Nancy Medina gets off to a flying start with her first production as artistic director of Bristol Old Vic. Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Choir Boy, first staged at the Royal Court in 2012, is a plea for inclusiveness, an attack on othering. It is also – what could be more pertinent in this city? – a call for a new look at entrenched views of history. It slides across the stage fuelled by song: spirituals and gospel are given voice by five marvellous unaccompanied singers.
McCraney, the American playwright most celebrated for the Oscar-winning film Moonlight, imagines an exclusive boarding school for African American boys, in which a gifted youth is taunted by another – because he is queer. The bullying pains the hero but does not muffle him. Terique Jarrett gives a beautifully calibrated performance: quick-tongued, teasing, floridly expressive, with apparently elastic limbs.
Max Johns’s design – gables, solid walls, a bank of white tiled showers – encases the stage in institutional propriety. Music – directed and arranged by Femi Temowo – colours and defines the boys’ internal life. It embodies the rigid code of school morality: “Trust and obey,” the students chorus sonorously but jerkily. In a male culture of non-revelation, it is the clue to what they are really like, as each finds his own voice: one sliding up and down, waiting to settle; another cheeky, rebellious, beginning to breakdance; a third soulful and expansive. As the chaps drift in and out of collaboration, they can occasionally be heard offstage backing up a single singer; suddenly companionable, they clap and stamp to a single rhythm.
Make a list of the main elements in Portia Coughlan and you come up with an Irish drama by numbers: a haunting, a tragedy in a stony landscape, bubbling talk, a cursing crone, shades of Greek myth with incest and anger. Marina Carr’s play is richer than this, less because of the emphatic Merchant of Venice references (the heroine’s fatal river is called Belmont) than because of some line-by-line dazzle – who will forget the man who was “not so much born as knitted”, and the sheer ferocity of Portia herself. On her 30th birthday, she is still poleaxed by the death of her twin brother 15 years earlier: she hits out, snarling in all directions, a living embodiment of how grief does not necessarily ennoble. First seen at the Abbey in Dublin in 1996, the play was commissioned by Ireland’s National Maternity hospital: don’t think, it warns, boldly, that motherhood always comes naturally and sweetly.
It is, though, the intensity of Carrie Cracknell’s production that makes the evening feel rapt. Alison Oliver – of Conversations With Friends – moves through the action like a knife, all blade, all unprotected. Who wouldn’t want to see a Cusack – Sorcha, in this case – spitting swearwords from her wheelchair? Sound and visual design combine to supply a direct line to the heroine’s emotions. Alex Eales blasts his living-room set with a cavernous hole giving on to rocks and river. Here Archee Aitch Wylie appears, as Portia’s twin, Gabriel, singing with savage clarity like a revenging angel. The music, with original songs by Maimuna Memon, a star of Standing at the Sky’s Edge, penetrates and elevates the action – with folk and blues and country and (yes! there is also a lovely pop-up jukebox) electric guitar. If it wasn’t for an interval before which a major revelation deflatingly takes place, the impression would be of a ballad delivered in one extended breath.
Everything about Jay Miller’s Yard ruffles theatrical expectations. Its citrus neon sign – like a magical motel, tucked in the corner of a concrete square. The way its bar and clubbing areas are rammed up against the auditorium so that stage and dance spaces are almost permeable. The defiance of the productions.
James Fritz’s The Flea, directed by Miller, uncovers a fascinating real-life story: that of the 1889 Cleveland Street scandal, involving a homosexual brothel in London’s Fitzrovia that hired telegraph boys to “lie down upstairs” with aristocrats and was rumoured to have been frequented by Queen Victoria’s grandson Prince Eddy. Alongside chronicle there is fantasy (God has a small role in rather fetching feathers) as well as nudges towards modern parallels: the detective in charge of the Jack the Ripper investigation explains he dismissed the testimony of women who might have led to a conviction because he thought they were “ranting and raving” publicity seekers.
The evening would gain from more fact and less flurry. Still, what a pleasure to see Norah Lopez Holden, who six years ago as a recent graduate made a striking Desdemona at Bristol’s Tobacco Factory. Here, she doubles as a poignant but beady seamstress and a regina more queeny than queenly: even her flounce has precision. Naomi Kuyck-Cohen’s ingenious design disrupts scale: the rungs of a ladder become prison bars; a pillar is made a throne. Costumes by Lambdog1066 unravel hierarchy: a plod has studs all over his uniform; an aristo has a horsehair tail sprouting from his back; Queen Vic is in laddered black stockings and saucy lace garter. Energy is everywhere. It is only surprising Miller didn’t punk it up right up to date and call it Bed Bug.
Star ratings (out of five)
Choir Boy ★★★★
Portia Coughlan ★★★
The Flea ★★★
Choir Boy is at Bristol Old Vic until 11 November
Portia Coughlan is at the Almeida, London, until 18 November
The Flea is at the Yard, London, until 18 November
