Les Blancs - National Theatre (Olivier)
Preview by Lizzie Guilfoyle
YAEL Farber will direct Lorraine Hansberry’s Les Blancs, which runs in the Olivier Theatre from March 30 (previews from March 22) to May 4, 2016, with further performances to be announced. It has since been announced that the production will complete its run on June 2, 2016.
An African country teeters on the edge of civil war. A society prepares to drive out its colonial present and claim an independent future. Racial tensions boil over. Tshembe, returned home from England for his father’s funeral, finds himself in the eye of the storm.
A family and a nation fall apart under the pressure to determine their own identity as this brave, illuminating and powerful play confronts the hope and tragedy of revolution.
Staged eleven years after A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry’s final drama is an unknown masterpiece of the American stage and a highly theatrical search for the soul of post-colonial Africa.
The cast includes Fola Akintola, Sheila Atim, Gary Beadle, Sidney Cole, Elliot Cowan, James Fleet, Clive Francis, Daniel Francis-Swaby, Tunji Kasim, Paul Lavers, Katie Lightfoot, Anna Madeley, Xhanti Mbonzongwana, Anne-Maria Nabirye, Roger Jean Nsengiyumva, Siân Phillips, Tumo Reetsang, Cameron Robertson, Danny Sapani, Mark Theodore and Karren Winchester.
Lorraine Hansberry (1930-65) was a playwright, journalist and activist whose work includes The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window and A Raisin in the Sun (1959), for which she won a New York Critics’ Circle Award – the first black playwright and the youngest American to do so.
Yaël Farber’s recent work in the UK includes The Crucible for The Old Vic, Nirbhaya at the 2013 Edinburgh Festival, and Mies Julie at the 2012 Edinburgh Festival and Riverside Studios.
Les Blancs will be the first play by Lorraine Hansberry to be produced at the National Theatre, and also Yaël Farber’s first production for the National.
The production will be designed by Soutra Gilmour, with lighting by Tim Lutkin and movement by Imogen Knight.
NB: Les Blancs is the first of the year’s Travelex £15 Tickets plays.
Also in the Olivier Theatre: As You Like It, Shakespeare’s comedy of love and change (previewing from October 26) and wonder.land, a new musical inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (from November 27, 2015).