Strange Fruit
Bush Theatre London

FOLLOWING a superb revival of Winsome Pinnock’s Leave Taking last summer, the Bush Theatre continue their Passing the Baton initiative by staging this debut work by Kittitian-British writer Caryl Phillips.

Now better known as a novelist, Phillips was just 21 when Strange Fruit was first produced at the Sheffield Crucible in 1979. For someone of such youth it is a flawed yet remarkable work, as is Nancy Medina’s current production.

As you enter the theatre through the beaded doorway, you encounter Max Johns’s design incorporating all the classic features of a traditional West Indian sitting room  — a ceramic pineapple, a stack of records, a portrait of the queen.

Unfortunately, most are hidden away in the foyer and are unable to act as a much-needed frame for the three hours of intense action that takes place in the bright-blue carpeted Marshall family living room.

Still, it is enough to lull into the false impression that Vivien (Rakie Ayola) is a house-proud matriarch. Yet what emerges from Ayola’s bewitching portrait —a woman who has been overtaken by life — is far more complex and gripping.

Her relationship with her two twenty-something sons, Alvin (Tok Stephen) and Errol (Jonathan Ajayi), is being eroded by intergenerational differences, inflamed by a viciously racist social climate — the play’s title, after all, references Billie Holiday’s song about a lynching in the US.

A rip-roaring first half is bookended by Vivien’s moving yet clumsily situated recollection of a shocking racist attack on the outskirts of town.

Yet the overbearingly miserable picture Phillips paints is somewhat offset by the endearing inscrutability of Tilly Steele’s performance as Shelly, the white childbearing girlfriend of abusive firebrand Errol.

Played with spitting pugnaciousness by Ajayi, it’s hard not to think his character is overly one-dimensional until a cause of his trauma is later alluded to.

When a disconsolate Alvin returns from compensating for his mother’s absence at his grandfather’s funeral in the Caribbean, years of what Phillips in his preface calls “hurtful misunderstandings” erupt with disturbing effect.

Once the revelations unfold, the production temporarily subsides as a number of seemingly climactic scenes give way to repetitive arguments. Yet a stirring conclusion overwhelms.
 
If whoever collects the baton from this work can write with the emotional depth of Phillips they will be on to a winner.

Runs until July 27, box office: bushtheatre.co.uk