INSPIRING TALE OF COLONIAL HISTORY
The Long Song (Festival Theatre, Chichester) Verdict: A stirring aria
THE Long Song was the novel that followed Andrea Levy’s best-known book Small Island. Set on a 19th-century Jamaican sugar estate, it’s the story of July, a child taken from her mother to work as a maid in the big house.
She grows up to see the overthrow of slavery and become the mistress of the plantation owner — before being separated from her own child when he is sent to England.
Levy’s mission in the book was to assert the dignity of enslaved people but also to reconcile that with their conflicting aspirations, set in part by British colonialists.
As in Small Island, Levy doesn’t shirk the difficult questions about the way class, cultural and racial status become entangled.
Most importantly, this is an epic account of a poorly documented period in British colonial history. Llewella Gideon, as old July relating her life story to her returning son, is a cranky and eccentric joy who loves spicy pork and cutting people down to size. Tara Tijani, making her professional debut as young July, is ambitious, shrewd and resilient.
And Suhayla El-Bushra’s script distils a strong sense of the enslaved workers’ cultural independence (thanks also to period African music from Michael Henry).
Although the white slave owners are a little two-dimensional, Olivia Poulet as the mistress catches the anxiety of the settlers, while Leonard Buckley nails the compromised idealism of her squeamish husband who’s on a mission to move from slavery to a wage-based workforce.
Charlotte Gwinner’s production, performed in front of a row of sugarcane plants lit with the warm light of the Caribbean — and contrasted by heavy European antique furniture — is lucid and light-footed.
It was also very warmly received by a hugely appreciative Chichester audience.