It comes as a surprise to discover August Wilson’s long-winded Radio Golf does not altogether grab the ear — or heart.
For Wilson wrote remarkable plays, five of them premiered at the Tricycle and all of which captured a dramatic sense of life for black Americans during successive decades of the 20th century.
Radio Golf, set in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where Wilson was born, does, admittedly, open with insinuating promise, far from the playwright’s familiar less- than-privileged terrain.
In the office of Bedford Hills Redevelopment Inc hopes run high and opulent.
Danny Sapani’s smart-suited property developer Harmond Wilks, who sounds too good to be true, is poised to launch a major redevelopment project for the run-down area, and readies himself to fight an election which would make him the district’s first black mayor.
Harmond’s elegant, under-characterised wife, Mame (Julie Saunders), looks set for a job in the governor’s office and Harmond’ s greedy golf-crazy business-partner Roosevelt (Roger Griffiths) revels in his job and money as a bank vice-president.
Wilson does not take a sufficiently critical view of these chic, up-market blacks, who wear success to the manner born and carry some of the bland dullness that sometimes goes with it.
In Paulette Randall’s lucid production a rising tide of boredom is staunched by the arrival of two fine eccentrics and free spirits who view the world with brooding disenchantment and help set the play’s abstruse plot in motion.
Joseph Marcell’s endearingly confused, elderly Joseph Barlow is painting a condemned house, due to be razed to the ground as part of the Bedford Hills redevelopment.
Ray Shell’s delectable one-time delinquent and full-time loser Sterling Johnson, who sees the world from an acute, angry angle, comes seeking work and is caught up in the question of the ownership of that threatened building.
The property, which Harmond discovers to be a perfect antique and whose demolition he struggles to prevent even when it threatens his role in the redevelopment scheme and his chances as mayor, stands as an old- world symbol of anti-materialistic beauty.
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Harmond, who discovers some of his own roots are planted in this building, remains a curiously stilted, unresolved figure whose late heroic idealism is articulated without any serious passion or sense of loss. It is Shell’s Sterling, mocking Rooosevelt’s money-love with inventive contempt, who briefly sets this smouldering play alight.
Until 1 November. Information: 020 7328 1000.
Radio Golf
Tricycle Theatre
Kilburn High Road, NW6 7JR
