“Knowledge is power, Bev.” So decrees all-American Jim when bickering with his wife over the origins of the word Neapolitan as applied to the tricolour ice-cream. True as that may be, it’s not the only weapon used in the two power-struggles fought over house number 406 on Clybourne Park. Though separated by half a century (to the very hour), both battles hinge on roots, rights and, most doggedly of all, race. Combatants use class as artillery and thick-skins as armour, seeking to claim the tactically advantageous moral high-ground with mock-offence. The outcome matters dearly. After all, as one pugilistic proprietor explains, “The history of America is the history of property.”
Clybourne Park is an area of Chicago, into which – in Lorraine Hansberry’s American classic, A Raisin in the Sun – a black family aspires to relocate following an inherited sum of $10,000 shortly after the Second World War. It’s an exclusively white neighbourhood and there’s some debate amongst members of the Younger family as to whether the move will prove beneficial or inflammatory. On learning of their new neighbours-to-be, the local residents send one Mr Karl Linder on behalf of the Clybourne Park Improvement Association, offering money if the Youngers keep to their side of the city.
Bruce Norris fills in the gaps with this intelligent time-hopping two-act play, which leaves a sour aftertaste lingering as the laughter fades.
His first act presents the opposite side of this transaction. We learn that the property’s price has been knocked down after the suicide of the owners’ son, Kenneth, who was a Korean war veteran. Into this grief-stricken household strides Karl Linder (Martin Freeman), adamant that the sale will demean the neighbourhood, both morally and financially. The sale, he insists with increasingly overt racist tones, must not go ahead. “First one family will leave, then another, and another, and each time they do, the values of these properties will decline.”
As it so happens, Karl’s predictions prove spot on. By the second act, in 2009, the house is falling apart. Its walls are rotten with damp, its windows are clouded with dirt. In the eyes of Steve and Lindsey, a middle-class white couple, it’s perfect. Not to live in, per se, but to rebuild upon. The only problem is the neighbourhood’s representatives, a black couple, are keen to preserve the area’s cultural heritage. For the past fifty years, it has housed an exclusively black community. The sparring couples, overseen by their respective legal representatives, wind up competing with a string of increasingly offensive racist jokes, as if each is keen to assert that race totally isn’t the sticking point.
Throughout Norris nails a whiplash comedy. The laughter he achieves is so close the knuckle that your head half-turns away from the stage in recoil.
The first act resembles a period sit-com, only one that refuses to confirm its gags with an outward glance or knowing nod. It’s framed by a comedic theme tune that comes tinkling from the wireless. The lighting is stark and white; at once a crime scene under investigation and a television studio. Sophie Thompson’s Bev wears a clownish smile, all teeth and lipstick, that often seems a demented grimace. She bustles around the house, keeping up appearances and attempting to maintain civility as debate descends towards a full-scale riot.
Into this room, Norris places a herd of elephants. If Karl and Jim initially dance around the central issue of race, you know that the room will eventually spark on account of the inflammatory circumstances. Karl’s wife is deaf, so a great deal needs repeating. Bev talks of a ‘monogloid’ working in a nearby grocery store. Jim refuses to admit mention of his dead son. All the while, Francine – the family’s black maid – and her partner Albert tuck themselves away in a corner, half-unnoticed, as the argument spirals. It’s furiously tense and, when it finally boils over, intensely furious.
Later, Norris employs a different tactic, turning to comedy of painted smiles, and righteous appeasement. Tiptoeing platitudes, the desperation not to cause offence, replace the brazen candidness of the fifties.
My reservation, though, is the neatness with which Norris parallels the two eras. Time and again, the contemporary second act mirrors or inverts its predecessor. In both, Lucian Msamati deadpans a joke, mocking the unsaid assumptions, which is twice met with uncertain silence. There are two pregnant women and two arguments over trivial geographical labels. Certain phrases snag on your ear, half-familiar. While the footlocker trunk containing Kenneth’s possessions needs to make its double appearance, I feel that Norris overplays his hand. Given, for example, Karl’s first-act dismissal of ‘skiing negroes,’ it almost groaningly inevitable that the contemporary black couple will favour winter sports. The repetition of set, time and actors – not to mention the reversal of the entire situation – is more than enough to set us comparing and contrasting.
But to hang Dominic Cooke’s fraught yet skittish production for such momentary excesses would be unfair. It is, without exception, impeccably acted. Freeman excels as both the finicky Karl, padding down the pockets on his jacket as he tries every angle of attack, and Steve, more amicably incredulous but equally stubborn. Sophie Thompson, more cartoonish than those around her, finds a neat thread of discombobulated mania connecting Bev’s frailty and Kathy’s laconic drawl. Msamati and Steffan Rhodri both manage perfect archetypal American figures before and after the break, while Lorna Brown and Sarah Goldberg switch from silent bystanders to prattling one-upmanship effortlessly.
Ignore the consciously sentimental ending, which owes too great a debt to the ghosts of J.B. Priestley and Tennessee Williams, and Clybourne Park is a wicked delight. Car-crash comedy, perhaps even anti-comedy, which keeps the Royal Court’s sharp eye trained on its audience and savages the American bourgeois.
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