Eugene O’Neill’s ‘Emperor Jones’ was the first serious play by a white American writer to place black experience centre-stage. It traces the fall of Brutus Jones, an ex-convict turned tyrant over a West Indian island through imitating his oppressors: ‘I’ll git the hide frayled off some o’ you niggers’ he cries in his first line. It’s not only the language and inflections (preserved in aspic in this production) which date the play. Jones’ swift descent from brave bluster to the savage expressionist jungle of madness is luridly staged in a series of violent personal and racial memories.
Thea Sharrock’s production proves O’Neill’s symbolism is still theatrical dynamite, even if it is also an outrageously dodgy Jungian metaphor for black experience. Robin Don’s symbolic design parts the white walls of Jones’s throne room, dropping a disc of what looks like drowned brushwood fencing down towards the upturned revolve for the jungle meltdown; your gaze is forced down on Paterson Joseph’s Jones, who races round in circles but cannot escape the jaws of this menacing abstract shell. Sister Bliss’ thrilling percussion-score expands the soundscape way beyond O’Neill’s original pulse-throb of a single tom-tom. And Sharrock’s tableaux of the dead are sometimes visually haunting: in one, Jones’ native victims sit, backs to the audience, like boulders weighing down his mental turntable. Joseph brings huge physical and emotional commitment to a part which is limited to one part swank and nine parts pure terror. And John Marquez makes a nasty insinuation in human form out of Jones’ white cockney sidekick. For me, though, Sharrock’s production scores a hit to the gut but misses the heart and mind. In 1920, O’Neill’s premiere was politically forceful as well as spectacular because a black man, not a blacked-up man, played the lead. Sharrock’s revival updates the special effects but not the politics: visual references to everything from recent west African dictators to ‘Live and Let Die’ do little to ground a play which is already powerfully incoherent. Staging it in the large public arena of the National exposes it: playing it as it is makes it less than what it was.
2 comments
good
That was really great, i love that musical.