REVIEW - Clybourne Park

Relentlessly un-PC, Clybourne Park marched into the West End after its hugely successful run at the

Royal Court

last year.  Now, with an armful of awards including Best Play by the Evening Standard and Critic’s Circle, it proudly pulls no punches.  Bruce Norris’s racial drama deals with prejudice and discrimination in the 1950’s in the first half, and expose’s modern America as a Nation where little has changed since those dark and inhumane days.

No-one would expect anything other than bigoted, ill founded fear and overt discrimination in a play about a black couple, set on moving into an exclusively white part of downtown Chicago in the late 1950’s.  And that’s exactly how local busybody and all-round fuddy-duddy Karl (Stephen Campbell Moore) and his deaf and pregnant wife Betsey (Sarah Goldberg) react to the news, their neighbour’s, Bev (Sophie Thompson) and Russ (Stuart McQuarrie) have sold-up to a completely “inappropriate” pair from the wrong side of town.

McQuarrie and Thompson play a more than anxious couple, clearly in love and devoted to each other, but struggling to cope with life after their beloved son killed himself in the upstairs bedroom.  That’s why they’ve decided to move.  Thompson was sincere and heart warming as the worried wife and grieving mother, trying to hold it together amongst the absolute devastation that’s occurred - and against the pressure of living with a man who either couldn’t, or more than likely, didn’t even try to stay in control.

There are a few sub plots running through this overly complicated plot.  These are gradually cleared up twenty minutes or so into the second half, thanks to Lorna Brown, who plays the culturally sensitive black woman, who asks – what are we all doing here?  I was thinking the same thing at this point. 

In the second half, the cast play different characters fifty years on, but back in the same house.  It’s now deteriorated and fallen into a sad state - just like the community around it.  Counter discrimination and ill founded negatively towards decent, but unknown people continue in an almost identical vain to what happened fifty years earlier in the same living room.  Basically the second half of this brutally honest story descends into a catalogue of abusive racially motivated “jokes”; I wouldn’t dare print in this respectable forum.

Clybourne Park is terrifically provoking on many levels, and will undoubtedly open up the debate in your own mind about how far we’ve all come over the last fifty years.  For some the answer will be – not very far.  Despite this, the nuggets of humour interspersed through-out this gritty look at social division helps lighten, what could otherwise be described as a stressful and embarrassing social documentary.