Since losing her unborn child, Sister Margaret (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) has put herself in the hands of the Lord. He’s made her a preacher in a small but thriving Harlem church, and he’s guided her hand as she’s brought up her now 18 year old son David single-handedly.
But the Lord now seems to be letting Sister Margaret down. Her congregation are bitching and scheming behind her back, and David can be found piano-playing and drinking in jazz clubs. And to top it all, her estranged husband Luke has turned up, ill and belligerent and is drawing David away from her with his worldly ways.
In this revival of black gay writer James Baldwin’s debut play, set in the 1950s, we’re treated to a sparse yet effective split layer set in the Olivier: above is the church hall, below is Margaret and her sister Odessa’s (Sharon D Clarke) kitchen where an all-black cast play out this passionate story of loving, losing and control-freakery – for nice as she is, it’s clear that Sister Margaret needs to be top dog at church and at home. For the next 160 minutes we see her set to lose all her control. Will her faith crumble? By God it won’t!
Punctuated by rebel-rousing gospel stomp-alongs, The Amen Corner says nothing very new but it does say that ‘nothing very new’ very well. Boys grow up and want to separate from their mothers, power struggles in communitites have been going on since the beginning of time, but it’s all new to Margaret of course and through her, it’s new to us too.
Faultless acting from the whole cast and deft direction from Rufus Norris make this production a joyous National Theatre night out.
Jean-Baptiste plays Margaret with a sort of round-shouldered, hang-dog weariness. She perks up whenever her pride is under fire (which is often) but her look tells us that deep down she knows the game’s up. Clarke as Odessa has a deep, dark voice full of gravitas and solidity. Odessa obviously cares deeply for her sister, and there’s a touching scene when she helps a deflated Margaret get undressed and into her preacher’s gown ready to fight her final battle with the obstreperous church above and it feels like a mother getting a sad little child into her Sunday best clothes (it helps that Clarke is twice the size of Jean-Baptiste).
The laughs are provided by Cecilia Noble as Sister Moore, and they are belly laughs, so carefully crafted is her performance as the church gossip and all round snake-in-the-grass.
With her white rimmed Mary Whitehouse specs, her breathy butter-wouldn’t-melt voice and her insistence that she’s pure in both thought and deed, she’s the perfect foil to the earnest, earthy and tormented Sister Margaret.
In one glorious scene Sister Moore dances herself into a righteous (and self-righteous) sweat, as if trying to out-religion everyone. It’s a curious, stompy, confrontational little number which begins like a playground taunt and ends in a religious fervour, and it brought the house down. So well thought out is this tiny piece that I reckon it’s the bit of the play that most people will take home with them.
And then there’s the songs. You can’t really go wrong with gospel can you, especially when you’ve got bits of the London Community Gospel Choir on stage.
There are only two (purposefully) discordant notes. The first is as the lights go up on the second half and we hear gospel hummed, but it’s out of time, out of step, out of harmony. Then, as the play comes to an end, gospel is replaced totally by jazz. Jazz has ‘won’, gospel has ‘lost’, reflecting what’s happened in Sister Margaret’s life.
Norris’s direction is full of small but significant moments like this that punctuate but don’t overtake. When the agitators in the congregation try to rattle Odessa into giving up on her sister, their nasty outpourings are accompanied by the snap, snap, snap of wooden chairs being opened, as if they’re animals circling her and snapping at her feet.
It’s touches like this that make this production outstanding along, of course, with the pitch-perfect performances and the soaring, timeless songs. I walked out of the National on a cloud, wanting to shout ‘go tell it to the mountain, sisters!’…..but I refrained.
Event: The Amen Corner
Where: The National Theatre, South Bank, London
When: Various times. Booking til 14 August
Tickets: £12-£34
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