THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
By Lorraine Hansberry
Lyric Hammersmith Theatre, Lyric Square, King St, London W6 0QL, until November 2, 2024
Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin In The Sun feels, rightly, like a play way ahead of its time.
Written and first produced in 1959, we find ourselves in a jaundiced and mold speckled apartment in Chicago's predominantly black south side. The Younger family are hard working, close, and dream ambitious dreams of a more spacious life and an escape into affluence and prosperity, where they have a house and a piece of land to call their own and the opportunity and liberty to pursue their chance of happiness. They are also often riven by the economic and structural iniquity of a system that is set against black success.
Into this, Hansberry pours the perfect ingredients to cause the chemical reactions that result in the violent pathos of a domestic tragedy: Walter Lee, a frustrated, young, black father working as a chauffeur for a rich, white family and dreaming of opening his own business to fulfill unspent potential (so far so Richard Wright – Native Son, as it happens, was published 19 years earlier); an inheritance of $10,000 to be collected by Lena, the matriarchal figure of the play whose husband has passed away and is desperate for her family to thrive while holding to the values she holds dear; Beneatha, Walter Lee's little sister, often derided for her political beliefs and her ambition to practice medicine, and Walter Lee's wife Ruth (Cash Holland of ITV's Red Eye), played with the anguish of a long suffering mother who has exhausted herself as the overworked diplomat between the warring factions of her family.
At the center of this play lies the conflict that still rages on in America today, the shifting tectonic plates of social structure. Specifically, Lena's and later the family's desire to move to Clybourne Park, a predominantly white neighborhood, and said neighborhood's desire not to have the Younger family move in.
Director Tinuke Craig brilliantly accentuates the ways in which Hansberry unflinchingly addresses the volatile issues that continue to plague American discourse. Cécile Trémolières' opaque set feels both confining and illuminating in her ability to allow us to see through the domestic walls that trap these characters as well as the dumbshow miming of what goes once characters leave the sitting room in which all of the action takes place, symbolically conveying the subtext of the tension simmering beneath the words uttered on stage.
Solomon Israel's visceral portrayal of Walter Lee, and his adept ability to bind up immense physical energy into a knot to release to great effect when emotions reach boiling point, genuinely feels like the angst of five generations' worth of Youngers, moving us to tears with his redemptive arc. Holland is brilliant in her assured range of joy and agony in the attempt to hold the family together as she is increasingly torn in different directions. And the charismatic Joséphine-Fransilja Brookman's portrayal of Beneatha leaves one to wonder if we are seeing autobiographical etched traces of Hansberry's own defiant self assurance. Her sharp comic timing and uncanny capacity for physical comedy is an absolute delight that draws out the lighter elements and heightens the tragicomic pathos of it all. Jonah Russell, playing the representative from the 'Welcome Committee' of Clybourne Park and the only white presence physically onstage, often sounds like he's moments away from extolling the virtues of The Great Replacement theory, managing to play the voice of unctuous white fragility and hegemony at the same time without ever slipping into pantomime, though not without earning a few kisses of the teeth of the audience!
Best and most surprisingly, whilst Hansberry lays bare the injustice of a system laden with corruption, red lining and bigotry, she also seems to point to solutions that are not unremittingly bleak and a future that both empowers black identity and points towards a closer knit and more understanding relationship between different communities in America.
