THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
By Ryan Calais Cameron
Apollo Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, London, W1D 7EZ until June 14,2025
www.nimaxtheatres.com/shows/Retrograde
It is hard to imagine a play that is unflinchingly facing down more important questions – for us all, but particularly for us as Americans – than Ryan Calais Cameron’s electrifying Retrograde. It asks, it challenges and it demands from us that we grapple with what it means to have courage when it matters what kind of people we really are. Most importantly, as the character of Sidney Poitier, (played by Ivanno Jeremiah) the first black man to win an Oscar, puts it about two thirds of the way through the play, ‘what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and to lose his soul?’
Ryan Calais Cameron has taken a little known episode of Poitier’s life and deftly staged it as a riveting morality play. The year is 1955. Poitier’s career arc is ascendant. He is on the verge of breaking through and is about to be cast in a made for TV drama that allows him to play a serious lead and to be taken seriously. All he has to do for NBC’s lawyers is sign one little contract, a tiny little loyalty oath at the height of the Red Scare and one little radio spot denouncing a close friend and civil rights act who had been making the wrong kind of waves in an America fraught with racial tensions.
As always, the devil is in the details.
Cue a hot, stiflingly stuffy NBC office, beautifully realized in painstaking wood paneled detail by Frankie Bradshaw’s design.
And this powerhouse of theater is full of nuance and simmering with sharp and uncomfortable observations that feel as relevant in today’s America as they did in the decade in which the play is set. Retrograde is 90 minutes without interval and feels like 85 minutes of utterly riveting building of tension between Robert Alun Aurthur – Bobby – (played by Oliver Johnstone) the Hollywood writer who is also about to break through with A Man Is Ten Feet Tall, the made for TV drama in which he’s cast Poitier, and NBC’s politically regressive, bullish, manipulative, and passively racist – ‘if my mind were any more open my brain would be spilling out’ – lawyer, Larry Parks (played by Stanley Townsend).
I had the privilege to interview Jeremiah before the play opened for this run in the West End, in which he told me that one of the things that drew him to the script was the fact that Calais Cameron’s ‘ear is his superpower… his pen is electric.’ And this is the most accurate way to describe the playwright’s uncanny knack for believable, dangerously sharp one liners, cutting deeper and deeper into the social fabric of passive attitudes and iniquitously racist expectations placed on actors and artists of color every day. At the same time, the play crackles constantly with a wickedly dark sense of humor.
The performances are pitch perfect, with Jeremiah at the vortex of the swirl of pressure between morality, loyalty and greed that mounts higher and higher around him on stage. He manages a powerful command and unbelievable versatility, at points conveying a trapped and beaten sense of utter and abject frailty and fear and at others a defiant, triumphant and emotionally irresistible charisma as Poitier. He is able to masterfully keep coiled a volcanic tower of rage until a cathartic moment of emotive release. His chemistry with Johnstone, as the classic, well-meaning white liberal creative who, try though he might, cannot see beyond or transcend the boundaries of his own social reality, is sensational. Amit Sharma has expertly carried this piece seamlessly from the Kiln Theatre in Northwest London to the West End, making this phenomenal production difficult to criticize. It is both vital and inspirational.
Read our interview with Ivanno Jeremiah here
