In the Red and Brown Water

Synopsis

Oya is a star athlete. She never feels so right as when she’s running. As a girl she has to choose between following her dream and caring for her sick mother. As a woman she is torn between two men and is desperate to bear a child.

Our Review:

10 October 2008

The Young Vic has been flooded with water for this new play by black American dramatist Tarell Alvin McCraney, whose Olivier-nominated The Brothers Size returns for a season in the smaller Maria studio next week. The setting is San Pere in Louisiana, so we are in serious levee country; New Orleans, like Stockholm, floats on water.

And in water, too. Who can forget the floods? But the water is also an elemental presence in the tale of Oya, the young girl with fleet heels who dreams of becoming a champion athlete only to find herself swamped in rejection by the state, demands of rival menfolk, the elegiac warnings of her Creole superstitions, and her own femininity, the consequences of menstruation and infertility.

We are not exactly by the waters of Babylon, but Walter Meierjohann’s ambitious production, flecked with the jazz trumpet and piano riffs of near-legendary Abram Wilson, has the sawn-off epic intimations of both Buchner’...

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Latest User Review

joesmith - 24 October 2008:

Splish! Splosh! great show set in a pond, pity it's so difficult to hear above the splashing....

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