Les Blancs with National Theatre at Home: The incredible life of playwright Lorraine Hansberry

In May 1964, the playwright Lorraine Hansberry gave a speech to the six black teenage winners of a creative writing competition. “I wanted to be able to come here and speak with you on this occasion because you are young, gifted, and black,” she said. “Write if you will: but write about the world as it is and as you think it ought to be and must be.”

Less than a year later, ‘young, gifted and black’ would come to be Hansberry’s epitaph. At just 29, her debut play A Raisin in the Sun made her the first African-American woman to have a play on Broadway, and the youngest ever winner of the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award. A playwright, but also an activist and public intellectual, she died of cancer only five years later at the age of 34, at the height of the civil rights movement that formed part of her life’s work. At her funeral, readings included messages written by Martin Luther King and James Baldwin; Nina Simone would later write a song about her.

This week, the National Theatre will livestream its 2016 production of her final play, Les Blancs. Directed by Yaël Farber for the Olivier stage, it’s an epic play about the struggles between the coloniser and the colonised in an un-named African state. Tshembe (played by Danny Sapani) arrives from England for his father’s funeral, finding his homeland now simmering with racial tensions.

A growing and renewed interest in Hansberry’s life and work has coincided with a global moment of reflection, inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement. “There is an extraordinary interest in Lorraine,” says Joi Gresham, Director and Trustee of the Lorraine Hansberry Literary Trust. “And maybe it’s more honest to say a need for Lorraine."

Gresham worked on the text for Les Blancs – unfinished at the time of Hansberry’s death – alongside Farber and dramaturg Drew Lichtenberg, building on a previous version put together by her father Robert Nemiroff, Hansberry’s literary executor, collaborator and former husband. She learned from him how to bring Hansberry’s intentions to life, piecing together the play from drafts, notebooks and speeches, with one essential rule: Hansberry’s words can never be changed.

Born in 1930, Hansberry’s parents were successful in their fields – her father an estate agent, her mother a teacher – but they were also activists. Prominent black intellectuals and creatives such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes were frequent visitors to their home. “Her exposures were really extraordinary and unique,” says Gresham, speaking over Zoom from her home in Boston.

Another experience would prove formative: when she was just eight, Hansberry’s father moved them to a segregated ‘whites-only’ area, where they were met with hostility by white locals – including an incident when a brick thrown through the window narrowly missed Hansberry’s head. After attempts to force the family out, Hansberry’s father fought and won the right to stay in a legal battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court.

These early experiences laid the foundation for Hansberry to grow into a bold, trailblazing and powerful writer. The team working at the Hansberry Literary Trust have an informal tagline: “It’s basically that we’re catching up to Lorraine,” says Gresham. “She was not afraid to be smart, and not afraid to ask us to be that smart. So I think that’s what we’re challenged with. Because, in many ways, we’re not that smart! So we have to learn, listen to one another, and catch up to a kind of theatre that she was imagining.”

It’s perhaps not just those working directly on her legacy that are catching up, but the theatre world at large too. Gresham says that Hansberry wasn’t entirely satisfied by how A Raisin in the Sun was interpreted. “She felt it was a cultural success in representing African-American life in a new, radical way, and leading people to understand the deferred dreams of a significant part of the population,” she tells me. “But it was misunderstood as having a happy ending, as a kind of middle class dream, and it wasn’t taken seriously as a critique of race and class and the roles that are given to the oppressed.”

Decades later, Gresham believes scholars analysing Hansberry’s work are also confronting how these misinterpretations affected her legacy more broadly. “Despite her brilliance and her voice and her presence, so many of the scholars and biographers I work with are examining: why don’t we know this, why has it taken us this time? What has this erasure cost us?” she says.

This fresh perspective has led her to become a “clarion voice” in 2020. “She helps understand, with a historical perspective, why these questions that are raised through protest now matter – why black lives matter. She gives some kind of definition to it, because without those questions, we can’t go forward.”

She believes the intersectional nature of Hansberry’s work – she was a political figure as much as an artistic one – is also relevant at a time when theatre needs to rebuild after a crisis. “It’s a critical time for us to examine what it means to be creative. What is that creativity for? Our own folly? Our own entertainment? Our own capital gain? Lorraine talks about these things.”

Although it may seem that Hansberry’s artistic trajectory was prematurely cut short just as it was beginning, Gresham isn’t sure she would have carried on down that path. “I don’t know if Lorraine would have had the patience to stay embedded in the art world. I don’t know if she would have continued writing plays,” she says. “I don’t think she would have had the stomach to deal with the values and the disappointments of capitalist, commercial theatre.”

“She didn’t take any prisoners. She didn’t play.”

Les Blancs will be streamed for free on the National Theatre’s YouTube channel tonight (July 2) from 7pm and be available on demand for seven days. Donations are welcomed to support the theatre while it remains closed. Find out more about Lorraine Hansberry at lhlt.org