Clybourne Park at the Park Theatre

‘This play just gets more & more topical, with its cathartic storm of mutual offence’: CLYBOURNE PARK – Park Theatre ★★★★

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Park Theatre, London – until 24 April 2022

In 2010, Bruce Norris’ play wowed the Royal Court: this is a ten-year anniversary (well, plus two years lost to Covid) so forgive me for quoting what I wrote then:

“I spent the interval racked with worry that the play might decline in Act 2. If that had happened, I would have trudged heartbroken into the night, unable to write a word. No danger, though: it roared off again into the stratosphere, glittering and throwing off sparks.”

It is a treat to return to this clever, honest, mocking piece: a comedy wrapped around a tragedy, a satire on class, race, offence, grief and housing. And by chance, I see it  just after the Bridge’s Straight Line Crazy, about New York’s growth and social conflicts 1922-62.

For this, set in the same house in 1959 and then 2009, makes a sort of accidental oblique sequel, conveying the human tides flowing along those expressways. It is sharp, funny, bookended with delicate grace by an acknowledgement of tragedy. In Oliver Kaderbhai’s production, it is also most beautifully acted.

In 1959 Bev (Imogen Stubbs, housewifely, wittering, cloaking a deep grief)  and her husband Russ (keeping a lid on it, postwar-stoical) are selling up to a non-white family, which fills their prat neighbour Karl with horror. Gradually, we learn how, despite their initially vapid conversations, Russ and Bev are blighted by the shame and suicide of their soldier son after the  Korean War. Mediated with zero success by the local minister, and witnessed by their decent embarrassed black maid and her husband, a glorious row develops.

Andrew Langtree’s Karl – bowtie and strutting gait – is perfect, furious about unmixable  “cultures” and house prices,  not above a bit of blackmail. Richard Lintern as Russ is magnificent both in restraint and the loss of it: preoccupied, crippled with grief and memory, rising to a massive justified anger.  Stubbs gives us an innocent, kindly and tormented and clumsily trapped in white-madam patronage:  in a heartbreaking last remark to her gentle cleaner,  she murmurs how good it would be “if we could all sit together at table”

So we can feel briefly superior to these 1959 people, but fifty years on, after the neighbourhood “went black” and white gentrifiers are moving in, Act2 shows their successors.  The same cast but wholly different (Stubbs now a hellish self satisfied lawyer, Langtree a different kind of prat) are at a homeowners’ meeting about planning objections. At, as it were, the same table,  but not doing too  well. They – we – are just as absurd and even touchier, in Norris’ early and timely prefiguraration of our present Age of Offence.

This play indeed just gets more and more topical, with its famously cathartic storm of mutual offence:  gay, black, white, pregnant, patriotic, all furious….all it needs is for trans politics to be dropped in and we’s be in 2022. Themes from the first act are neatly interwoven: among them the original tragedy itself, a delicate, understated staging stopping your breath. . Seven fine actors dazzle, veteran and newcomers  (Aliyah Odoffin is on a professional stage debut, assured and elegantly in timing).   The play deserves no less.

Parktheatre.co.uk. To 23 April

Rating.  Four

 

 

‘This play just gets more & more topical, with its cathartic storm of mutual offence’: @lib_thinks on @OliverKaderbhai’s revival of Bruce Norris’ @ClybourneParkUK. At @ParkTheatre til 23 Apr. ★★★★ #LondonTheatre #theatrereviews

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Libby Purves
Libby Purves was theatre critic for The Times from 2010 to 2013. Determined to continue her theatre commentary after losing that job, she set up her own site www.theatrecat.com in October 2013. She personally reviews all major London openings, usually with on-the-night publication, and also gives voice to a new generation of critics with occasional guest 'theatrekittens'. In addition to her theatre writing and myriad other credits, Libby has been a presenter on BBC Radio 4’s Midweek for over 30 years. She is also the author of a dozen novels, and numerous non-fiction titles. In 1999, Libby was appointed an OBE for services to journalism.
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Libby Purves on RssLibby Purves on Twitter
Libby Purves
Libby Purves was theatre critic for The Times from 2010 to 2013. Determined to continue her theatre commentary after losing that job, she set up her own site www.theatrecat.com in October 2013. She personally reviews all major London openings, usually with on-the-night publication, and also gives voice to a new generation of critics with occasional guest 'theatrekittens'. In addition to her theatre writing and myriad other credits, Libby has been a presenter on BBC Radio 4’s Midweek for over 30 years. She is also the author of a dozen novels, and numerous non-fiction titles. In 1999, Libby was appointed an OBE for services to journalism.

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