Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun was the first by a black female author to reach Broadway, and won the Critic’s Circle award in 1959 over competition from Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill. It depicts a single family living through trials and tragedy, with a masterly revelation of character through action and a piercing focus on the working man and woman. Tinuke Craig’s impeccable production embraces the play’s light and shade, placing the emphasis on the gripping story of hope at its heart.
The Younger family live on Chicago’s South Side in a cramped and crumbling apartment inhabited by more people than can comfortably fit. We eavesdrop on their busy morning routine, driven by Ruth (Cash Holland), who cooks breakfast and cajoles her husband Walter Lee (Solomon Israel) and young son Travis (on press night played by impressive 14-year-old Josh Ndlovu) up and out to work and school respectively.
Walter Lee spends his evenings chatting, drinking and dreaming up get-rich schemes with his friends—somewhat disrupting Travis’s sleep, as the boy spends his nights on the pull-out sofa-bed in the main living area.
Also competing for space and privacy is Beneatha, known as Benny (Joséphine-Fransilja Brookman), Walter Lee’s younger sister, who dreams of becoming a doctor. Lena (Doreene Blackstock), mother to Walter Lee and Beneatha, is the flat’s final inhabitant. She is recently bereaved, and the opening scenes of the play are organised around the family’s wait for an insurance cheque to arrive. The mood is buoyant, each family member in their own way imagining the better future the expected windfall will afford them.
With startling efficiency, Hansberry draws believable characters through witty, compelling dialogue and makes clear their varying, sometimes conflicting, hopes, fears and responses to the world around them. We watch the Younger family as they move from a position of optimism, teetering towards total disintegration. Through them, we glimpse a pivotal moment in American history, charged by conflicts of interest, differences in religious belief, the rise of female empowerment and the real-world impacts of debates around segregation and assimilation—never, though, losing sight of the play’s humanity and lightness of touch.
All this is made flesh by a set of superb performances all the way through this confident, compulsively watchable ensemble. Blackstock is a warm, matriarchal figure, but can also draw on a vein of icy strength. Her relationship with Beneatha (Brookman) is particularly interesting and nuanced. Brookman portrays the youthful hopes and naïvety of her character without erring too far towards self-parody: Benny may be flighty but she has a capacity for resolve, a yearning for something meaningful, and Brookman imbues her with real depth.
The latter applies also to Cash Holland’s performance as Ruth: exhausted, carrying the household for her husband, son and others, she lives the tragedy of the piece the deepest. Her dreams are the most modest, and heartbreaking, of them all. Solomon Israel, playing her husband, has charisma in buckets and real range. Walter Lee’s character perhaps travels the furthest, and Israel is in beautiful control at every step.
Rounding out the ensemble are Gilbert Kyem Jnr and Kenneth Omole as two of Benny’s would-be suitors, each offering her a different version of escape. Omole also doubles in a small role as one of Walter Lee’s friends, and so transformed was he that I did a double-take to check it was indeed the same actor. Jonah Russell appears in a small but key role, again bringing plausibility and authenticity to what might in other hands be overplayed.
The set, costume and hair, by Cécile Trémolières, Maybelle Laye and Dominique Hamilton, evoke the period well with simple touches rather than bold statements. If there is one critique, it might be that the set has a tendency to feel expansive and open rather than enclosed and invaded on all sides by dust and dirt as Ruth describes it. But overall, along with Max Pappenheim’s sound design and Joshua Pharo’s lighting, we get an effective sense of the apartment sitting within the wider world of the block and the city beyond.
After stunning productions such as Jitney, Tinuke Craig again demonstrates her ability to craft intricate, intimate and impactful drama without showiness. There are contemporary design interventions: at times, characters remain visible through the gauzy walls of the set, moving in slow motion, once they’ve left the onstage action. But this is broadly a production which retains its tight focus on the detail of the interactions between the characters, the small victories and moments of dejection, building to a greater sense of tragedy, dysfunction and oppression.
I won’t spoil the ending, but suffice to say the drama is resolved while the tragedy goes on. The programme note talks of this being a production about black freedom; it is absolutely that, in all the knottiness, contradictions, aspirations and setbacks that are implied. And in its fine grain, it is so well-plotted and crafted. Another gripping, brilliant production from Craig: a fine revival of a somewhat overlooked classic, which still—in ways both sad and hopeful—speaks to contemporary experience.