Les Blancs had a troubled birth. In 1965 several unfinished drafts of the play were entrusted by its dying author, Lorraine Hansberry, to her ex-husband, Robert Nemiroff, who mounted a debut production in New York in 1970. Nemiroff has created a fresh version with the help of a ‘dramaturg’ (or ‘colleague’, in English) named Drew Lichtenberg who believes not only that this ramshackle script is a masterpiece but also that Hansberry belongs in the first rank of dramatists alongside Ibsen, Sophocles and Aeschylus. This does not bode well. But the result is surprisingly good. Or good-ish.
The setting is a nameless African colony populated by do-gooding Europeans, angry freedom fighters and a thuggish soldiery overseen by a British army major who happens to be a psychopathic racist. The atmosphere of the tropics is conjured brilliantly and Soutra Gilmour’s lavish designs are a true feast for the eye. There’s music, too, from white-gowned matriarchs who warble native choruses and pluck away at crude, hand-made instruments.
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