As soon as the lights come up on the action of Blue/Orange — with two actors, one black and gangly, one white and short, locked in the middle of an intense discussion that might have been going on forever — you know you are in safe hands.
The setting (beautifully executed by Nadia Cohen) places you instantly in the deceptively relaxed atmosphere of a room in a modern British national health psychiatric hospital. Gone are the days of harsh yellow walls, straightjackets and functional furniture that separate the ‘sane†from the ‘insane†— the expert psychiatrist on one side of an invisible screen, the lunatic on the other.
Gone, by implication, are the days of slavery, colonialism and imperial arrogance. Gone is the world of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. We live in a new age of enlightenment.
Or so it seems, until you start listening to where the dialogue is heading. Any attempt to give a rational spin to what either of the characters is on about rapidly disappears as you hear them talking at cross-purposes.
The young black man (fabulous black West London delivery from Luthuli Dlamini) has been locked up for some violent act in his native Shepherd’s Bush. He has spent some time in this liberal facility being prepared by the young psychiatrist (nicely placed portrayal of liberal sympathy by Ashley Dowds) to be returned to the ‘normal†world.
But there are problems. The psychiatrist doesn’t think his young charge is quite ready for what he will be faced with back out there in the streets. The black man is quite certain that he knows the concrete, Shepherd’s Bush jungle like the back of his hand, and can handle it.
Enter the dragon.
A third, quietly sinister, pin-striped figure in the shape of Ron Smerczak’s older psychiatrist sidles into the room, and the whole debate about freedom, madness and the modern world takes a different turn.
The brilliance of the writing by award-winning playwright Joe Penhall is in turning all assumptions on their head, making the arguments about right and wrong ebb and flow in their own illogical, mind-boggling ways.
The older psychiatrist, you would assume, is the stuffy, old-fashioned type who would like nothing better than to see an uppity black man kept locked up indefinitely. And yet it is he who argues for the young man’s release, ready or not. His arguments are entirely reasonable and well-reasoned.
So it then becomes a power struggle between patronising neo-liberalism and passionate, New Labour type earnestness. Between the two sides of the argument sits the suppressed, puzzled rage of the black man they are arguing about. There is no way that either of the shrinks, the old school and the new, will ever really know what is going on in his head. So who are they to tell him what is inside there?
Each one uses the same argument to prove his point. ‘What colour is the outside of this orange?†they ask him.
‘Blue,†he replies.
‘And the inside?â€
‘Also blue.â€
‘God gave names to all the animals,†sang Bob Dylan. But he certainly didn’t call a pig a ‘pig†in Zulu. So where do we begin? Whose blue is ‘blue†anyway, and whose orange is ‘orange?â€
Blue/Orange is a fine production beautifully constructed by Maralin Vanrenen. Even I say it’s a ‘must seeâ€.
Blue/Orange shows at the Liberty theatre in Sandton until July 10