The RSC hasn’t had much luck embedding hip American writers. In 2008, Adriano Shaplin’s two-year residency produced a bollix of a history play about Thomas Hobbes. Now the multitalented Tarell Alvin McCraney – whose ‘Brother/Sister’ plays were a lyrical epiphany at the Young Vic – follows suit with a fizzy but flakey ‘contemporary restoration comedy’.
Everyone’s a scum-skimmer on the shallow pond of fame and sexual opportunity in this transatlantic farce about nothing. Young freelance mixed-race gigolo Pharus is on the run from big rap producer Jules, who wants him as a sex slave.
He skips to London to work for his Scotch-swilling, scheming Great Aunt Marion (poison in a petite pink trouser suit, thanks to Sheila Reid’s nicely twisted performance). But as soon as Pharus lands at Heathrow, McCraney’s verbal bling seems to get lost in a fog. As Pharus improbably recruits a cabbie, an illegal immigrant and a Prussian prostitute to his adult therapy business, motivations turn bizarre and as transient as the accents and the plot – which has to be tight to drive this kind of hectic, fronting comedy – idles on full volume.
Soutra Gilmour’s neon-lit set throbs like a sex shop, and a talented cast make the strident cameos blaze like the striplights above. But there’s only so much fun you can have with a pervy English lord in an aquamarine G-string. At least Jamie Lloyd’s jerky, overly hardcore direction adds the suggestion that sex work has its painful moments – but it’s a mistake to sour this rococo bit of fun with would-be sugar daddy Jules apparently fisting Pharus against his will. Despite the slick energy and the refreshing rudeness, the play’s pushing a tired message: that gangsta rap can be sexist and the celebrity clean-up business shallow and vain.
Now McCraney’s back home with Chicago-based Steppenwolf his plays will hopefully recover the sense of depth and proportion required to earth his talent. Even Restoration smut classic ‘The Country Wife’ had a moral element, for perspective and to make the double entendres more illicit fun. ‘American Trade’s fun is unsustained, partly because when everyone’s out and on the fiddle, single entendres are all there is.