There’s a lot of big spectacle in the West End at the moment. Big musicals, big stars, big budgets. Which makes Ryan Calais Cameron’s fifties-set three hander about a potentially commie actor seem pretty conventional. We’ve got sharp suits, big pours of scotch, a haze of cigarette smoke. We’ve got a no-bullshit lawyer who speaks in cliches (‘now we’re cooking with gas’ etc) and a nervy wannabe writer trying to break the big time. All a bit familiar, a bit old-fashioned.
But to assume that’s all that this play’s going to be – a pastiche of a fast-patter period piece – is to underestimate Calais Cameron who, after all, smashed the West End with his beautiful play For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy. Because in walks Sidney Poitier, the guy who’d go on to become the first Black man to win an Oscar, and then the whole thing gets richer and tenser, with big speeches that borrow the cadences and blueprints of the golden age, becoming a play that feels both completely contemporary and like an instant classic.
The play is a transfer from the Kiln Theatre, directed by its artistic director Amit Sharma, and it works so well in the West End, maybe because it’s a really simple idea: Poitier is about to be cast in a big breakout role, but NBC’s lawyers want him to sign an oath that he’s not a communist, as well as denounce a friend. It’s three actors arguing in a nicely furnished office. That’s literally it.
First there’s the initial tension of Poitier being Black in a very white world. But Calais Cameron goes further: what really matters is that he’s Black AND he’s principled. You can see Ivanno Jeremiah’s Poitier wrong-footed: he’s come into the office assuming the conflict is a Black thing. More so, it’s a Red thing.
The cast of three smash it: Oliver Johnstone’s skittery writer, blinking and sweating, with good intentions but such ineptitude at reading the situation, whose desperation for the big time overrides his sense of right or wrong. As the studio suit, Stanley Townsend is a brilliant opposite, slow and heavy and unrelenting in his mission to best Poitier, like staring down a charging rhinoceros.
But it’s Ivanno Jeremiah as Poitier who is completely transfixing. He’s one of those actors that has proper presence, captivating the moment he steps on stage. One of those actors who can take a long stretch of silence – Sidney considers whether to sign a piece of paper – and make it one of the most riveting moments of the play. And what’s amazing is that he’s channelling Poitier but also somehow managing to pay tribute at the same time. You can see the admiration, the intensity Jeremiah has for the part he’s playing. He IS Poitier, but also standing apart from him in awe.
Sure, you can see the seams of the play: the phone ringing at precisely the most tense moment, the convenient reasons for an actor to leave the stage or come back on. But its bare schematics don’t really matter. It’s the substance that’s so good. There’s all this talk of ‘values’, of ‘the American way of life’, coded language which hasn’t really changed. It’s never explicit – Calais Cameron is too smart for that – but what you can hear in those speeches about McCarthy and HUAC is one dark, scared and paranoid time calling to another.
