(seen at the afternoon performance on 19th October 2024)
The first play by a Black American woman ever to appear on Broadway (and it took until 1959 for that to happen). Time has, if anything, sharpened the relevance of the story.
Lena (Doreen Blackstock) has inherited $10,000 thanks to her late husband’s life insurance. She wants to move her family – daughter Beneatha (Fransilija Brookman), son Walter Lee (Solomon Israel), daughter-in-law Ruth (Cash Holland) and grandson Travis (Jeriah Kibusi at this performance) out of their cockroach infested apartment and into the white middle-class suburbs.
Beneatha also wants to climb the career ladder as a doctor, and meets Joseph (Kenneth Omole), an African at the same university. He is another encouraging presence for a family already ambitious. Yet colour prejudice – in the form of Karl (Jonah Russell) is an ever-present barrier to success.
Tinuke Craig utilises Headlong’s house style to the full in an energetic and revelatory staging. Cecile Tremolieres gives us gauze walls through which shadows of characters are often seen, present yet not quite realised, like the lives they dream of.
The hierarchy of the home and the tensions between family members are real, and we feel the crushing pain of betrayal, the shocks in changes of fortune and the triumph of defiance with equal intensity.
Blackstock gives Lena a Christian strength but also a determined logic. She is no controlling matriarch, just a wise one who must exert the authority of her experience in order for her family to progress.
Solomon Israel as Walter is the major recipient. A difficult character only written at polar extremes, Israel makes sufficient connections at each stage to overcome any dislocated writing.
As his wife, Cash Holland’s modesty and industry are a fine contrast. Their son Travis has Jeriah Kibusi nicely playing both compliance and a proper streak of juvenile rebellion.
Brookman’s Beneatha does fine work underlining that had she been white, everything she fights so hard to obtain would have been her right. Omole as her new love is a counterpoint, his African background demonstrating how in a different society, her options would have been so much broader – his studied reaction to his new country bringing context to his lines.
Strong work too from Jonah Russell, delivering shocking scenes with the normality of its era.
A classic production of a classic play. If the characters’ ambitions are sadly dehydrating like a raisin in the sun, the light shed here ripens the work into a delicious piece delightful to consume.
5 stars.