Theatre review: Things of Dry Hours

A white stranger forces his way into a black family’s home, but race is a secondary factor in Naomi Wallace’s look at Depression-era American politics, and an anti-Communist witch-hunt long predating the more famous one in the 1950s. Things of Dry Hours is set in Birmingham, Alabama in 1932, where factory workers are being laid off in large numbers, making the local Communist Party an attractive option, particularly to black workers who are more disenfranchised than most. One of them is Tice Hogan (Jude Akuwudike,) who takes on odd-jobs and teaches Sunday School, but mainly gets by thanks to the money his daughter Cali (Michelle Asante) makes as a washerwoman to the town’s rich. Both widowed, they live together in a tiny shack, where wanted murderer Corbin Teel (Emun Elliott) knocks on the door in the middle of one night in need of a hiding place. They have no intention of risking their lives for a suspicious stranger, but he blackmails them into letting him stay for a week.

This is one of the Genesis Award productions that play a short run in the Clare every year, and which presumably have a fairly short rehearsal period (the play is longer than the ones usually chosen, and at times the cast still wobble over their lines) but the characters are well-drawn by them and their tense relationships spark. They’re thrown together in a rather odd play though, that teases something interesting but doesn’t quite deliver. This corner of American history is an intriguing one, and it makes sense to discover that the Communist Party became popular in such a desperate time, as does the fact that the powers that be tried to crush it with utterly ruthless measures. Tice’s twin love of the Bible and Communist Manifesto is also well-developed, embracing the similarities between the two credos that aren’t always acknowledged in American culture.

But Wallace has a fondness for flowery, poetic language that often overwhelms the action. The play is narrated from beyond the grave by Tice some years down the line, and having come up with quite a potent metaphor for race relations involving apples, the writer crowbars in references to apples throughout. The storyline teasing a relationship between Cali and Corbin is a somewhat inevitable one but develops in unexpected ways (you can't say her smearing boot polish on his face and porridge on her own to reverse their races isn't unexpected,) so the play has a lot of good individual scenes, but it’s also got an uneven pace that director Debbie Hannan can’t quite make work. There’s strong design from Lily Arnold though, a rickety shack and the sheets Cali washes covering up the somewhat makeshift feel of the studio, and a leaky bucket dripping ominously onto the stage throughout the second act like a bomb ticking down. The website blurb describes the play as “tantalising,” which is a fair description of something that promises to deliver just that little bit more than it actually does.

Things of Dry Hours by Naomi Wallace is booking until the 25th of August at the Young Vic’s Clare.

Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes including interval.