My bank manager is going to be having some serious words with the man behind There Ought To Be Clowns. Having decided that, in order to avoid bankruptcy and destitution, I could live without seeing Clybourne Park, I made the mistake of casting my eye over a review of an early preview on his ace blog and decided that perhaps I ought to reconsider. And I am very glad that I did, because a couple of days later it opened to an avalanche of four- and five-star reviews and tickets were suddenly harder to get hold of than a jellied eel.
Clybourne Park feels like two one-act plays held together by the common threads of property and race. The first half is set in the 1950s and opens on a middle-aged couple discussing at length the meaning of the word “Neapolitan” in an ice cream context. It soon becomes clear that they have suffered a shattering tragedy leaving them with a grief which the wife, played by the marvellous Sophie Thompson, masks with a tightly wound cheery exterior whilst the husband (Steffan Rhodri, giving a performance of such pent-up anger that I feared he may be heading for an aneurysm) withdraws from the world. Eager to move as soon as possible, they are selling their house to a black couple and in doing so have upset the neighbours, particularly the bespectacled, be-bow-tied Karl. Having given a splendid performance as Watson in Sherlock, Martin Freeman here takes a further step towards erasing the memory of Tim Canterbury, allowing Karl’s prejudice to gradually emerge from behind his neighbourly bonhomie.
In the second half, the action shifts to the present day; the house is a dilapidated shell and a young white couple want to knock it down to build a new home in its place. The neighbourhood is now occupied by middle-class black families keen to protect their heritage and the situation is reversed. The act climaxes in an absurd racist joke-off between Freeman’s increasingly exasperated husband and the self-assured representative of the residents (Lorna Brown), from which no character emerges with any credit. The acting is much more naturalistic than the first half (seemingly a conscious decision of director Dominic Cooke) but still the characters are not listening to each other and the same ignorance and prejudice is displayed: everything has changed but nothing has changed.
Reading the foregoing, you would be forgiven for thinking that this all sounds very worthy but not a lot of fun, much like the overrated Oscar-magnet Crash, which explores similar issues. I have thus far failed to give any sense of how laugh-out-loud funny the play is. Some of the laughter was certainly born out of the discomfort of the overwhelmingly white audience but it was more than that: the writing is sharp and darkly hilarious, the characters are well-realised and the performances are pretty much perfect. The ensemble cast is so strong that it’s very difficult to single out any individual, but I especially enjoyed Lucian Msamati’s scene-stealing asides. I could have lived without the ghostly goings-on at the end, but this is already forgiven: Clybourne Park achieves the rare feat of being both thought-provoking and entertaining and deserves all the awards which will invariably be heaped upon it.
Tags: Clybourne Park, Lorna Brown, Lucian Msamati, Martin Freeman, marvellous actresses, Royal Court, Sophie Thompson, Steffan Rhodri
