In 2018, the New York Times named ‘An Octoroon’ by the American playwright Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins the second-best play since ‘Angels in America’ (putting first for some reason the excruciating ‘Topdog/Underdog’) – but despite this, the play is scintillating and worth seeing.
It is complicated to summarise, but essentially, Jacobs-Jenkins reworks a Nineteenth-Century play called ‘The Octoroon’ by the then-famous Anglo-Irish playwright Dion Boucicault, who spent much of his life in America.
‘The Octoroon’ (Jacobs-Jenkins changes it to ‘An’) was a fairly standard melodrama with a mad plot set on a slave plantation in America. Shocking about it for us today are: on the one hand, not only its racism, but the chirpiness and assumed obviousness of this; on the other, how familiar are so many of its characters and devices.
Originally all the parts would have been performed by white actors, some in blackface. Jacobs-Jenkins has actors of colour do parts in blackface and whiteface, adds some characters, and intersperses the scenes with a kind of commentary – one thing introduced by these is a sense of humour that manages seamlessly to pass into ‘The Octoroon’ – and at the beginning monologues by actors playing him and Boucicault.
With this conceit the play manages to take on the entirety of race in American (and more broadly Western) culture for the last few centuries in a fresh way – none of it simply or cheaply. You leave with the feeling that you have experienced something new.
I think part of the secret of this lies in how it manages to layer everything – melodrama, racism, humour, the two playwrights, the audience – so that there is not one word or gesture, not one decision that the play has made with fewer than three meanings.
Like Moby Dick, this is a work of art that whenever it is faced between options somehow chooses all of them, and the result is extraordinary.
Like Moby Dick, this is a work of art that whenever it is faced between options somehow chooses all of them, and the result is extraordinary.
Schools should bring their students to this play instead of ‘teaching’ Shakespeare. It is true that, if they did, people would turn 18 not knowing whether the quality of mercy is strained and if a rose smells just as sweet when we call it something different, but on the other hand they would have experienced a much more important thing that in Ireland and generally life is too rare: actual theatre.
Schools should bring their students to this play instead of ‘teaching’ Shakespeare. It is true that, if they did, people would turn 18 not knowing whether the quality of mercy is strained and if a rose smells just as sweet when we call it something different, but on the other hand they would have experienced a much more important thing that in Ireland and generally life is too rare: actual theatre.
The whole point of actual theatre is that it is something only a play can do (otherwise it would just be something else: for example, ‘humour’)
‘But what is actual theatre – and who needs it?’ The whole point of actual theatre is that it is something only a play can do (otherwise it would just be something else: for example, ‘humour’), and so if you want to know what it is then you will have to see it for yourself. There is always a certain, essential gap between a distillation or description of something and it – any reasonably broad-minded person can understand this.
But still let me try and explain. Near the beginning of this play and marking the transition from opening monologues to the action, Boucicault (played by Rory Nolan) dances to ‘WAP’ by Cardi B, at the end of which he turns into the character Wahnotee. We watch this large, bearded man playing a Richard Harris sort of character as Boucicault move his body in ways we would associate with a young, black hip-hop star.
Actual theatre is the experience of actuality, of reality unmoored from the constraints of the imagination – reality as pure possibility.
It would be easy to describe that movement with words such as ‘enchanting’ or ‘spellbinding’ but they would completely miss the point. In that movement there is actual theatre (which is one way of translating Bertolt Brecht’s term ‘Episches Theater’): that which puts before us with arresting and irrefutable power all the ways that our ideas about the world and ourselves and each other have nothing to do with reality. Actual theatre is the experience of actuality, of reality unmoored from the constraints of the imagination – reality as pure possibility.
The mix of ignorance and feeling threatened which is behind most of the choices about our country’s education system will mean that at least in this place and time anyone who wants to experience actual theatre will have to go out and look for it with no guarantee of finding it. But what better for school students to see?
This production of the play, directed by Anthony Simpson-Pike, is very good but misses opportunities here and there. Sometimes the actors show their characters’ hands too much, meaning that the obviousness of Boucicault’s play wins out over the subtlety of Jacobs-Jenkins’s. Patrick Martins is excellent as the lead once Boucicault’s play begins, but in the opening monologue he is not quite camp enough for the script. Umi Meyers and Leah Walker are memorable as Zoe and Minnie.
Overall, the choice to run it by Caitríona McLaughlin, the new artistic director of the Abbey, was spot-on, and hopefully we will have more plays like this. It is certainly an overstatement in the programme for Simpson-Pike to call Boucicault “one of Ireland’s leading lights” – and awkward in a play that puts so much emphasis on exploding fake compromises to avoid the implications in the Nineteenth Century of Boucicault’s ANGLO-Irishness, however complex they may be – but for the most part such issues can be avoided by simply not reading the director’s note.
The worst thing about this play by far was the audience, full of people laughing to show they had ‘got it’ though as it went on those same laughs felt like a means of avoiding discomfort. Maybe now, having changed who puts on the plays in its theatre, the Abbey can try and change who goes to them.
An Octoroon, produced by the Abbey Theatre, directed by Anthony Simpson-Pike, is running until 14 May. Image by Ross Kavanagh.
