Theatre review: White Noise

In recent years when British theatre has dealt with race and the history of slavery, it's largely been about acknowledging that Britain even had any part in or benefited from the slave trade. America's legacy is even more entrenched in slavery and racism, but (apart from the more extreme fringe) it's widely accepted that it's a great burden of debt and shame that the nation still carries. So American plays exploring where its history puts the nation today have gone for a different trend, which often uses extreme situations and shock value to blow up the polite multicultural surface and show racial conflict as written into Americans' DNA. Suzan-Lori Parks' White Noise definitely falls into that category, presenting us with a happy quartet we can tell from the first moments are probably going to end up tearing each other to pieces. Friends since university, the two men and two women have in the past paired up in various combinations, but have ended up in two long-term, interracial couples.

Parks gives us a very literal take on the much-maligned term "woke" in Leo (Ken Nwosu,) a black artist who's suffered from insomnia since he was five. A white noise machine given to him by best friend Ralph (James Corrigan) cured him for a while, but it also seemed to make him lose all inspiration in his work. He got rid of the machine, so now he can't sleep or work.

So he's already stressed when he gets racially profiled and attacked by the police. He knows he's been incredibly lucky to escape with some bumps and scratches compared to how many black people fare in those situations, but he still feels lost, especially after Dawn (Helena Wilson) doesn't accept his proposal. He comes up with a radically counterintuitive plan to feel safe: During the times of slavery, a random cop wouldn't hurt a black man without asking any questions, because he was a white man's property. Ralph is independently wealthy, so Leo asks him to buy him; for 40 days he'll be his slave, and in return for doing whatever he asks, Ralph will be responsible for his wellbeing. Needless to say, within moments of the deal being struck, both relationships and the friendship group at large have been irrevocably damaged, and in the longer second act everyone reverts to a grim historical stereotype.

Both the play and the production have flashes of brilliance among much that is frustrating, beginning with the premise of Leo's "slave quest." I could buy it as an extreme experiment or, given one of the participants is a struggling artist and the other a failed writer, a radical art project; but as most forms of slavery are illegal in the US*, the idea that it would afford Leo any kind of security outside of the deal itself makes no sense, especially if, as initially decided, it's to be kept a secret. And I'm not thin-skinned enough to be offended by the portrayal of the white man very quickly going to an extreme of racism and entitlement. But the differences between first and second act are vast for all four characters, and there's something unsatisfying about a story that can't function without giving the entire cast a personality transplant halfway through: White Noise has four characters, but eight personalities. An added bit of distance from the story probably comes from the culture clash: There's no real angle on the fact that the friends' preferred way to hang out is shooting guns, so it may just be one of those cases where we're not expected to see it as an unusual hobby. This is America so Chekhov's Gun won't cut it: Here's Chekhov's Whole Damn Shooting Range.

Since starting to write this I've had a quick look at what others have had to say about the play, and the word "absurdist" comes up a lot, which makes me think my issues are less to do with Parks' play and more with Polly Findlay's expansive, intense production, because I did not get a single hint of this element of surrealism. Lizzie Clachan's impressive set, putting an increasingly yawning expanse behind the intimate story, is one of the stars of the show, but again the epic element it lends might not be quite what the play needs to get away with its abrupt turns and flights of fancy. Importing already-successful foreign plays sounds like one way of solving the Bridge's issues with new writing, but once again it may be the wrong home for the plays it showcases. Or maybe White Noise just needed a black American director to treat it with a bit less reverence.

Still, it's not an easy play to dismiss. The premise may be clumsily handled but it's an intriguing one, and while the writing can be meandering there's some interesting tangents, as Parks touches on inequalities other than just racial ones: Dawn is a successful lawyer while Misha's (Faith Omole) racially-themed call-in vlog looks like it might get picked up by a TV network, but both get sidelined because the mediocre men they're dating come up with an insane distraction from their career failures. The performances also can't be faulted, and although there's times where I felt the script could have been more tightly edited it mostly gets away with its hefty running time. You've got to give kudos to any show that leaves the entire audience talking about the play rather than their trip home; but while everyone I overheard, black or white, was excited at the interval over where the story was going, at the end all I heard was disappointment over where it went.

White Noise by Suzan-Lori parks is booking until the 13th of November at the Bridge Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 55 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Johan Persson.

*I've seen 13th, I know the abolition of slavery left itself some convenient loopholes