Robert Tanitch reviews Les Blancs at National Theatre/Olivier
Lorraine Hansberry was only 34 when she died in 1965. She did not live long enough to finish her last play, Les Blancs. Robert Niemiroff, her former husband and editor, completed it with the aid of her draft copies.
LES BLANCS by Hansberry, , Writer – Lorraine Hansberry, Director-Yaël Farber, Design – Soutra Gilmour, Lighting – Tim Lutkin, Movement – Imogen Knight, The National Theatre, 2016, Credit: Johan Persson/
Hansberry was the first black and the youngest American to win the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. She won it in 1959 when she was 29. The play, A Raisin in the Sun, is an American classic.
Les Blancs is set in an unnamed African colony at a time of conflict between White Imperialism and Black Nationalism and the writing and characterisation aim at Greek Tragedy.
The National Theatre has gone back to Hansberry’s original drafts and notebooks in an attempt to give the text more focus and to make the didactic dramatic.
Yael Farber’s absorbing production, designed by Soutra Gilmour, has an epic sweep and pace. The Olivier stage and its revolve are put to good dramatic use.
African-born Tshemba Mattoseh (Danny Sapani) went to Europe as a young man, married a European and fathered a child. He returns home for the funeral of his father, a tribal elder, and gets caught up in an uprising against colonial rule.
Where does Tshemba’s duty lie? Is it in Europe or in Africa? Is it to the mission hospital and the Brits who run it and educated him? Or is it to the violent insurgents who want to burn it down?
An extremely tall and extremely emaciated black woman stalks the stage constantly, a silent yet potent symbol for Africa under colonial rule.
It is clear to a blind and old missionary woman (Sian Phillips) what a nation must do when pacifism no longer produces any results.
“Few men,” she points out to a visiting American liberal journalist (Elliott Cown), “get to see the end of an epoch and the opportunity to know it at the same time.”
Danny Sapani’s strong performance is backed up by a fine ensemble which also includes: Gary Beadle as his brother, a converted Christian willing to kowtow to British rule; Clive Francis as a vile and brutal racist British major, who thinks of the colony as his country by right; and Anna Madeley as a hard-working decent missionary who wants the status quo.
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