Lorraine Hansberry’s great 1959 work A Raisin in the Sun is a hugely famous play, frequently staged on Broadway, but for whatever reason much less so over here. I wonder if artistic directors feel it’s too obvious, or that more obscure works of Black twentieth century drama are more deserving of a revival. Certainly the play is hardly lacking in cultural visibility: in recent-ish years we’ve had the rise of Bruce Norris’s Raisin-referencing Clybourne Park, Kwame Kwei-Armah’s Raisin sequel Beneatha’s Place, and a lavish NT production of Hansberry’s unfinished obscurity Les Blancs.
But Tinuke Craig’s touring Headlong revival is the first big UK production to come to London in a very long time, and to quote the actual words of the schoolgirl behind me at the matinee I caught it at: ‘yass Beneatha!’.
What a great play it is. A rich and powerful mix of domestic blue-collar tragedy, capitalist critique, consideration of Segregation and clear-sighted look forward to a better Black future.
It follows the Youngers, a resilient but fraying African American family crammed into a tiny Chicago apartment. Walter’s marriage to his wife Ruth is visibly strained – she’s a pragmatist, but he can only keep his head up high by dreaming bigger, and he chafes at his family’s refusal to get behind his desire to open a liquor store with a couple of semi-reputable pals. His student sister Beneatha dreams rather differently, of Black liberation and Nigerian culture. And stern widowed matriarch Lena is just trying to keep the family above water.
As A Raisin in the Sun begins, the family is awaiting a life-changing $10,000 pay out on Lena’s late husband’s life insurance. But what is she to do with it? Donate to the church? Fund Walter’s shop? Pay for Beneatha’s university fees? Or buy a house and say goodbye to the claustrophobic apartment?
In what I believe is the first UK revival since 2010 and the first in London since… who knows… Craig directs fluidly and efficiently rather than flashily, with the slightly abstract gauze walls of Cécile Trémolières’s set the closest thing here to a classic Headlong arty flourish. Craig is here to serve the play, and the play deserves to be served. Plus she coaxes fine performances out of her cast, particularly Joséphine-Fransilja Brookman’s disarmingly puppyish Beneatha and Solomon Israel’s Walter Lee, teetering disconcertingly between frightening and loveable.
Hansberry died of pancreatic cancer aged just 34 and it’s still devastating to think what a talent the world lost - Raisin, her debut, juggles an astounding number of characters and themes with the utmost assurance, deftly focusing on the local and the global, the personal and philosophical with seeming effortless ease. It’s dark and light, tragic and hopeful, the texture of life.