New Statesman - Prophecy and prejudice

Stereotypes mar a beautiful production about life in the Louisiana projects In the Red and Brown Water Young Vic, London SE1

Prophecy and prejudice

Here's a question that may or may not have perplexed you: Why are black women so bad-tempered? And here is the answer provided by Oya, the female lead in Tarell Alvin McCraney's new play. "We can't change colour like yellow girls when they blush so we get mad quick so you can see it on our face." Right. Let's park that thought, as they say.

You will be hard put to see a more beautifully realised production this year than the Young Vic's In the Red and Brown Water. The theatre's main space has been transformed into a huge, dark and shallow pond, across whose surface cast members splish and splosh, creating ripples that are caught by the dramatic side-on lighting. The audience, scant on the night I went, sits around it, not only peripheral but littoral. We are in black-raced, inner-city Louisiana, but also in the head of an adolescent boy named Elegba (the terrific John MacMillan), whose woozy nightmare of Oya drowned proves prophetic. If ever there was a wet dream, this is it.

Oya is a gifted young runner being trained by the state coach, the only white member of the cast, for greatness. She is also a good girl, however, and when her mother becomes terminally ill she retires to nurse her. Oya is much courted, by a stuttering but well-meaning dolt called Ogun and a flashier chancer called Shango, described in the dramatis personae as a "dark man of colour", presumably denoting his darker skin and inferior ranking in the abstruse and tragic delineations of black American society.

But Oya is deprived not only of track glory, but of that other glittering prize open to women: giving birth. As Shango says on his return from a tour of duty in the army: "How somebody ain't put a baby inside you is beyond me." Oya affects unconcern, but she is an opaque character, somewhere between an earthbound woman and a spirit of the air, so it is hard to discover what she is thinking. Paradoxically, Ony Uhiara, who plays her, is a magnificently expressive actress, physically appearing always to be in motion even when standing still. She finally addresses her infertility with the local voodoo priestess, who morphs into the ghost of her now dead mother. The play ends with Shango having impregnated another girl and even puerile, candy-addicted Elegba having sired a child. Oya, in despair, cuts off her ear and bleeds to death, and, in our imaginations, turns the stage water from brown to red - thus fulfilling the boy's prophecy.

All this is brilliantly realised, in the poetically driven text, in Walter Meierjohann's direction, in Miriam Buether's extraordinary set and in Jean Kalman's lighting. The actors, whose movements, despite the hindrance of all that water, are almost balletic, are often followed around the stage by a jazz trumpeter while cast members not involved in the immediate action hum and sing, a chorus both in the Greek and operatic sense. However, the production has another, less happy affinity with opera - it is very hard for a British ear to catch more than half of what is said. The periods of incomprehensibility ate away, as you would imagine, at the dramatic tension and muted much of the humour. In fact, I was quite surprised, reading the text later, to discover how funny some of it was. But if you lived in a Louisiana project no doubt the language, although heightened, would have been perfectly accessible, and I therefore make no complaint.

What did worry me was the play's reliance on what a programme note said were Yoruba storytelling traditions, and stories Caribbean and African. Are black people in Louisiana really in hock in this way to superstition? Or are their lives so incoherent that a local playwright feels free to impose such a schema on them?

The piece resembled nothing so much as a fertility rite that Oya had transgressed in some way, although whether by daring to run for a living and train with a white coach, or by settling for second best when it came to setting up home with Ogun rather than fighting for Shango, it was not clear. The play's atavism made me anxious. So did its assumption that, for these folk, reproduction was the only worthwhile destiny.

As for the line with which I opened my review: if I, as a white man, had written it, I would be called racist and misogynist. It was not, I can only hope, an accurate representation of a people perhaps about to elect their nation's first black president.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times