Mind-expanding take on race and the theatre
Trouble in Mind Ustinov Theatre, Bath
By
Agrabbier, and perhaps more apposite, title for Trouble in Mind, Alice Childress’s remarkable, if slightly rough-roundthe-edges debut play of 1955, might be: How to Succeed in Show Business Without Really Crying.
Childress’s subject, inspired by her own experiences as a Charleston-born black actress in the white-dominated theatre of her day, was the courageous one of race relations on-stage, backstage, and in society at large. Showing a predominantly African-American company rehearsing a play with a bold anti-lynching theme ahead of a Broadway run, under the supervision of a putatively liberal white director, it’s often surprisingly funny but its take-home message is bleak: if you’re a black performer and want to earn a buck, you had better bite your tongue and not challenge the stereotypes.
Laurence Boswell’s commendably fine revival in Bath neatly coincides with the Trump win and its attendant anxieties about the resurgence of racism. But the more pertinent and satirical point lies in its portrait of the well-meaning progressive who encourages debate only so far as it accords with a pre-conceived idea of “correctness”, a faux-democracy that props up privilege.
At first, it looks as though as the leading actress, Tanya Moodie’s Wiletta, is going to be the most conformist of the assembled troupe. On an impressively capacious-feeling back-stage set she advises John, the young black actor who will play her doomed son on the dos and don’ts: “Laugh at everything they [the ‘white folks’] say… makes ’em feel superior.”
Yet Wiletta is goaded as the rehearsals roll on. The director Al (a wonderfully uptight Jonathan Cullen) projects colour-blind bonhomie but his demand for the actress to dig inside and find what’s “real” collides head-on with her professional survival strategy of reticence. Where she starts off by keeping her exasperation in a vein of bright-eyed mockery, for the benefit of fellow players, she winds up challenging the submissive premise of her character, with predictably counter-productive results.
Elsewhere, the piece could hardly be better served, with a brace of beautifully detailed performances, including Pip Donaghy as a forgetful Irish stage-hand, Joseph Marcell as an insouciant older player with a searing soliloquy recalling a real-life lynching and Emily Barber as a nervy Yaleeducated white actress trying to blend in. A mind-expanding evening.