Bruce Norris's new play, set in the Chicago suburbs, has had some cracking reviews. There are so few good comedies around that it's great to find a playwright who can write such brilliant dialogue. And Dominic Cooke's production is perfectly judged, with exquisite comic timing and a wonderful cast including Martin Freeman and Sophie Thompson. So why did I go away dissatisfied?
The play traces two episodes in the life of a house, some 40 years apart. In the first act, set in the 1950s, Clybourne Park is an all-white suburb where Russ and Bev are selling up to move closer to his work. In comes a neighbour to tell them that the purchasers are black -- something sure to lower property prices. In the second half, the house is semi-derelict and the new purchasers want to knock it down and start again. But the neighbours in this 'mixed, vibrant' residential area, newly fashionable and regenerated, are uneasy about the new-build plan.
This is fertile territory for social comedy, exploring American sensitivities and hypocrisies about property, territory and race, which Norris does to great effect. The problem is that he seems nervous about foregrounding the black side of the equation. In the first half, the black purchasers of the house never appear, and we get to meet only Francine the maid and her husband, who have no dramatic function and little to do except observe. In the second half the black couple are also left a little on the margins, though there's a great passage in which Steve (Martin Freeman) blunders into telling an offensive racist joke, excusing himself on the grounds that he heard it from a black colleague at work. 'Half of my friends are black!' exclaims his wife Kathy. We know she's exaggerating, and Norris knows how to make the most of the comedy of embarrassment. But somehow his under-use of his black characters means he's pulling his punches.
A bigger problem for me is that he has added a second theme to the play (SPOILER ALERT) which jars with the social comedy. It's painful, but not painfully funny, unless you find Ibsen funny. The house has been the scene of a suicide. Kenneth, the son of Russ and Bev, has killed himself after returning from the Korean war. This is a classic skeleton-in-the-cupboard theme which, while explaining Russ's irascible outbursts, seems to me to distract from the main theme of the play. The trunk in which Russ buries Kenneth's suicide note is dug up again in the second half, but the impact is diluted because the main characters have already left the stage by the time the note is read. Kenneth himself appears on stage in a ghostly flashback which jars with what has gone before. It's cheap melodrama. Knitting together the past and the present of a house is a fairly common dramatic device, but the playwright here falls short of his ambitions. The result is that there two plays in Clybourne Park, either of which would have been okay on its own. But they don't combine well together.
Comments