The Pulitzer-winning American playwright Suzan-Lori Parks goes back to the Greek tragedies and Homer’s Odyssey to find a format for her play, Father Comes Home From the Wars (parts 1, 2 & 3), which is set during the American Civil War.
The main characters have Greek names and there is also a chorus. The artificiality, a classical and colloquial mix, gives the drama, serious and comic, a fable-like quality; and that is its special appeal.
Jo Bonney’s production at Royal Court Theatre has a fine ensemble of actors who get it exactly right.
Hero (Steve Toussaint, a man of stature), the slave of a Southern white landowner, is promised his freedom if he will fight on the Confederate side with his master. Can he trust his master to keep his word?
The story is told in three parts. In the first, the chorus and a very old man take bets whether Hero will fight. In the strong second part, the white master (John Stahl) debates with a captured, wounded and caged Yankee (Tom Bateman) how much a slave is worth. It seems the worth of a coloured man, once he is made free, is less than his worth as a slave.
The third part begins with a Messenger artfully delaying his message. The Messenger is a talking dog, amusingly played by Dex Lee. The liberated Hero comes home, his name, character and circumstances changed, but in ways which are so out of character that they do not convince.
The three parts are the first in Parks’s intended cycle of nine plays. Already there is a feeling of a modern classic in the making, something comparable, potentially, to August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle.
Imogen at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre is billed as Shakespeare’s Cymbeline renamed and reclaimed. Bernard Shaw dismissed the play as “stagey trash of the lowest melodramatic order, abominably written, intellectually vulgar, foolish, offensive, indecent and exasperating beyond all tolerance”.
Cymbeline has never been popular with modern audiences. The Victorians, however, loved it and idolised Imogen (King Cymbeline’s daughter in the play). Alfred, Lord Tennyson read the play on his deathbed and arranged for a copy to be buried with him.
I doubt very much if Tennyson would have asked for a copy of Cymbeline to be buried with him, if his knowledge of the play had been restricted to Matthew Dunster’s modern, urban, aggressive, drug-ridden, tracksuits-and-trainer production, with its jarring modern colloquialisms, abattoir curtains and its sci-fi aerial battles with the actors in harnesses.
Shakespeare’s best song, Fear No More the Heat o’ the Sun, has been cut. Maddy Hill sings Daft Punk’s Get Lucky. Hill’s tough-girl Imogen gets a big unwanted laugh when she wakes in the play’s most horrific scene to find a headless man in her bed.
The most affecting performance is by the deaf actor William Grint, who speaks his dialogue in sign language, which is translated by Martin Marquez, who plays his dad.
The “grime” dancing finale, judging by the audience’s wild reaction during and after it, was the high spot of the performance for them. This leads to the big question: whether Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre is the right place for a production which is so at odds with the Globe’s raison d’être.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.