A Raisin in the Sun. Oxford Playhouse
This review was written for The Reviews Hub, and appears on their website . Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 family drama A Raisin in the Sun was the first play by a Black woman to run on Broadway. Now 65 years old, do its themes still feel current, or is that raisin looking a bit wrinkled? This is a play about Black freedom and aspirations, thwarted by a system mired in racism. Tinuke Craig’s production for Headlong spends a while hunting for relevance, but when it finds it, the drama snaps into focus, the issues feel both present and prescient, and the passion and anger fuelling this seminal piece of Americana roar with pain. But it’s never a tract. Hansberry’s characters are three-dimensional, believable, flawed, and as full of repressed yearning as any scene from Chekhov. Walter Lee (played with burning energy by Solomon Israel), gullible and chauvinist, is as much the author of his own tragedy as his oppressors are. Each member of the family, and their circle of friends, represents a di