Women on the edge: Michele Austin (La Veuve), Ronke Adekoluejo (Odette), Danusia Samal (Maude Lynn), Ayesha Antoine (Agnes) and Martina Laird (Beartrice). Photo credit: Mark Douet
Play: The House That Will Not Stand
Theatre: Tricycle Theatre
Playwright: Marcus Gardley
Director: Indhu Rubasingham
Review by Joy Francis
Set in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1836, The House That Will Not Stand by the African American playwright Marcus Gardley is tightly stitched with intrigue, mysticism, melodrama and racial politics.
The play opens on the recently dead body of Lazare Albans, a wealthy white grandee who died suspiciously aged 72.
His long-time Creole partner, the tyrannical Beartrice (an imposing Martina Laird), has already had him embalmed and has imposed a seven month mourning sentence on her three teenage daughters. With Lazare gone, Beartrice’s hard earned status as the richest coloured woman in the city is under threat.
As Lazare’s placée (a free, mixed race woman who serves as a mistress) for two decades, the financial benefits she enjoys as a Creole women under French colonial rule are being wiped away by the “Yankees”. A newly introduced law means that Lazare’s estranged wife is entitled to the house.
Beartrice’s status and snobbery makes her a magnet for vicious gossip and rumour – that she killed her first lover, now Lazare, and keeps her deranged sister locked in the attic. The head of the gossip mill is La Veuve (a spiky Michele Austin), an aspiring woman of colour determined to bring Beartrice to her knees and snatch the house from under her at a fraction of its worth. La Veuve quizzes Beatrice’s sharp as a tack house slave Makeda (the impressive Tanya Moodie) over the circumstances behind Lazare’s death in exchange for trinkets.
When alive, Lazare (Paul Shelley) wanted his daughters to attend the Masked Ball, where Creole girls meet wealthy white men, mothers negotiate their worth in dollars and contracts are signed. Despite being a placée, Beartrice bans her daughters from attending.
The ball is all the sexually charged eldest daughter Agnes (Ayesha Antoine) and starry eyed Odette (Ronke Adekoluejo) can think about. Agnes knows the wealthy Ramon Le Pip will be there and is keen to be snapped up by him. Agnes persuades Odette to accompany her disguised as Beartrice behind a mask and extra padding. Odette reluctantly plays along for the chance to meet men, while their religious sister Maude Lynn (Danusia Samal), who secretly wants to escape, warns against it – and is tied up for her efforts.
Cry freedom: Tanya Moodie (Makeda) with Martina Laird (Beartrice), and Clare Perkins (Marie Josephine). Photo credit: Mark Douet
Like Beartrice’s daughters, freedom is all Makeda can think about. Beartrice promised that once she secures the deeds to the house, she will make Makeda a freewoman. As for Beartrice’s sister Marie Josephine (Clare Perkins channelling Hamlet’s Ophelia), she is mentally unstable after Beartrice locked her in a room for seven months to keep her from the love of her life, a dark skinned Negro drummer. Stuck in the house, she senses Lazare’s restless spirit and when his ghost appears all hell breaks loose.
With her grip on the family home slipping, Beartrice battles to keep her daughters away from the clutches of white men (“I refuse to put my daughters in chains”). Her repressed but painful past where she was “raised to be a mule in a dress” compels her to behave like a slaver herself and triggers the very outcome for her daughters, and herself, that she desperately wanted to avoid.
Rising star Gardley and director Indhu Rubasingham have produced an atmospheric, dramatic, touching, lyrical, scintillating, funny and disturbing piece of theatre. At two hours and 18 minutes long (including the interval) Gardley holds your attention with sharp historical insight and barbed and incisive dialogue that would make the late Joan Rivers clap in appreciation.
Comparisons will inevitably be drawn with Tennessee Williams and Federico García Lorca, but Gardley’s voice stands apart. Supported by a Gone with the Wind inspired set, beautiful period costumes, moody lighting and the hypnotic movements and vocal dexterity of the actors (who also sing and chant), it is hard not to be captivated.
It is a play about women of colour. It’s a play about their lack of power. Even as a free Creole woman and placée, Beatrice is still enslaved, though in style. It is a play about the hierarchy of racism and the institutionalised caste system. Odette, the darker of the sisters, is seen as carrying “the family stain…the stain we are trying to hide” according to Agnes. Tragedy is tightly woven into the narrative.
Though uneven on a few fleeting occasions, the narrative is turbo charged, aided by a truly fantastic cast of actors who take you by the scruff of the neck and hold you aloft until the play ends. Although it is hard to single anyone out I am compelled to draw attention to the towering performance by Martina Laird. Her Beartrice, striding across the stage with her black cane, is complex, angry, controlling and vulnerable. Her final scene, which ends the play, is worth the price of the ticket alone.
If The House That Will Not Stand isn’t nominated for best play, at the very least, then there is no justice.
The House That Will Not Stand has extended its run at the Tricycle Theatre until Saturday 29 November 2014.