11 February 2016
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
The National Theatre
reviewed by Adam McCormack
This is a serious play about music and race, rather than just an excuse to perform great music which can make up for any dramatic shortfall. August Wilson’s story, the third in his series of 10 plays that describe the Black experience in the 20th century, is that of early blues recording artist Ma Rainey (the “mother of the blues” as Paramount billed her) and is, by the time we see her (1927), the story of a diva. The play is set in a Chicago recording studio and its rehearsal room and starts with everyone waiting for Ma, who is very late. She is a woman who will only record songs the way she wants to, and will only do so if the environment is exactly to her wishes (recording is halted while band members have to go out to buy her Coca Cola). However, this is much more the story of a band, the shift from voice based blues to instrument based jazz for recording, and most importantly how the US entertainment industry was reaping all it could from the demand for blues recordings from both the black and white population.
The band really steals the show here, all seeking to tell their back story in a series of tales, both true and apocryphal. The most poignant is the tragic tale of Levee, the trumpeter who is trying to break out of the mold of just being a band member to being a composer and band leader (with some encouragement from the recording studio) as he recounts the details of the serial rape of his mother and the death of his avenging father. The play is progressed well by the philosophising piano player, Toledo, who has been unlucky in love but is remarkably sanguine about it, and the trombonist and base players who see themselves as journeymen musicians, just wanting to complete the recording session and get paid. It is the scenes without the band that struggle a little, for while Sharon D Clarke is a strong blues singer, her diva character is somewhat 2-dimensional. Her insistence on using her stuttering nephew’s voice to introduce her on the record (and not the trumpet player’s solo) allows for some humour, but this seems both unlikely and a little laboured, although her relationship with a young female groupie seems to fit with stories regarding her sexuality.
Nevetheless, overall director Paul Oliver has done full justice to a powerful play, and the National has done a great job in reviving a play that brings a different and broader demographic to its theatre. This is a story told with great pathos and a denouement that will undoubtedly shock – but then that is the story of the blues.
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