The Stage

Big White Fog

Published Friday 18 May 2007 at 11:50 by Mark Shenton

On Broadway, August Wilson’s ten-play cycle chronicling a decade-by-decade history of the African-American experience across the last century (with a play for each decade), has just been posthumously completed by the production of the last of them, Radio Golf.

But as the amazing Almeida rediscovery of a forgotten 1938 play by Theodore Ward proves, Wilson was far from the first black American playwright to see the potential for articulating his people’s sense of anger and overpowering injustice in the theatre.

Ward’s play - set in twenties Chicago and stretching forward across the Great Depression to 1932 - burns with a ferocious anger as it chronicles the desperate fight for survival of a black American family, with three generations living under the roof of Danny Sapani’s politically-minded patriarch Victor Mason, who harks back to his African roots even as his children are discovering the realities of modern-day American racism.

Meanwhile, wife Ella - Jenny Jules, one of our very best young actresses - struggles to keep everything together, especially when her mother, played by the excellent Novella Nelson, and husband clash in a bitter battle of internal racism, and then again as the depression threatens to leave them all homeless.

Ward’s play, with some 20 named characters, isn’t cheap to put on, but it is given lavish treatment in Michael Attenborough’s beautiful, tenderly acted ensemble production. This is a tremendous staging of a terrific play that is not just a historical document but also a searing, soaring drama in its own right. The only pity is that so few contemporary black and British playwrighting voices are being heard on our stages to offer a more local perspective.