Review: Clybourne Park, Bristol Old Vic Weston Studio

Bruce Norris’ play asks us to think hard about race, property, greed and gentrification – but it wears these big questions lightly, under a covering of black humour and some deeply human stories.

Clybourne Park’s structure is satisfying, neat, makes interesting demands on its cast… and helps illustrate those big messages all the more starkly. The first act (1959) centres on a white couple preparing to leave their house in a respectable inner Chicago suburb. The reason for their move becomes clear as the act progresses. What also becomes clear is that there is some perturbation among some (well, one) of the local neighbourhood association, about the new buyers of the house – a black family.

L-R Mofetoluwa Akande, Cudjoe Asare, Holly Carpenter and Finnbar Hayman in ‘Clybourne Park’. Pics: Craig Fuller

The second act fast-forwards 50 years to 2009, and to another moment when the exact same house is changing hands. This time, under the process of inner-city gentrification, the house’s black occupants are moving out, to be replaced by a young, upwardly-mobile white couple expecting their first child. More enlightened times, you’d think… and yet the move turns out to be no less contentious.

Norris’ stylistic devices are all happy ones: both acts take the place of a single, long scene, following one hour in the life of the house on a pivotal day in its history. Both play out in the same room of the house. Both, what’s more, use the same cast of seven, suggesting a sense of history repeating or at least replaying itself. Linking past and present still further, some of the characters we meet in the second act are revealed to have links back to the 1959 vintage.

Mofetoluwa Akande (Lena) and Cudjoe Asare (Kevin)

In short, Clybourne Park makes some wonderfully sharp observations about race and social sectarianism – and, lest you think this is a mere flag-waver of a play, weaves around these big themes some poignant stories of loss, loneliness, frustration, loyalty and ambition.

What it needs to bring it fully alive is a crisp, nimble set and a top-notch cast able to slot itself into both time-frames – and it gets both in this outstanding Bristol Old Vic Theatre School production. The cast of seven all excel in both their ’59 and ’09 roles, often in the latter bringing echoes, however faint, of their characters in the former, thus underlying further the sense of history’s implacable cycles.

Jason Imlach as Russ

Finnbar Hayman brings a splendid nervous, compulsive energy to both Karl, the nervy dad-to-be and neighbourhood association standard-bearer who hides some deep-set prejudices under his fussy, amiable pomposity, and later Steve, the hipster dad-to-be who… hides some deep-set prejudices under his nervy banter and obsessive fact-checking.

Holly Carpenter (Kathy) and Lydia Gard (Betsy)

Mofetoluwa Akande, similarly, echoes her dignified, self-aware maidservant Francine in her second-act role, the calm, measured Lena who stands by and speaks clearly of her desire for the house and neighbourhood she has loved to retain its character after she has gone, while everyone else around her ties themselves in political-correctness double-knots (I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a more cool, withering gaze than those Akande directs towards Hayman).

In the first act, Jason Imlach and Holly Carpenter also turn in masterful performances as Russ and Bev, the nice suburban couple leaving Clybourne Park under a cloud of sorrow that she has re-forged into jokey, companionable good humour, he into a quiet brooding (fans of Richard Yates, John Cheever and other chroniclers of the sadness behind the white picket fences of 1950s America will find much to enjoy here).

The set is beautifully done – the comings and goings across the front room of the house, with faint hints of the upstairs and outside world, so that there is never an idle second of scene-changing, never a half-second’s loss of momentum.

Holly Carpenter (Bev) and Charlie Layburn (Jim)

Crisply, tautly directed by Jenny Stephens, this production showcases the hugely impressive talents of another fine crop of Bristol Old Vic Theatre School students. They are clearly deeply involved in the play – and rightly so, because in its mix of the personal and the wider social, in its mirroring of two eras to show us just what has and more often what hasn’t changed, and its sharp, often blackly funny dialogue, Clybourne Park is a chamber-theatre masterpiece.

Clybourne Park continues at Bristol Old Vic until Sat, Nov 17. For more information, visit bristololdvic.org.uk/whats-on/clybourne-park

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