A cramped sitting-room-come-kitchen dominates the stage of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. This is the rented three-room Chicago apartment of the Younger family sometime in the 1950s.
The lives of the five people who occupy its tiny space are hemmed in not only by poverty but also by a society that is racist and hasn’t quite grasped the idea that women deserve equal rights. Despite this, they have their dreams. But in the words of a Langston Hughes poem that opens the play, “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?”
The play, performed by a brilliant cast directed by Tinuke Craig, explores those different dreams and the obstacles they face. The sensitive and serious issues are in part conveyed through remarkably witty dialogue that has the audience continuously laughing.
The story is told from the point of view of women who are sympathetic to the male casualties of an oppressive society. Lena (Doreene Blackstock), a domestic worker regarded as the head of the family, is to inherit $10,000 insurance as a result of her husband's death. She intends some of the money to pay for her daughter Beneatha’s training as a doctor. Her son Walter Lee (Solomon Israel), tired of life as a chauffeur, is keen on using the rest to start a liquor store, but much as she cares for him, Lena rejects that idea as unchristian and instead has her eye on buying them a home.
However, when she settles for a house in a white district, because it’s much cheaper than buying from an area occupied by black people, she gets a visit from one of its representatives who wants her to change her mind.
Beneatha, played by Josephine-Fransilja Brookman, has the confident, easy, sometimes mischievous manner of a young adult, certain that the world can and must be different.
She is drawn to the ideas of fellow student Joseph Asagai (Kenneth Omole), the Nigerian who talks about their African heritage. She is less struck by wealthy George Murchison (Gilbert Kyem Jnr), who has not the slightest interest in political ideas or his African heritage. When she tries to talk to him, he tells her, “I don’t go out with you to discuss the nature of ‘quiet desperation’ or to hear all about your thoughts.”
The man’s money may appeal to Walter but not to Beneatha, a character who, a decade later, would be labelled a second-wave feminist.
Walter’s wife Ruth (Cash Holland) is kindly but worn by poverty, her face a picture of strain, exaggerated by the worries of a pregnancy she doesn't think they have the space for.
This powerful play, coming in the middle of the growing Civil Rights Movement, reflects something of Lorraine Hansberry’s own family experience of the racist segregation of housing and marked a cultural breakthrough in 1959 when it became the first play on Broadway by a black writer. It was also the first Broadway show directed by a black person.
The USA and Britain are still societies where lives are frustrated by the lack of opportunity and discrimination. The words of Langston Hughes open the show with the question, “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?”, listing several possibilities before finishing with “Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it just explode?”
August 2024 in English cities gave us one frightening answer to that question.
A better answer is in the performance of Lorraine Hansberry’s important play.