• Les Blancs (NT Live at Home)

7/9/20 (Wed)

A fascinating play by Lorraine Hansberry of Raisin in the Sun fame, left unfinished at her early death and reworked by her husband for its debut in 1970. She wrote this apparently in response to a production she attended in 1961 of Genet’s hugely successful Les Nègres, wanting to jettison the exoticism of his show for a more realistic portrait of colonialism and the African experience.

Two visitors arrive in an unnamed African nation with decidedly different perspectives: a native son Tshembe who has returned from Europe for his father’s funeral, and a white reporter Charlie who has come from the US to write about a long-standing Protestant missionary hospital and school in the area established and run by Europeans. Tshembe was educated in that very school and, as a successful expatriate with a European wife and child, would appear to be one of its successes.

The nation that Tshembe has returned to is on the brink of revolution against a patronizing colonial master, challenging his loyalty to both sides. Charlie tries to engage with him regarding his views, but Tshembe, wary of what he considers the unwitting superciliousness of whites coming to help the poor blacks, responds to Charlie’s idealism with bitterness. The intense dialogue can border on the polemic but is extremely interesting in light of the recent Black Lives Matter talk, which it echoes. Tshembe has worked, lived and traveled widely in the West, so his observations, such as his reference to “American apartheid”, are not idle. To Charlie’s entreaties just to talk, Tshembe responds, “For a handshake, a grin and half a glass of whisky, you want 300 years to disappear? … It will take a million tomorrows to rectify what has been done here.” Seems unfair to an individual journalist who had nothing to do with actions centuries earlier and wants to be seen as an individual (“I’m not 100 men”), but this is the gulf of mistrust that history has created.

Tshembe’s conflict is embodied in his family. His older brother is a Catholic priest, seen by Tshembe as the subjugation of Africa to white culture versus the brother’s aspiration to an ideal embracing all of mankind. The priest questions the father’s traditional funeral and the need for violent overthrow. Meanwhile, their confused teenage brother Eric is mixed race, representing very literally the rape of Africa – the father will come as a shock – and his sexuality is questionable, never a good thing in those parts (“So if you can’t become a white man, you’ve decided to become a white woman?”). When the priest discovers that Eric wants to join the terrorists, he moves to turn in the leader, a village elder to whom the family is deeply indebted. This sets up a bitter dispute with Tshembe.

The clash of cultures and refusal of both sides to listen to the other (Tshembe is no better in his way than the British major) lead inevitably to violence, with whites killing blacks, blacks killing whites, and blacks killing each other. The senseless deaths – the black leader who preaches nonviolence and has returned to Africa for peace talks, the white reverend who set up the mission and has worked selflessly for the locals for four decades, a black religious figure, a white family with children – are clearly only a signal of what is to come as young Africans come to see violence as the only way out:

We marched in silence, without weapons, without hatred. We stood; we prayed our Christian prayers! Your Christian prayers. We wrote petitions and editorials. We sent our emissaries to Europe. We tried to negotiate on our knees. We begged, and when we were not shot, we were ignored. And we were not yet begging for freedom, but for concessions, crumbs from the banquet tabled of imperialism – the right to live unharmed. Where were you then?

The tough response of the colonial authorities to the mounting terror finally sees Tshembe join the forces of revolution, aware that they want to destroy without a clear idea of what they want to build. Still, he feels, this should be decided by Africans themselves. The result in real life has become clear in the half-century since this play debuted, but in any case the insightful work drives home the futility of dictating from the outside and the need to let matters take their course. The mission school/hospital, a symbol for Africans of both the West’s good intentions and self-assumed superiority, ends the play in flames in a fire set tellingly by the biracial brother and thus a victim in a sense of both sides.

The play is framed by the irritating presence of four African women (two curiously in whiteface) who parade at an excruciatingly slow pace across the stage from time to time, singing in Xhosa. It goes on way too long and comes across as pretentious. I’ll fast-forward through this on future viewings. There’s nothing much they can do about the ghostly African woman who wanders glassy-eyed across the stage since she is evidently written into the script. She reappears throughout the show, haunting Tshembe and finally embracing him. She is the ghost to his Hamlet as he weighs his ties to the West, including his own family, versus his ties to an African ideal. I get the symbolism, but there must be a better way to show this than the affected manner here.

The expert set places the mission in skeleton form at the center of a revolving stage, allowing for swift transitions. The cast was superb from top to bottom, starting with a dominant performance by Danny Sapani as Tshembe. Also memorable were Siân Phillips as the reverend’s elderly wife and Anna Madeley as a doctor, both selfless victims of events beyond their control. Other than the clumsy handling of the female chorus and eerie woman, I can’t imagine a better production. One of the best of the National Theatre Live shows, and that’s saying a lot.