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 The Royal Exchange’s production of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom is well worth seeing; in the performance I saw, the cast were twice called back for an encore. Although set in the 1920s, the play is full of timeless, insightful humour and has a great performance of Ma's Black Bottom by Johnnie Fiori (with an accompanying sensual dance of the same by Kay Bridgeman).
Reviewed by Paul Kane
Ma Rainey's Black Bottom by August Wilson is showing at The Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester (http://www.royalexchange.co.uk/new/home.asp) from 18 October to 25 November 2006.
*****
Ma Rainey's Black Bottom by August Wilson
Directed by: Jacob Murray
Starring: Johnnie Fiori, Antonio Fargas, Kobna Holdbrook-Smith and others
The Royal Exchange’s production of August Wilson’s best-known play, originally performed on stage in 1984, is a nuanced, finely-acted triumph. It opens in a recording studio in Chicago in 1927: as the four musicians in the Mother of the Blues’ band “wait for Ma”, they recount their experience of prejudice and discrimination, share their hopes and talk about their lot. As they do so, the play explores one of its main themes: the predicament of African-Americans living in a racist society.
.jpg) If this description makes the play seem po-faced, or in some way dull and didactic, it would be a mistaken impression. For Wilson has a genuine gift for banter and jive-talk, and his characters express themselves with an insightful humour that is wry, ironic and often wildly inventive. Wilson expertly captures the idiom of African-American speech, but one small warning: the “n” word (and I don’t mean “negro”) is frequently uttered by his black characters.
.jpg) Toledo (ably played by Antonio Fargas, probably most famous for playing Huggy Bear in “Starsky and Hutch”) gets many of the best quips. He’s an older man, intellectual and reflective, with a wry, dry wit. But it is Levee (played by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, an actor with real presence and surely a future star) who is, to my mind, the central character in the play. One suspects that Wilson has invested much of himself in this character. Levee is ambitious and creative, but also conceited and weak. A flash young man dressed in a fluorescent orange zoot suit and two-tone shoes, he is at odds with Toledo (whose knowledge of the world tells him that Levee is heading for a fall) and at odds too with Ma, whom he regards as an anachronism. As a jazzman he represents, or so he thinks, the future and he improvises on Ma’s songs, something that irritates her immensely.
.jpg) If these two central relationships - between Levee and Toledo, and between Levee and Ma - lend a disguised Oedipal theme to the play (which feels often like a dysfunctional family romance), another theme is art. The musicians are there to record a song (the song in the play’s title), to make art. And so we come to Ma - or Madame, as she insists on being addressed by her white manager - Rainey. Johnnie Fiori gives us a Ma Rainey who is a force of nature, a grand, stormy presence. Although called “The Mother of the Blues”, Ma knows that the blues have a deeper source and didn’t start with her; and she is centred by this knowledge. When you’re in the presence of a great artist (or someone whom you greatly admire) it is their humanity that amazes, and so it is with Ma here.
 One can say that Ma and Levee are both artists, but Ma is the greater. She is shrewder and more forceful and doesn’t allow herself to be exploited or pushed around. Her art (her shrewdness and nous) extends to dealing with her white manager and record producer, who are minor characters here. And if Wilson’s writing has a weakness, it is that his white characters are little-developed and no more than ciphers.
The Royal Exchange’s production of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom is well worth seeing; in the performance I saw, the cast were twice called back for an encore. Although set in the 1920s, the play is full of timeless, insightful humour and has a great performance of Ma's Black Bottom by Johnnie Fiori (with an accompanying sensual dance of the same by Kay Bridgeman). And the sudden outburst of black-on-black violence that closes the drama shows that this is a prescient play for our time too.
About the reviewer: Paul Kane lives and works in Manchester, England. He welcomes responses to his reviews and can be contacted at pkane853@yahoo.co.uk
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