Stage-to-screen review: The Piano Lesson

Maybe we should change the theory that most playwrights secretly just want to write a ghost story, and accept that all of them do. America's great chronicler of the 20th century August Wilson did so in the 1930s instalment of his play cycle, and while by all accounts Malcolm Washington's film version has edged more into horror movie tropes than the original suggests, Wilson's The Piano Lesson does centre on a literal ghost as a way of dragging up a whole lot of metaphorical ones. The literal ghost is that of Sutter, last descendant of a slave-owning family, who's recently died in vaguely suspicious circumstances. Boy Willie (John David Washington) brings news of his death to his sister Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler) in Pittsburgh. Their own ancestors were slaves owned by Sutter's family, and while it's been decades since their emancipation a grim connection to their former owners has continued through the generations.

It's not long before Berniece and her daughter Maretha (Skylar Aleece Smith) start seeing the ghost of Sutter in their own home, but the real tension in the play is between the siblings and how they're going to deal with their family's history.

Sutter's land is now available, and Willie wants to buy it, and to afford it he needs to sell the family's heirloom piano. But he shares it with his sister and she won't part with it: It's decorated with carvings made by one of their enslaved ancestors, showing other members of the family, and was eventually stolen back by their own father in an escapade that resulted in his death. In a film that transfers most of the cast from a recent Broadway revival, Samuel L. Jackson plays their uncle Doaker, whose job it is to fill in much of this complicated family history for the audience.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the part of the story that really got me involved was the emotional heart of the battle over the fate of the piano, and by extension whether the family should move on by embracing the pain of the past that it represents, or put it behind them and claim the land of their darkest history. I think the adaptation's biggest successes are in the translation from stage to screen - you can still feel the structure of a number of lengthy scenes built on dialogue, but it never becomes claustrophobic and stagey.

It did lose me a bit though as it leaned more into horror territory for the finale and, following a candidate for least romantic proposal ever (essentially "congregations do better if the preacher's married so you should marry me,") preacher Avery (Corey Hawkins) instead gets to help Berniece with an attempted exorcism. The use of wobbly camera work making me feel quesy at the end probably didn't help much either. But for the most part I found this powerful and well-performed, and given a bit of time to forget the plot details I think this will be one to look forward to adding to my Century Cycle collection when it next makes it to the London stage.

The Piano Lesson by August Wilson, adapted by Virgil Williams & Malcolm Washington, is streaming internationally on Netflix.

Running time: 2 hours 7 minutes.

Photo credit: David Lee / Netflix