissiness of political correctness. It treats us — and its troubled characters — like adults.
The play is really a set of character sketches, forming a portrait of a community centred on an all-black ‘jitney’ (or cab) firm in Pittsburgh.
Becker, the boss ( Wil Johnson), struggles to reconcile his strong moral principles with the bitter reality of a son in jail for murder
— as well as having his livelihood threatened by the city council, who want to redevelop the neighbourhood.
And yet, world- weary as Becker is, he has an authority to which his drivers defer. Mostly . . . Turnbo (Sule Rimi) nudges the action along with his niggling insinuations about everybody else’s business. He has got it in for Youngblood (Solomon Israel), whom he suspects of incestuous infidelities.
Then there’s benign old-timer Doub (Geoff Aymer), who has seen it all in the Korean War. He’s on hand to sow peace and stamp out any tendency to a victim mentality, which he believes holds young black people back.
With Tony Marshall as boozy fantasist Fielding — dreaming of climbing a ladder to Heaven to retrieve the love of his life — there are echoes of Arthur Miller’s Death Of A Salesman. And the story about Becker’s son is surely half-inched from To Kill A Mockingbird.
It’s as if Wilson has written a soap opera pilot, preserving the characters in aspic. The lack of an overall plot, though, is a problem in the second half, when we need a pay-off for our investment in this disparate band of men. Maybe Tinuke Craig’s production is also a little too slick for what must have been a cold and grubby reality.
But period jazz music and stylised movement between scenes, suggesting the passage of time, nails Wilson’s love of these men as they pursue their fragile hopes against the odds.
Craig’s production even includes a nicely choreographed dance routine — which is more than they manage in the new musical version of Mustapha Matura’s comedy, Playboy Of The West Indies.
The play, set in 1950s Trinidad, is a transposition of J.M. Synge’s 1907 Irish drama The Playboy Of The Western World, about a fugitive peasant who claims to have killed his father.
I had high hopes for the show, directed by Nicholas Kent alongside composers Clement Ishmael and Dominique Le Gendre. Their idea was to liven up Matura’s tale with the Caribbean music and dance traditions of calypso and carnival.
The reality, though, is an underpowered, near three-hour slog that only supplements the play with a string of songs. Choreographer Ingrid Mackinnon seems to have gone fishing and left the cast to the occasional bit of foot shuffling.