Slow but sassy - Moon on a Rainbow Shawl is a great production of an average play says Naima Khan.
Kudos to the late Errol John whose 1957 play is enjoying a beautiful revival at National Theatre, where his strong female characters plough on through the drudgery of their lives with wit, hope and straight-up sass. Director Michael Buffong and designer Soutra Gilmour allow us to look in on a claustrophobic shared backyard in Port of Spain, Trinidad where a prostitute called Mavis stirs up the tempers of her neighbours as much as the unreasonable rent charged by their creepy landlord, Mr Mack.
Mavis – the impossible to ignore Jenny Jules – flirts with young trolleybus driver Ephraim (an explosive Danny Sapani), who is desperate to leave and neither his possible promotion nor his pregnant girlfriend will hold him back. His much-admired neighbour, Mr Adams, has his own money worries. A former cricket star, he's now a drunk who struggles to find the funds to send his clever daughter Esther to school, while his wife, the perfectly cast Martina Laird, holds the family – and indeed the neighbourhood – together with her tough love and damning wit.
She's an example of John's exceptional take on women and their variation. Mrs Adams' concerns simmer constantly in full view while everyone can see Esther's wasted potential and Mavis struts around defensively until someone likes it enough to put a ring on it, at which point the gloves really come off.
But his male characters are not as well-sculpted. After all his cricket tours, Mr Adams is Ephraim's guide to what lies outside Trinidad but his drawn-out stories of discrimination do little to put Ephraim off travelling to Liverpool and give a very brief, limited context to the place of Trinidad or the West Indies on the world stage. Similarly, Ephraim's panic about being held back by his girlfriend seems more to do with his own traumatic past than the economic situation he finds himself in. His ambitions are too vague for us to relate to and we learn only very little about how the rest of the world sees post-war West Indies.
As the characters resort to desperate measures, the predictability of this script isn't helped by the slow pace of Buffong's production. But in allowing us time to take in the many different temperaments that fizz and pop in the same backyard, he elucidates the humour and the conflict between morality and practicality that collide during desperate times. This is a heated production of a flawed script performed by an excellent cast.
Moon on a Rainbow Shawl runs at National Theatre, Cottesloe until 9th June.
Image by Jonathan Keenan
Like our Facebook page
Click here for Theatre in London
Click here for Things to do in London
.jpg)
Add an event
Review: Byzantium
20 years after Interview with a Vampire, director Neil Jordan cooks up the theme on a ...