Life
Theatre review: Retrograde - A dilemma for Sidney Poitier
Hot playwright Ryan Calais-Cameron's latest drama focuses on what went down when America’s first African American Oscar winner was on the cusp of fame
April 28, 2023 11:40
2 min read
Hot playwright Ryan Calais-Cameron's latest drama focuses on what went down when America’s first African American Oscar winner was on the cusp of fame
April 28, 2023 11:40Retrograde
Kiln Theatre, London | ★★★★✩
There is more than a whiff of Mamet’s Speed the Plow in Ryan Calais Cameron’s new play. Not only do men shout obscenities at each other in a display of fast, percussive and often very funny dialogue, the ruthless underbelly of the movie business is revealed too.
However, to all this, Cameron adds real life events. The play is set just as actor Sidney Poitier is on the cusp of a TV film role that will be the first step to superstardom and eventually a career that wins him the first Oscar to be won by an African American actor.
Sidney (an excellent Ivanno Jeremiah) and NBC writer director Bobby (Ian Bonar) are in the office of high powered lawyer Mr Parks (Daniel Lapaine) where they are about to sign contracts for the first TV film starring a Black actor.
But Parks has another agenda. The FBI have paid him enough money to “take two six month holidays a year” for the rest if his life if he can get Poitier to publicly denounce the great singer and activist Paul Robeson who has has been blacklisted by McCarthy's anticommunist witch-hunt.
Meanwhile, like Mamet’s Charlie Fox, the desperate Bobby is trying to save his career with a relationship with a rising star (Sidney) who has agreed to appear in his film.
My drawing attention to the similarities between the two plays is not intended as criticism. Rather Cameron, whose breakthrough hit For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy continues its remarkable run in the West End, uses the context to explore the politics and racism that Poitier who died last year, had to overcome. The result is very much Cameron’s own thing and like For Boys..., Retrograde, also deserves to be a hit.
Jeremiah is excellent as Poitier, conveying the simmering anger beneath the actor’s cool exterior. Lapaine meanwhile completely nails the WASP bigotry that permeated the industry at the time, mixing it with Trump like patriotism. My only complaint is with the character of Bobby whose background and motivation for becoming a progressive writer and his relationship with Poitier is never explained.
Rather than explore this Cameron seems to have resorted to what appears be stereotype of a Jewish Hollywood writer. The character notes are “Liberal, needy, nerdy…” while the intensity of Bonar’s actually very good performance suggests “Jewish writer”.
The irony of this is that racial stereotype is exactly what the play highlights Poitier bravely rejects even as a struggling actor.
These doubts, which used to go unnoticed – or at least unremarked on – but since the Royal Court Hershel Fink scandal should be uppermost in the minds of theatre makers, continue to nag even as this excellent play reaches its climax. Aside from this Cameron is a rising and very exciting new talent.