Reviews

The Long Road South (King’s Head)

Paul Minx’s play foucused around the civil rights movement in 1965 transfers to the King’s Head

Paul Minx's play is a curious hybrid of low-grade Tennessee Williams and right-on political sentiment in a vacuum, with the black servants on an Indiana farmhouse in 1965 taking the blows and then taking the road to the civil rights marches in Alabama.

It's a brave venture by director Sarah Berger who launched her So and So Arts Club at the Hope Theatre last year, and her production has a fine performance from Imogen Stubbs as the dipsomaniac mother of a young girl, Ivy Price (Lydea Perkins), who flirts with the black character called White (Cornelius Macarthy, very good indeed), with – let's be frank about this – her bottom hanging out of her mini-skirt all evening.

Dad (Michael Brandon) is a bigoted pig farmer who squares up to his staff with intent while Stubbs's Carol swigs from the vodka bottle in a swirl of pastel silks and lets drop such wannabe sub-Tenn gems as "The world is so unforgiving of what it doesn't understand" or "I don't drink, I imbibe; it lightens the day."

The bible and James Baldwin are the lodestone of reference for the servants in a story the author says relates to the "African-American man who helped raise me; he was brought down by day-to-day racism…I wrote the play as a testament to him." So there's an element of personal guilt and catharsis in the play that is one of its more attractive features.

Otherwise, it plods along for ninety minutes on a pleasant open-air lawn design by Adrian Linford as a series of awkwardly engineered confrontations that are fleetingly illuminated by Stubbs throwing a wobbly, or Brandon asserting his social pre-eminence, or Lydea Perkins coming over all floppily Lolita-ish with the domestic bible-puncher.

Macarthy and Krissi Bohn as his enslaved counterpart play their scenes with enormous dignity and finesse, but they never really move to the centre of the play, as they should. There's one of the worst stage fights I've ever seen – fists flying in the ether and passing each other in the void – and the most welcome play-out music of the year so far: Roy Orbison thankfully reminding us that "It's over, it's over, it's o-ooo-oo-ver."

The Long Road South runs at the King's Head until 30 January.