”Retrograde” at the Kiln Theatre – review

Anybody expecting Ryan Calais Cameron’s latest play to bear much relation to his universally acclaimed For Black Boys… – currently selling out nightly in the West End – is in for quite a surprise. His new work, receiving its world premiere at the Kiln in an atmospheric production by Amit Sharma, is a much more conventional conversational piece, played out in real-time, on a single set by a trio of excellent actors. One thing Retrograde does have in common with that earlier smash hit though is a righteous fire in its belly, even if it takes a little time to get there.

Calais Cameron imagines a meeting in 1950s New York between rising star actor Sidney Poitier (brought vividly to life by Ivanno Jeremiah, whose vocal impression of the real thing is pretty uncanny), Bobby, an aspiring Hollywood screenwriter (played with appropriate sweaty desperation by Ian Bonar) and unscrupulous NBC studio legal executive Larry Parks (an acidic Daniel Lapaine). It’s the height of the McCarthy witch-hunts but Bobby thinks he’s written a radical masterpiece which will catapult himself to success and Poitier to stardom. Parks, however, is more preoccupied with getting Sidney to sign a loyalty oath, to renounce his associations with “politically unacceptable persons…that are known for not holding American values” and effectively to become an informant on other Black activists within the entertainment industry at the time, such as Harry Belafonte and Paul Robeson.

There’s a lot at stake, and, on a side note, it’s particularly poignant to hear Belafonte’s name bandied about on stage in the very week that he died. The opening section between the two white men recalls Mamet in his heyday with its booze- and testosterone-fuelled banter and bravado, and the sense of self-serving males talking at length while doing precious little listening. Calais Cameron’s writing for these two tends to have them express themselves in shopworn soundbites which wear a little thin (“What am I, chopped liver?”…”You got champagne taste on a beer budget”…”Put an egg in your shoe and beat it”), but the temperature and tone changes noticeably with the arrival of Poitier into Frankie Bradshaw’s period-perfect office set.

Jeremiah paints a compelling picture of an innately decent human, charismatic but watchful, trying to temper his stellar talent and burning ambition with an overriding sense of what is right and wrong. The history books tell us that Poitier did indeed put social conscience and loyalty ahead of his career and paid the price for a number of years, but much of the excitement of Calais Cameron’s script and Sharma’s staging derives from the will he-won’t he tension of seeing Jeremiah’s fine Sidney being bullied, cajoled and snarled at by the repellent Parks. Bonar and Lapaine invest their characters with energy and conviction but don’t have enough to work with to make them into fully-rounded figures. Jeremiah’s Sidney Poitier benefits from being given much more backstory, a firecracker of a final moment, and being generally and inarguably an infinitely better human being.

When Sidney breaks open and starts to speak his truth (“There’s something incredibly remarkable about to happen, something that this country, maybe even this world has never ever seen, and I don’t want to miss that…I do not wish to be on the wrong side of history”), the play finally blazes into dramatic life. If it feels like we have to wait a little too long for such catharsis, the play leaves you in no doubt that the young Poitier was, at this moment in time, already well on his way to being a Titan amongst artists and humanity, and a role model for Black people, and if Calais Cameron’s play has one overarching achievement, it is this.