What a vital evening. Lynette Linton’s production of Blues for an Alabama Sky shimmies with ease between the down to earth and dreams. Linton has a gift for creating an entire world on stage, as she did so powerfully four years ago in her production of Sweat at the Donmar. Pearl Cleage’s 1995 play, set in 1930s Harlem, is hefty in subject matter, with debates about gayness, family planning and racial injustice. Yet this is an evening of individual voices, raggedy with poverty but bold with hope. It flies.
At the centre, the pivot of a lively though guessable plot, is Angel, singer and streetwalker. Samira Wiley, who would be a wonderful Sally Bowles, sparkles with seductive egotism: put-upon and tough, alluring as she calls to men from her window, ruthless as she snaps her fan shut on another torrid, champagne-swilled episode. Yet Wiley does not simply dominate. As her earnest boarding-house companion, Ronkẹ Adékoluẹjo is soberly magnificent. Listen to her drop her voice a tone as she slides from being churchgoer to lover: “yes” she says as her doctor suitor asks if he can shut the door (the audience sigh with pleasure); then “yes”, much deeper in her throat, when he asks if he should lock it: the audience applaud.
Sule Rimi is both languorous and wired as a good-time doctor. And Giles Terera – shortly to play Othello – is an explosion. As a dress designer transfixed by Josephine Baker, he gives a giant performance: obsessive, gaudy, yearning. His life as a gay black man is fenced with double discrimination, as becomes apparent when Angel takes up with a conservatively inclined (bigoted, you might say) admirer from Alabama. He is a carpenter. “Like Jesus,” Terera acidly points out.
Frankie Bradshaw’s tenement-block design is busy with multiple lives – several rooms and the street always on show. Bradshaw’s hand is also important in the tremendous clothes (costumes is too inert a designation) that suggest aspiration as well as habit, and give a lovely texture to the play’s movement. Oh, the shimmer of an orange satin dress cut on the bias, the desperate glitter of a skimpy white frock, the nonchalant hang of the doctor’s suit – and the staid stiffness of Adékoluẹjo’s outfits. Terera’s appalled reaction to a dress the carpenter buys for Angel – a navy-blue, keep-all-your-parts-hidden uniform with white collar – is a drama all of its own. I have rarely seen costumes used so expressively. They are the fabric equivalent of the songs that break out beautifully through the evening.
When Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible in 1953, he saw, in the mass hysteria and suspension of justice that fuelled the Salem witch trials in 17th-century Massachusetts, the circumstances that fed McCarthyism and the persecution of communist sympathisers. With each new performance, his drama is freighted with other parallels: Lyndsey Turner’s assured production rings with warnings about mob opinion, intoxicating lies, the difficulty of hearing an individual dissenting voice. The arguments, knotty and sometimes overextended, twist in unexpected directions, some not often heard these days: “Is the accuser always holy?” Nevertheless, this is an instructive rather than an alarming evening, an occasion on which it is easier to spot the parallels than be chilled by them.
Terrific, shiver-inducing lighting by Tim Lutkin makes a world of darkness, occasionally splashed with candles. Robust performances by Eileen Walsh, Brendan Cowell and Tilly Tremayne tether the action to a modest world of work. Both wilderness and homestead are present here. Yet too much is approximate. Catherine Fay’s costumes smudge the period: there is a touch of Little House on the Prairie in the girls’ pinafores. Atmospherics are often free-floating. A heavenly chorus of female voices rises over the concluding moments.
And why does a spectacular curtain of rain enclose the stage before the opening of each act? Six years ago, the show’s designer, Es Devlin, used the same device superbly in Turner’s production of Faith Healer, summoning up not only Irish weather but a world in which transparency turned out to be a cage. Here, the effect is literally arresting: it is a thrilling tableau, but not one that steers you into the action.
So much talent has gone to making Dido’s Bar that its failure to come together is worthy of, well, an epic lament. The evening has a strong musical and emotional inspiration. Josephine Burton of the site-specific company Dash Arts was inspired by a meeting in Helsinki with the Kurdish-Iranian musician Marouf Majidi, a performer on tar, tanbour and clarinet who memorably described himself as being “out of tune” in his adopted country. Burton saw in his life of exile a long history of displacement and of Europe fracturing, which chimed with Virgil’s Aeneid. She turned to the terrific Hattie Naylor to write a script melding past and present. She found her first Carthage in London’s Docklands.
In an iron warehouse you hear the planes of City airport and feel the precariousness of characters under threat of expulsion. Juno and Venus ingeniously become nightclub hostesses and government officials. Dido is the magnetic Lola May. Scenes are dispersed throughout the large space, with the audience sitting as at a cabaret. Majidi’s music ripples and thrums and once comes to full realisation in a marvellous dance sequence in which characters sing of different seas – and get sneered at by goddesses. Yet it is mostly impossible to hear the words – and hence difficult to follow. Let’s hope Carthage finds a more acoustically friendly home as the play tours.
Star ratings (out of five)
Blues for an Alabama Sky ★★★★
The Crucible ★★★
Dido’s Bar ★★
Blues for an Alabama Sky and The Crucible are at the National Theatre, London, until 5 November
Dido’s Bar is at the Royal Docks, London, until 15 October, then touring until 29 October
