The phrase “person of consequence” might have been coined for Sidney Poitier. The pioneering black American actor was not only possessed of huge talent, but of immense dignity and deep convictions, active in the civil rights movement and, later, in efforts to hand more power to artists in Hollywood. He was remembered on his death in 2022, aged 94, as a person of unassailable decency and integrity.
That decency and integrity is vigorously assailed in Ryan Calais Cameron’s electric three-hander Retrograde, set in real time in a stuffy NBC lawyer’s office on a sticky LA afternoon in 1955 – the height of the McCarthy era.
Amit Sharma’s production, which premiered at the Kiln in 2023, is an imagining of a real incident, when Poitier was asked as part of a movie contract to sign a loyalty oath – an undertaking to not do or say anything or associate with anyone with even a tenuous link with communism – and to publicly denounce his hero, the singer and activist Paul Robeson. We now know that a number of civil rights figures were deliberately lumped in with the red scare, in a covert attempt by the FBI to undermine the movement.
Ivanno Jeremiah’s Poitier is on the verge. His breakout role in 1955’s Blackboard Jungle has made him somebody, and he and Bobby – Poitier’s real-life friend, the writer Robert Alan Aurthur, played with sweaty energy and callow bravado by Oliver Johnstone – are in the office of shit-talking, wise-ass lawyer Parks (Stanley Townsend) to ink a big studio contract. Bobby’s all signed up but when he leaves, it becomes clear that Parks has a different agenda for Poitier.
Calais Cameron’s script, echoing the fast-talking, wise-cracking style of the era’s movies, fairly crackles. It’s talky but funny, entertainingly sweary (never Poitier, at least almost never) and saturated with what we’d now call micro-aggressions, not all of which are all that micro.
Poitier’s unease in this situation, where whiskey is drunk in the morning and, for all the straight-talking, too much is being left unsaid, is palpable from the start, but even he isn’t sure why at first.
Jeremiah’s Poitier is beautifully rounded, proud but respectful, reserved but passionate, easy-going but wary, navigating a terrain that he’s increasingly aware is booby-trapped. He understands that change requires sacrifice, but it’s not always easy to know what sacrifice to make. It is a stonking performance – you can’t take your eyes off him, and when Poitier allows his emotions to propel him, Jeremiah commands the stage completely.
Bobby and Parks are more sketchily drawn but they hold their own, and Townsend peels away the layers of the fantastically serpentine Parks slowly. Bobby’s almost harder to watch – a white liberal, passionately opposed to racism, but who nonetheless can’t quite make the leap to zero tolerance because, crucially, it doesn’t apply to him. When it becomes clear that to stand up in a meaningful way may have a detrimental effect on his own career, he struggles to find the courage or the conviction.
As much as this is about an insidious plot to sabotage a movement, it’s also about a black man who is expected to shed some of his blackness in order to move forward. There’s a fundamental reason this period piece feels so alive.
Utterly without consequence, on the other hand, is Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors at the Menier Chocolate Factory. Director Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen’s daft off-Broadway parody of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (though “parody” is insufficient to express just how firmly it drives a stake into the heart of the original) has almost nothing to say that hasn’t been said before, but says it with great brio.
Canadian actor James Daly is the inhumanly handsome, pansexually voracious Count Dracula, gym-buffed to a gleaming Eurotrash shine and sporting a cape in a way that few living men could pull off. He’s also oddly obsessed with baking, enabling precisely two jokes that then don’t go anywhere.
Charlie Stemp is querulous solicitor Jonathan Harker, terrified of germs and blind to the perils presented by his new client. For whatever reason, Lucy, played with head-girl enthusiasm by Safeena Ladha, is now Harker’s fiancee, while Mina is her notably less beautiful sister – presumably because she’s played by Sebastien Torkia in an orange wig.
Torkia also plays a female Dr Van Helsing, simultaneously scoffed at and desired by Lucy and Mina’s father, Dr Westfeldt, played by Dianne Pilkington. Everyone except Daly plays several roles – Pilkington notably Westfeldt’s insect-scoffing mental patient Renfield. Her increasingly shambolic quick changes are very funny.
It’s all pretty funny and larky, delivered gamely by the cast with a chaotic fringe show vibe on an expensive-looking set. The jokes come thick and fast, plentiful if not particularly sharp, and some needed suffocating at birth, let alone a shot at immortality. One highly questionable gag about Janet Street-Porter’s teeth must have been added for the UK run, but even the press night audience didn’t appreciate it. The show lacks bite but there’s no need to snap.
Star ratings (out of five)
Retrograde ★★★★
Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors ★★★
Retrograde is at the Apollo, London, until 14 June
Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors is at the Menier Chocolate Factory, London, until 3 May
