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 different reaction in the Black community to the institutionalised repression of their world: Walter’s wife Ruth (Cash Holland) suffers and bemoans her lot as an enslaved housewife; his younger sister Beneatha (Joséphine-Fransilja Brookman) has her sights set on becoming a doctor; their elderly mother Lena (Doreene Blackstock) acts with the dignity of one who still remembers what it was like to be a slave. Beneatha’s two rival boyfriends, George (Gilbert Kyem Jnr) and Joseph (Kenneth Omole), seem to offer two routes forward: George is assimilated and successful, but has abandoned his heritage, while Joseph rejects the materialism of white society and wants to take Beneatha to Nigeria.

With each character so clearly designed to represent a different type, A Raisin in the Sun could easily have been a turgid morality tale. But, like so many great plays of the 1950s, it works a kind of alchemy, and manages to combine protest with personality. It’s Look Black In Anger (and having Ruth virtually chained to her ironing board in the opening act is a subtle nod to Osborne’s kitchen-sink pioneer).

There are flaws. Not everyone manages a convincing accent, which is disappointing by today’s standards. And the apartment, which the family is desperate to leave because it’s poky, undersized and falling to pieces, looks frankly gorgeous, with high ceilings, uncluttered spaces, and walls made of what looks like crema marfil marble. And while setting the entire thing in a raised window may be intended to emphasise a sense of imprisonment, the surrounding border does not do much more than make the action harder to see for the first couple of rows in the audience.

But once the second half gets underway, these annoyances are eclipsed by a succession of breathtaking set-pieces. The scene in which the play’s only white character, Karl (Jonah Russell), attempts to prevent the family from moving into his nice, Caucasian neighbourhood drips with so much hatred that you can almost feel the shame spreading through the auditorium. And Walter’s tragic monologue at the play’s climax is of classical Greek proportions. The fact that it includes the N word makes it even more shocking to a 2024 audience than it would have seemed in 1959.

And it’s here that the modern relevance is to be found. A Raisin in the Sun is calling to us from the other side of the mountain of history. It was created during a civil rights movement that should have changed everything. When Hansberry wrote this, Black people had only just moved to the front of the bus. But despite everything that has happened between then and now, it’s still necessary to say that Black Lives Matter. It’s still necessary for footballers to take the knee. It’s still necessary to fight white supremacists off the streets of Southport. And if anyone in the UK thinks that we have a more integrated society than the States, bear this in mind: the first play by a British Black woman to be staged in London’s West End wasn’t in 1959. It was Natasha Gordon’s Nine Night, and that was 2018.