Les Blancs (2020)

I’d never heard of this play, written by A Raisin in the Sun’s Lorraine Hansberry, but I was really impressed. Hard-hitting and complex – another fine job by National Theatre Live.

Charlie, a white American journalist, comes to an unnamed African country under colonial rule. He’s there to learn more about a longstanding European mission/hospital, but as he witnesses the conflicts between local revolutionaries and the western military presence, he starts to realize that the mission isn’t the symbolic of hope for interracial relations that he thought it was. We see questions of imperialism play out between three brothers from the local tribe: one who stayed in the village under the care of the mission, one who moved to the city and is becoming a priest, and one who traveled to Europe and made a life for himself in the west.

We’ll start with the three brothers. While the youngest brother Eric has never left, Tshembe, who left the country, and Abioseh, the priest, both return to the village after the death of their father, where they’re forced to confront the growing political turmoil. Each brother brings differing views to what’s going on, not always internally consistent, and what results is messy, bone-deep conflict that gets at how the lives of these three brothers have been touched and shaped by the imperialism in their country. Tshembe is viewed as a traitor, abandoning his roots for moving to the west and marrying a white woman, while he’s far more disturbed by Abioseh taking on and perpetuating the western teachings that were forced upon them by the European settlers. Meanwhile, Eric struggles to get out from under the weight of his own life, which is further complicated by his biracial background.

Even though there are a number of prominent white characters in this piece, it certainly doesn’t come across as a White Savior narrative, and if Charlie is positioned as a central character, he serves as a mirror for Tshembe, who’s probably just as prominent. As Tshembe wrestles with his own internal conflict between wanting to better his country and wanting to escape it, Charlie has his eyes opened to the truths of imperialism. It’s easy for him to recognize the racism of the British Major Rice, who imposes harsh blanket restrictions on the villagers as he cracks down on the revolutionaries’ “terrorism” and will wax poetically about the “proper place” of the African, but it takes longer to realize that the benevolent-seeming mission is also a tool of western dominance, a pretty-looking front of service that pays lip service to “helping” the villagers when pretty much everything that ails them is a direct result of their subjugation.

There are too many brilliant moments in this play to highlight all of them, but there is one quote I want to grab, from Tshembe in response to Charlie’s insistence that they speak frankly with one another (Charlie, by the way, commands Tshembe to sit down, have a drink, and talk with him, even though a curfew has been imposed on all the villagers and despite Tshembe’s obvious resistance – yes, Charlie is a white guy who considers himself one of the “good ones”):

“And just why should we be able to ‘talk’ so easily? What is this marvelous nonsense with you Americans? For a handshake, a grin, a cigarette and half a glass of whiskey, you want three hundred years to disappear – and in five minutes! Do you really think the rape of a continent dissolves in cigarette smoke?”

And that’s just one quote from one scene – there are numerous moments that hit home as hard as this.

Quite a few people in the cast who I recognize from different things. I’ve seen all three brothers before: there’s Tunji Kasim, who plays Eric (Nick from the CW’s Nancy Drew – he’s also in another National Theatre Live whose review I haven’t put up yet, which includes my remarks on discovering that he’s Scottish,) Gary Beadle, who plays Abioseh (Clyde’s dad on The Sarah Jane Adventures,) and Danny Sapani, who plays Tshembe (Col. Manton on Doctor Who’s “A Good Man Goes to War.”) I have to take a moment and talk about Sapani, who’s incredible here. I’ll admit that I don’t know much about his other work, but I do think it’s telling that here’s this actor that I recognized from a handful of scenes in a mostly-throwaway one-off role on an episode of Doctor Who, and this play gives me a chance to see that he’s so immensely talented and tears it up on this stage. For the white characters, I know Elliot Cowan as Charlie (Mr. Darcy in Lost in Austen,) and James Fleet and Anna Madeley as the mission doctors (also Austen alum, both from different adaptations of Sense and Sensibility – Fleet was John Dashwood and Madeley was Lucy Steele.)

Warnings

Strong violence, language (including racial slurs,) drinking/smoking, and strong thematic elements.