Young Vic | ★★★★★
Theatre has long known that the only realism that counts is the psychological kind. Still, when sets are stripped away and actors sit waiting for their cues in full view of the audience, we marvel at how disbelief continues to be suspended.
But in the case of director Daniel Fish’s revelatory revival of Oklahoma, first seen in St Anne’s Warehouse in Brooklyn and now in London with some of the original cast, reality not only survives this pared-down almost prop-less kind of theatre, it distills it into something shockingly visceral.
When farmhand Jud Fry sexually intimidates his employer Laurey Williams, who local cowboy Curly McLain also has eyes for, the bright Oklahoma daylight is replaced by pitch dark. Even signs to the theatre’s fire escapes are extinguished. All that can be heard is the threat and intimacy of the encounter. It is like being plunged into the black chamber of a beating heart.
Mention Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s 1943 musical and most people think of Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’, a song whose optimism is swelled by an orchestra in full sail. Here it is performed by Curly and his guitar; Curly played by the excellent Arthur Darvill, the poor chap who was the unwitting centre of the Royal Court’s antisemitism scandal when he played the character formerly known as Hershel Fink.
