Theatre review: This Bitter Earth

Harrison David Rivers' two-hander This Bitter Earth follows an interracial American gay couple whose relationship is punctuated by significant events in the country's ongoing violent race relations - mostly the high-profile killings of unarmed black people by the police. They meet at a protest when Neil (Alexander Lincoln,) who is white and from a wealthy family, recites a poem by the little-known black, queer poet Essex Hemphill. It just so happens that Hemphill is a specialist subject for Jesse (Omari Douglas,) a black writer from a less privileged background, who's writing a thesis about him at the time and can mouth the poem along by heart. The coincidence makes him seek out the other man and they begin a relationship that lasts several years and sees them move in together before eventually leaving New York for Minnesota, where Jesse has got a teaching job.

But while the protest where they met was a one-off, impulsive occasion for Jesse, it's a regular event for Neil, a full-time activist who uses his position of privilege to support causes like Black Lives Matter.

Over the years this difference in the way they respond to injustice becomes the one major, recurring argument in an otherwise mostly healthy relationship that plays out of sequence. And it's this structural choice that seems to me the reason Rivers' play struggles to make the impact it might have, either in terms of the wider politics it engages in, or the intimate relationship we're being asked to invest in. I don't mind a story that jumps back and forth in time, but I like to know why it's doing it.

But This Bitter Earth didn't give me the sense that it was holding back secrets to be revealed at the perfect moment, less an intricate jigsaw puzzle, more a picture shattered into haphazard pieces. Morgan Large's set and Lee Curran's lighting do give us indications of whether we're in the NYC apartment, the St Paul one or a club, but otherwise Billy Porter's production leaves us to figure out for ourselves where we are chronologically, and why we're being given this piece of the picture at this time.

Huge kudos has to go to Douglas and Lincoln for managing to make us believe in the relationship as well as they do, given the short and fragmented moments they're given to express this, but every time we get a chance to emotionally invest in them we jump to another iteration of the same argument. As well as this jumping around time, the show also has moments that abruptly take us out of the moment and into a harsh reality: A klaxon indicates a new horrific news story, shattering glass takes us to a violent event in the couple's future; again, though, why these moments come when they do is hard to find a pattern in.

Most disappointingly we lose the impact of what should be the crux of the whole play, when following the Charleston church shooting we get to the roots of Jesse's apparent apathy. It shows that Rivers really has struck on an interesting theme and characters, and the cast successfully bring these to life, but the narrative device has missed out any sense of the story's natural rhythm, and didn't convince me it had found anything better to replace it with.

This Bitter Earth by Harrison David Rivers is booking until the 26th of July at Soho Theatre.

Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Tristram Kenton.