59. Clybourne Park - Wyndham Theatre

Given the rave reviews that Clybourne Park has been receiving for the last year or so, I was extremely thankful to finally find a Saturday in my schedule to slip in a successful visit to their day ticket queue (I would day ticket more if I were less tired and more organised, alas I am rarely either). In the end I came out feeling it was definitely worth the early morning, but I wasn’t quite sure it was worth the hype.


Quite possibly that’s just one of those unavoidable things, when a play (or a TV show or a book for that matter) gets routinely glowing praise, you end up going in both with unrealistic expectations and, probably more the case here, with oddly warped ideas of what you’re about to get pieced together from all sorts of scattered comments. I’d gone in with a vague idea that the play said something profound about racism and perhaps for others it did, but for me though I found it interesting and clever, it never provided that moment of enlightenment I was expecting.

And that’s the thing, it shouldn’t have to live up to these pre-beliefs, I don’t think I needed that revelatory moment and not having my expectation satisfied certainly didn’t spoil my enjoyment of what is a truly excellent play. But it did leave me wondering if I had missed something, if I’d been too tired or not clever enough and whether I would have got more from this if I’d been familiar with its inspiration, A Raisin in the Sun – the latter of which, at least, I suspect is true.

That said, I thought this was great – both sets were fantastic, with lovely attention to detail and a real lived in feel; the cast were superb all round and I was laughing so much that it made my sides ache, even if it was frequently the uncomfortable guilt-laced sort of laughter. I particularly loved Stuart McQuarrie and Sophie Thomson and the knife-edged closeness they created in the first act, it was a beautiful portrait of a family just managing to hold themselves together and the appearance of Michael Goldsmith as their son at the very end was intensely moving. It was also fascinating to have a socio-economic journey so beautifully and clearly laid out in an artistic form, though I wished they could have maintained the personal-familial storyline a little more in the second act. Though this abandonment is a little more truthful to life, particularly when telling the story of a place – people leave, we’re left hanging and their stories remain unfinished only haunting.

Clever, funny and certainly making me think – I just wish I could have stripped myself of all my preconceived notions, as I think I would have enjoyed this a little more.