Promises, promises

Intriguing word, ‘octoroon’. Does it mean an eight-sided almond-flavoured cakelet? No, it’s a person whose ancestry is one eighth black. New Yorker Branden Jacobs-Jenkins wants to explore this factoid in his farce An Octoroon, which opens with an angry African-American playwright delivering a comic monologue. He tells us a story about ‘my shrink’. Then he tells us that ‘my shrink’ doesn’t exist. Then he talks about ‘my shrink’ again. Right, so is ‘my shrink’ real or not? Obviously the writer doesn’t care.

A second dramatist enters, an Irishman, in Victorian costume. This is Dion Boucicault, a 19th-century writer whose comedies were enormously popular in London and on Broadway. Boucicault’s opening line is ‘Fuck you,’ which he addresses to the black playwright. ‘Fuck you,’ comes the reply. This phrase is repeated 20 times between the amusing wordsmiths and they try to make their repartee even funnier by screeching the lines at the volume of an exploding barrel bomb. After this, the play rather tails off.

The writer sets out to examine the issue of racial imposture on stage but he has nothing to say about it. He creates a 19th-century scene in which a black performer dressed as a white character says ‘Nigger Pete’ to a white performer dressed as a black character. Once delivered, the label is discarded without comment. What’s the point of giving a fresh currency to these extinct slurs? To increase racism, perhaps, although that seems a strange ambition for the National Theatre. The only other purpose is to make us feel slightly ashamed of our ancestors. Whites were overly brutal, blacks overly subservient. OK. What’s new?

Two gossiping slave girls appear and they become entangled somehow in a melodramatic pastiche that features a screaming heiress, a stolen baby, a gesticulating bandit, an axe-waving Cherokee and a rich fool fumbling with a primitive camera.