Red Velvet *****

Tricycle Theatre

EXCERPT: "Lolita Chakrabarti's play has a fascinating premise and is tightly structured and well written, but I believe it is Indhu Rubasingham’s judicious directorial choices and Adrian Lester’s supremely powerful performance in the title role that transforms it into the five star Broadway transfer show it is.
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Plot Synopsis:

Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, 1833. Edmund Kean, the greatest actor of his generation, has collapsed on stage whilst playing Othello. A young black American actor has been asked to take over the role. But as the public riot in the streets over the abolition of slavery, how will the cast, critics and audience react to the revolution taking place in the theatre? Imagined experiences based on the true story of Ira Aldridge.

Cast and Creatives:

Written by: Lolita Chakrabarti

Directed by Indhu Rubasingham


Designed by Tom Piper


Adrian Lester
 - Ira Aldridge / Othello

Charlotte Lucas
- Ellen Tree / Desdemona

Oliver Ryan – Edmund Kean’s son / Iago

Eugene O’Hare
- French director

Rachel Finnegan
- Aldridge’s wife

Nic Jackman
- eager to please young actor

Simon Chandler


Natasha Gordon


Thoughts:

Lolita Chakrabarti's play Red Velvet has a fascinating premise and is tightly structured and well written, but I believe it is Indhu Rubasingham’s judicious directorial choices and Adrian Lester’s supremely powerful performance in the title role that transforms it into the five star Broadway transfer show it is.

Having a play within a play can be a very potent device and here director Indhu Rubasingham and his exceptional cast exploit it to its full. Just as the device adds an element of self-awareness to farces Noises Off and Jeeves and Wooster - so making the over-exaggeration much more comically palatable for those who instinctively don’t like farce - here it is used to ensure comic over-acting retains its pathos and power. Casting Adrian Lester as Ira Aldridge pays dividends: Lester is simply outstanding in his negotiation of his part’s intricacies. Appropriate to acting of its time, all the cast over-act the ‘play within a play’ part of the play, the grandiloquence of their gestures working to great comic effect. However, Lester has the stage presence and charisma to ensure that these Shakespearean scenes retain their emotional power and significance. It is actually quite astonishing that he stops this method of acting from being reductive. I think his success is partly due to the space he performs in: for someone who is able to enrapture at the National’s Olivier, having the intimate Tricycle Theatre as your stomping ground is a dream. (I wonder what space they’ll perform in when they transfer to Broadway).

The rest of the ‘play without the play’ part is necessarily in a lower-key, but it isn’t dwarfed by the excess of the performative part because the story’s characters are big ones, whilst with enough emotional depth to give moments real poignance. We feel for every one of the characters: all the main four have to face up to a personal dilemma during the play, and all respond in very relatable and human – albeit flawed – ways. The cast are almost irreproachably strong – supporting such a thesp without being lost yourself onstage is tricky, but they are all individually strong. There are elements of the caricature in how Oliver Ryan plays the villainous figure, but crucially we can still relate to his difficulties. And Eugene O’Hare, who plays the French director/manager, is absolutely superb in his quavering but resolute decision to close the theatre, and his confrontation with Ira Aldridge about it.

Even though the degree of racism that the play exposes is long gone, the play possesses a great deal of currency as an exposition of a historically fascinating period of time. This is also facilitated by the way the shifting ways the play engages its audience: at the start, when we’re trying to work out what’s going on, it comes as a real shock to realise that the reason for the cast’s mixed reactions to Ira’s theatrical suggestions is bound up with the colour of his skin. Because Lester makes no fawning apology for his character’s race, and because the other white characters respond in differing ways to him, my immediate assumption was that there was some as yet unrevealed backstory that provokes such horror in Kean’s son (Oliver Ryan). The racism of the time is thus exposed in a shocking way, but because it doesn’t harp on about it too long it doesn’t seem anachronistic. Instead, the play’s attention shifts onto other issues – how friendship is tested, how people fight all sorts of inequalities – and the racism message isn’t hammered home again until the very end. At this final point, we have heard great things about Ira Aldridge’s acting successes outside England. When we see him finally face the audience ready to go on and play the part of Lear, complete with wig, gloves, and a faceful of very convincing white paint, we realise that these acting accolades have been achieved in the disguise of a white man. It is a chilling visual image that will stay with me for a very long time.