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Review Round-up: Fog’s Black History a Critical Hit

Pioneering African-American playwright Theodore Ward’s 1937 political melodrama Big White Fog opened at the Almeida last week (17 May 2007, previews from 11 May) with critics commending its performers while questioning its “creakily” written occasionally “didactic” script.

The play is set in Chicago’s South Side during the 1920s and 1930s and was first produced in New York by Ward’s Negro Playwrights’ Company. Almeida artistic director Michael Attenborough directs an emsemble cast including Danny Sapani, Jenny Jules, Tony Armatrading, Novello Nelson, Clint Dyer, Tunji Kasim, Guga Mbatha-Raw and Lenora Crichlow in what is the first-ever European production.

Big White Fog sees Labourer Victor Mason (Sapani) fighting to keep his family together as his devotion to Marcus Garvey’s separatist Back to Africa movement clashes with the family’s pursuit of the American Dream and his salesman brother-in-law, Daniel (Armatrading), advocates beating the white system by joining it.

Critics were pleased to see more than 20 of “the best of British black actors” in action even if, as a result, some of the characters remained “sketchy”.

Rhoda Koenig in the Independent (four stars) – “Among the large and splendid cast, several are particularly notable – Jenny Jules as Ella, moving from careful repression to desperate appeasement to white-hot rage to stony disdain; Clint Dyer's sweet-talking Uncle Percy, heartbreaking in his descent to bewildered alcoholism; Novella Nelson, a matriarch as grand as she is flawed; and Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who is touching as the vulnerable Wanda. Compelling as history, the play is less satisfying as theatre. Ward takes up too many personal and political themes, and sometimes assembles them clumsily. Yet Big White Fog evokes nostalgia as well as pity. Here is a world in which children are respectful to elders, in which three generations of a family live in a large house, and in which a black man who disparages Jews is reproved by another for imitating the white man's prejudice. The production also suggests what is missing from our stages: where are the contemporary plays to show us such a full and passionate picture of black life?”

- by Malcolm Rock

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	Big White Fog - 18th May 2007 reviews