Lorraine Hansberry has her place in the history books. With this play she became, in 1959, the first black woman, and the youngest American ever, to have her work on Broadway. The play, although formally traditional, revives superbly because of its militant passion and truth to lived experience. Hansberry presents us with a three-generation black family living on Chicago's Southside. The action revolves around a $10,000 insurance cheque resulting from the late patriarch's life policy. His feckless son, Walter Lee, plans to invest the money in a liquor store.
But the dead man's widow, Lena, has other plans: she not only hopes to kick-start her daughter Beneatha's medical career but puts down a deposit on a house in Chicago's white suburbs. But when the white community offers the family money not to move, it is met with a defiance that is sorely tested by Walter Lee's revelation that he has blown most of the insurance payment.
What makes the play so moving is Hansberry's portrait of the Younger family, who are residually idealistic but never remotely idealised. Matriarchal Lena is a staunch religious conservative who slaps her atheistic daughter across the face.
Walter Lee, blending aspects of Miller's Willy Loman and O'Casey's Captain Boyle, is a fantasist who has absorbed the worst aspects of the American dream. Even Beneatha, searching for her identity through her relationship with a young Yoruba intellectual, lapses into a despairing cynicism.
Hansberry paints an unsparing picture of the riven family. But, ultimately, what unites them is an absolute refusal to surrender to white prejudice and pressures. Through intense realism Hansberry turns the family into a resonant metaphor for black experience.
My only cavil with David Lan's production is that Francis O'Connor's set hardly suggests the poverty in which the Youngers live. But there are fine performances from Novella Nelson as the matriarch, Lennie James as her son, Kananu Kirimi as her daughter and Ofo Uhiara as the Nigerian boyfriend. The play is of its time, but transcends its period through incandescent prose and its belief in the right of the socially oppressed to achieve their dreams and live a life of honest dignity. • Until June 30. Box office: 020-7928 6363. A version of this review appeared in later editions of yesterday's paper.
