An Octoroon
Playwright: Branden Jacobs-jenkins Director: Ned Bennett
Dorfman, National Theatre, South Bank, London SE1 (020-7452 3000). Until 18 July
Running time: 2hrs 40mins (including interval)
★★★★
“What a bold, exhilarating piece of work” this awardwinning American play is, said Sarah Crompton on What’s On Stage. First seen at Richmond’s Orange Tree, the piece has transferred to the National like a “heat-seeking missile, releasing its energy and power, its comedy and its deep, dark anger”. An Octoroon is a playful refashioning of a wildly popular 1859 Broadway melodrama, The Octoroon, about slaves and their masters on a Louisiana cotton plantation. This “slippery and compelling” reworking by Branden Jacobs-jenkins opens with the appearance on stage of a black playwright, BJJ (Ken Nwosu), who explains to the audience that he admires the original play, but can’t find any white actors willing to take roles now seen as racist. His solution is to slap on “whiteface” make-up – which he does there and then.
After that, the remarkable Nwosu takes on three different roles, said Ann Treneman in The Times. In whiteface he’s both George – a young man tasked with restoring the fortunes of the family plantation, who is in love with Zoe, a slave who is one-eighth black (or an “octoroon”, in the language of the time) – and George’s brutish neighbour and arch-enemy M’closky. Meanwhile a mixed-race actor “blacks up” for another part and a white actor “reds up” to play a Native American. “Do keep up at the back!”
It’s all “astoundingly well acted”, and the result is a “disquieting” piece of theatre that “interrogates” received cultural notions of blackness, said Patricia Nicol in The Sunday Times. The 19th century original, by the forgotten Irish playwright Dion Boucicault, is credited with the first use of the term “mash-up”. And this is certainly that – invoking minstrel figures, Br’er Rabbit, Gone with
the Wind, Show Boat and Quentin Tarantino. Director Ned Bennett (“we’ll be hearing more from him”) gleefully sends up theatre’s every artifice, from spotlights to soundtracks, until even the stage itself is dismantled, said Claire Allfree in The Daily Telegraph. All is “queasily entertaining”; all is “grotesquely exaggerated”. This is “messy, exhilarating and quite unlike anything else”.