Vexed issues

Clybourne Park
Royal Court, until 2 October

Tiny Kushner
Tricycle, until 25 September

Bash the bourgeoisie is a game the Royal Court likes playing and I’m always keen to join in. Bruce Norris, a brilliant American satirist, delighted us a few years back with The Pain and the Itch, a hilarious exposure of middle-class hypocrisy. Clybourne Park is a pair of plays set in a house in the prosperous Chicago suburbs. We start in the 1950s when black families are just arriving in the neighbourhood. We then fast-forward 60 years and see prosperous whites returning after decades of poverty and neglect.

The earlier play feels very wonky. The dice are overloaded against the whites. As well as their black servants, they have a deaf friend and a kid next door with Down’s syndrome. As this conveyor-belt of disadvantage trundles past we’re invited to gawp and giggle at our ancestors’ painful inability to conceal their prejudices. Norris has serious trouble drawing black characters. Hobbled by reverence he paints them as grave, noble and superior, silent witnesses to the unsubtle intolerance of the whites. And because he’s reluctant to give a black character a fault, let alone a vice, his play has an internal and unwitting apartheid. Whites express themselves freely, blacks are blurred and impaired.

The second play is a vast improvement. Members of a housing partnership gather to discuss how to spruce up their multicultural neighbourhood. The meeting turns ugly when the vexed issue of race finally breaks the surface. Fearlessly, joyously, Norris forces his characters to the edge and makes them unleash their true feelings by telling each other racist jokes. ‘What’s long and hard on a black man?’ ‘First grade.’ ‘How many white men does it take to change a light bulb?’ ‘All of them.