The calm before the storm: Haywood Patterson (Kyle Scatliiffe, centre) sings optimistically about the future. Photograph by Richard Hubert Smith
Play: The Scottsboro Boys
Theatre: Young Vic
Book by: David Thompson
Review by Joy Francis
The African American experience of racial brutality and injustice is nothing new to the stage or screen. Last year’s Django Unchained by Quentin Tarantino and now Steve McQueen’s acclaimed 12 Years a Slave act as a constant reminder of just how recent black people were treated as lowly chattel in the USA.
In The Scottsboro Boys, the partially healed wound of historical racism is rubbed raw, yet again, through the unlikely genre of the musical. Many people remain unaware of the true life story of the nine young African American men who, in 1931, hopped aboard a freight train on the Southern Railroad Line in search of a better life.
Two of them were brothers. A couple were friends. The majority were strangers to each other and were illiterate. What connected them was a desire to escape poverty and being falsely accused of the gang rape of two white Alabama working girls (Victoria Price and Ruby Bates), sparking a catalogue of injustice. Years of imprisonment, endless show trials and racial and physical abuse led to nine wasted lives, but played a pivotal part in the civil rights movement.
Turning this visceral and heartbreaking story into a musical screams risk. Vaudevillian in tone and staging, a southern minstrel show troupe ‘perform’ the story of The Scottsboro Boys. The minstrel ‘black face’ tradition is subverted with satire thrown in for good measure. Strangely, it largely works, though the story never stops feeling uncomfortable.
The differences between these young black men, the youngest 13, the oldest 19, are teased out convincingly through humour and tragedy. Haywood Patterson (a charming Kyle Scatliffe) cuts a dignified figure, determine to hold on tight to the truth as reflected in the song Nothin. He is acutely aware of a system that “makes me an animal so you can kill me,” but he warns: “I ain’t dying for a lie”. His mantra “you gotta make friends with the truth” is a recurring theme that seeps through the production.
Eugene Williams (Idriss Kargbo), the baby of the bunch, is plagued by nightmares of the electric chair, the sound of which echoes through his cell. A musical dream sequence (Electric Chair) is painfully funny and visually arresting with prison wardens dressed in white with mental head straps dancing around Eugene like lyrical zombies.
Broadway stalwart Colman Domingo plays five unappealing caricatures, including the grotesque Sheriff Bones, who borders on the farcical, as does his dim sidekick Deputy Tambo (an energetic Forrest McClendon). Their tasteless racist jokes, harping back to the dehumanising treatment of black people, come thick and fast. “What do you call a black boy in an electric chair? A shock absorber!”
Throughout the play, a silent middle aged black woman hovers in the background, a possible symbol of the black mother, forced to wait patiently for her son’s return, often bearing the burden alone. At the end of the play this silent woman becomes civil rights campaigner Rosa Parks and is given a voice.
The exceptional quality of the vocal arrangements and John Kander and Fred Ebb’s lyrics and music, from ragtime to show tunes, draws you into the tragic tale. Inventive and cleverly choreographed dance routines by Susan Stroman harp back to the cinematic musicals of the 1930s and 1940s with edgy hints of Mel Brooks’ Springtime for Hitler.
Performances are solid all round. Clarence Norris (Adebayo Bolaji) is full of palpable deep seated rage while James T Lane as Ruby Bates, who recants her testimony against the boys (to no avail), is full of verve.
There is one moment, near the end, that is momentarily shocking, emotional and, sadly, still timely in the wake of pictures of young white American college students blacking up as murdered black teenager Trayvon Martin for Halloween. That and having the real Scottsboro Boys receive a posthumous pardon this year, 82 years after the initial miscarriage of justice, leaves a bitter aftertaste.
The Scottsboro Boys will be at the Young Vic until 21 December 2013.