As outrageous as it is unforgettable
Underground Railroad Game
Soho Theatre
Underground Railroad Game will make you uncomfortable in a dozen different ways, sometimes in the space of a minute. This anarchic satire from US duo Jennifer Kidwell and Scott R Sheppard makes hairpin turns between humour and horror. It’s less a play than a kind of narrative sketch show, a sequence of surreal vignettes that probe modern race relations and pick at the unhealed scabs of American history.
A hit off-broadway in 2016, and in Edinburgh this August, it arrives in London on a wave of hype. Watching the first scene, however, you might wonder what all the fuss is about. Hiding in a moonlit barn, a black slave (Kidwell) is discovered by a white stranger (Sheppard), who promises to help her to freedom through the titular network of safe-houses.
The acting seems over-egged, the dialogue patronising. It’s almost like one of those ghastly pieces of theatre-in-education put on for children. And – as we learn in the first of several rug-pulls – it is. A schoolbell rings, the beard comes off, and Teacher Stuart (Sheppard) and Teacher Caroline (Kidwell) are congratulating each other for making history fun.
They explain that we – the fifthgraders of Hanover Middle School, Pennsylvania – are going to play a game. Students on the “union” team win points by sneaking slaves (black rag dolls) to freedom in another classroom’s cupboard, and the “Confederate” team win points by intercepting them. This is based on a game that Sheppard played as a student at that very school.
Caroline and Stuart give the show its framing device, as each of their well-meaning lessons veers off into increasingly shocking and sexual territory. The audience of schoolchildren drops away, and the teachers are subsumed by the characters they play – or perhaps by actors playing them.
In one scene, Caroline is giving a Q&A as a slave. But a new costume turns her into a towering mammy figure (bonus points to Tilly Grimes, the production designer), a symbol of the fetishised attraction she has in Stuart’s mind. Looming above him, she is reduced to a caricature, yet also elevated to a position of power. Diving under her skirts, he pleasures her while she croons the spiritual Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child. It’s a vision as outrageous as it is unforgettable.
The pair push each other ever further beyond the bounds of the acceptable, for fear of what they might lose if they stop. The effect for the audience is a kind of emotional whiplash. A series of playful nudges ends with an angry push; the tension created by a brutal attack is released by a bout of slapstick. “Is this what we wanted?” Sheppard asks, once things have reached an OTT climax.
For years, political theatre has been dominated by plays featuring middleclass people politely having heated debates. Underground Railroad Game is part of a new breed refusing to play by those rules. Like National Theatre’s recent An Octoroon, it uses fourthwall-breaking humour and archly enacted stereotypes to force buried anxieties around race to the surface. Its confrontational nudity put me in mind of Natalie Palamides’s Nate (also at the Soho Theatre), a cross-dressing clown show about rape – an idea just as inappropriate as a sketch comedy about slavery.
All three feel like part of something fresh, something vital. Genuinely thought-provoking, boldly rejecting easy conclusions, this 75-minute punch of gonzo theatre is guaranteed to jolt you awake.