Theatre review: Clybourne Park, Brunton Theatre, Musselburgh

BACK in 2017, when Rapture Theatre produced a version of A Streetcar Named Desire featuring a black actor as Stanley Kowalski, the company’s artistic director Michael Emans was shocked at the negative reactions of some reviewers and audience members, including those, like myself, who wrongly assumed that the casting was colour-blind – when in fact it was deliberately designed to reflect the relatively relaxed attitude to interracial marriage in 1940s New Orleans – and those who simply objected in principle.

Clybourne Park, Brunton Theatre, Musselburgh ****

The experience set Emans thinking about real underlying attitudes to race, both in Scotland and in other supposedly enlightened countries; and it led him to Clybourne Park, Bruce Norris’s 2010 Pulitzer Prize-winning play about whether racial attitudes in the USA have really changed much in the last 60 years.

In two linked one-hour dramas – the first set in 1959, the second in 2009 – the play explores race in America through the fate of a single house in a Chicago suburb. In 1959, tragically bereaved white couple Russ and Bev unknowingly sell the house to the neighbourhood’s first black family, provoking predictable but still horrifying protests. Then in 2009, a young white couple try to buy into the rapidly gentrifying area, only to find their ambitious plans contested by the black leaders of the local community trust.

The intensely conventional style of Norris’s play – and Emans’s production – tends slightly to undermine its radical intentions. It’s a shade too easy for western theatre audiences to sit comfortably behind the fourth wall, cheering on the black characters, and tutting at the white racists; and the recordings of presidential swearing-in ceremonies from Eisenhower to Obama, played during the interval, offer a sense of political context that could have been more boldly integrated into the production, and into Ken Harrison’s stuffy living-room set.

Yet Clybourne Park remains a fascinating, thoughtful, and sometimes disturbing play, delivered with passion by Emans’s eight-strong company, led by Adelaide Obeng and Vinta Morgan as the black characters insulted and unheard in both time-frames, with Robin Kingsland and Jackie Morrison as Russ and Bev, and Francis McNamee and Jack Lord as 2009 couple Lindsey and Steve. It’s Steve’s angry rant about how he doesn’t see himself reflected in the White House any more that most accurately foreshadows the backlash against the Obama presidency that overwhelmed America in 2016; a backlash predicted by very few, a decade ago, but clearly foreseen by one insightful playwright. Joyce McMillan

On tour until 12 October, www.rapturetheatre.co.uk