Review: A Man For All Times: Web DuBois, theSpace @ Jury’s Inn (Venue 260)

By David Pollock
Published on 23/08/2012 15:38

This one-man restaging of the life of American author and activist WEB Dubois, a less well-known international figurehead of the civil rights movement than King, Parks or X, is most enjoyable for the dignified and commanding title performance from Brian Richardson, lending Dubois the expected air of intellectual gravitas and quietly commanding statesmanship.

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His long career is sketched with just the right balance between his achievements and the rawer first-hand experience of society he accrued, his latter years characterised by a tension between the huge esteem he was held in and the very slow march of positive progress.

The facts of Dubois’s biography are engaging enough as they stand: his university education in Nashville, where he was made painfully aware of what he called “the colour line”; his time as a teacher, where he tried to replace black children’s negative view of Africa with a sense of “pride, dignity and racial identity”; his being the first black man to study at Harvard in the late 19th century, where “sometimes, people can only hear your colour”. He founded intellectual magazine the Crisis, clashed with Marcus Garvey and developed an internationalist outlook that saw him attend the first ever UN conference and be accused of communist activities as an elderly man during the McCarthy era.

All this, Richardson brings to life in a way that’s never any less than compelling, even as he offers many of us a welcome education.

Until 25 August. Today, 2:55pm.