Jitney is precisely the sort of project that could save Britain’s theatres
A run-down room in downtown Pittsburgh and a telephone that won’t stop ringing were all the tools the late great American playwright August Wilson required to summon this full-fat portrait of black working-class life, one of the earlier works in his 10-strong play cycle documenting 20th-century black America.
We’re in the office of a taxi (jitney) company that’s facing demolition as part of the city’s 1970s tidal wave of gentrification. Archival footage of urban streets projected against Alex Lowde’s suspended black-box set anchors the richly rendered lives of Wilson’s cabbies, all men, in a specific historical moment.
Yet while Wilson belongs to the great tradition of American naturalism, his artless touch can push his plays towards abstraction, like a piece of music. Tinuke Craig’s loose-limbed production, co-produced with Headlong and first seen at Leeds Playhouse last year, certainly makes a virtue of Wilson’s melodic eloquence.
Gorgeous jazz strains interlace the dialogue, underscoring the improvisatory cut and thrust as this disparate jocular bunch bang back and forth through the office door, endlessly bantering, arguing and occasionally jostling for supremacy. Over the course of nearly three hours, there’s an awful lot of talk and not a lot of action. Some directors might have been tempted to nip and tuck, perhaps impose a bit of structure. Craig instead boldly embraces the messy ebb and flow.
Just as well, then, that her cast is impeccable. There’s an easy intimacy here, a strong impression these men have known each other all their lives. Individual characters, each with their own complex histories, emerge slowly but strongly. There’s Solomon Israel’s cheeky, twinkly Youngblood, whose idle charisma belies a determination to hustle his young family out of the projects on to the property ladder. Sule Rimi’s deceptively laid-back Turnbo, all pent-up frustration and restless energy as he seeks a respect among his peers that he can never find.
Tony Marshall’s wide-eyed, drink-sodden Fielding, still living off past dreams, including his marriage, which has been over for 22 years. And Becker, in a strikingly impressive performance from Will Johnson, the patrician owner of the business whose moral authority barely disguises the chasmic disappointment he feels over his son Booster, in prison after killing a girl who had perfidiously accused him of rape.
Yet there are moments too of explosive drama. An ugly encounter between Becker and the newly released Booster lays bare both men’s struggle to maintain self-respect within a system intent on crushing it. There’s the exquisitely dramatised tension between Youngblood and his girlfriend Rena as they struggle to reconcile the dreams of early romance with the reality of feeding their child.
Meanwhile, that insistent telephone becomes a character in its own right, a shrill, persistent drum-beat marking out the rhythms of daily life. Wilson’s great skill over the Pittsburgh cycle was to almost seamlessly fold in the external forces defining his characters lives – namely economics and racism – into the granular texture of the day-to-day.
All the same, Craig’s production demands you succumb to the flow. One starts to wonder about half way through the second half whether Wilson’s characters might in fact carry on talking in that suspended box forever. Yet so detailed are the performances, and so particularised the portrait of a community determined to fight on, that succumb you do. It’s terrific, too, to see a work of this calibre brought into London after originating in a regional theatre – the sort of supportive relationship that the non-London theatre scene so desperately needs.
Until July 9. Tickets: 0844 871 7628; oldvictheatre.com
