The Week in Theatre: My White Best Friend; And So We Come Forth – review
The words of My White Best Friend (and Other Letters Left Unsaid) hit actors and spectators simultaneously. The performers reading these fictional letters, giving voice to what it is to be black in a white-curated world, opened their scripts for the first time in front of an online audience. Sometimes they looked as if they were picking up live ammunition.
The letters ran for a week as a mini-festival: two new ones a day, each read by a different actor. They were commissioned by writer Rachel De-Lahay, who contributes a prefatory piece, and director Milli Bhatia, who in seven methods of killing kylie jenner helped create one of last year’s most blazing theatrical evenings. All the writers are black; the actors are cast according to the colour and gender of the unnamed recipients.
Anger, anecdote, reflection fly off in all directions, sometimes sky-high; actors are occasionally almost crushed by the words. Martina Laird wept as she read Campbell X’s letter, written in the voice of a trans man to a former lover.
When one woman leans in, you half expect a hand to reach out and pull her through the camera
Reading Elliot Barnes-Worrell’s subtle description of betrayal, Alex Lawther, who is white, struggled with how to manage the N-word. How extraordinary to see Rosamund Pike, poised in English roseness, carefully weighing each word of Amma Asante’s letter, in which a woman, who as a child had thought racism was the preserve of “boys and adult men”, finds herself persecuted by a series of women, one morphing into the next: all with skin “like alabaster”.
Anne-Marie Duff’s acutely focused rendering of Afua Hirsch’s witty, lethally twisting letter gets entitlement wriggling on the end of a verbal spear. Paapa Essiedu, grave and versatile, reads a knockout piece by Yasmin Joseph that encompasses toenail painting, a teenage love affair, huge feelings “folded into a tiny knot”, hyper-self-awareness. Does this great flow of words mean she is talking “like a fortune cookie?” If so, why not? “I’m a writer now.” She certainly is: a mighty dramatist of the future.
In April, Richard Nelson’s first Zoom drama about the Apple family, What Do We Need to Talk About?, marvellously chronicled white liberal life. The second instalment, And So We Come Forth, falls short. It exactly – too exactly to be stimulating – mimics the hermetic and the lofty aspects of lockdown. A reference to street protest sounds desultory. The cultural background is heavily underlined: the title comes from Dante’s Inferno; the evening ends with an iPhone playing the over-quoted – and not spot-on relevant – Soave sia il vento.
It is, though, exquisitely acted and phrased. The separation of these middle-aged siblings, trapped behind their screens in different houses in the Hudson Valley, magnifies their closeness. When one woman leans in, you half expect a hand to reach out and pull her through the camera. As they bicker and giggle, they edge towards precipices. One woman anxiously eats cereal for dinner. An ex-teacher describes rejection by her former pupils. Her sister remarks, calmly, that she has not been touched by another human being for months. Each bleak remark is amplified by tiny responses from surrounding screens: shared lives finely captured.
Star ratings (out of five)
My White Best Friend (and Other Letters Left Unsaid) ★★★★★
And So We Come Forth ★★★
