An outstanding cast bring Andrea Levy’s final, shocking novel to life
The Long Song Chichester Festival Theatre ★★★★★
Shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker prize, Andrea Levy’s The Long Song evokes the brutal experience of slave life in Jamaica in the early 19th century. Her final novel before her death in 2019, it distils reams of material with a light, lyrical touch, charting the transition to qualified “freedom” in the wake of the 1833 abolition and taking in bloody episodes such as the 1831 “Christmas uprising”.
At its centre is a young slave turned maidservant – July – whose reminiscences in old age, at the bidding of a prosperous young man keen to document her life and determine his parentage, are Levy’s route to the past. Adapted for the stage at Chichester, patrons are advised on entry that the show “contains racially offensive language prevalent at the period, scenes of corporal punishment, gunshots, death by suicide, haze and loud sound effects”.
However, in contrast to the 2018 BBC adaptation, enactments of vicious punishment are minimised. Variants of the N-word, though, are heard in abundance. That’s a bold decision on the part of adapter Suhayla El-bushra and director Charlotte Gwinner, as well as the theatre. However shocking it is to hear, though, the casual use by white characters of words that are now near-taboo outside the black community fully brings home the toxic, racist mindset of Jamaica’s colonial “masters”.
The reiteration of the slurs creates a mood of relentless subjugation. And the script, following Levy, accentuates how such weaponised language is internalised – “Mr Nimrod was black as sin,” says the old incarnation of July, talking of a freed slave with whom her younger self consorted. There’s a resulting fixation with skin-tone. This offspring of a white overseer’s rape, dragged into service before the eyes of her helpless mother, clings to her status as a “mulatto” – and is much taken with a snooty “light-skin maid”, Clara, from another plantation.
Though lacking the novel’s abundant word-music, the play is richly steeped in Levy’s understanding of how the violence of the system played out in all kinds of subtle ways. Everything becomes eloquent – a wary look, a conspiratorial glance. Bursts of song and outbreaks of dance have the force of a mutiny. The collective hacking of sugar cane – teeming stalks of which dominate the stage – suggests a silent solidarity. Yet everyone is negotiating the situation individually. Divided loyalties flourish, as does an unexpected humour, the power dynamic shifting as passion intrudes.
There’s no weak link in the cast. Olivia Poulet catches the neuroticimbecilic qualities of July’s mistress, Caroline Mortimer, and her laughable obsession with status, without stinting on her ingrained nastiness.
The evening belongs, though, to Tara Tijani as young July, retaining an essential sweetness amid impossible circumstances and Llewella Gideon as her lumbering aged self. This dignified survivor squints in bemused scepticism at everything, stooped as if carrying the weight of slave-era black experience on her shoulders. Levy, of Jamaican heritage, wrote the book to find out who she was, she once said; in so doing she tells us who we are. For that reason this production stands comparison with the National’s recent triumphant staging of Small Island, her earlier novel about the Windrush generation. Wherever it goes next, it’s imperative it has a further life.