Race? It's too black and white

By Daniel Nelson

Sex, race and law: US playwright David Mamet certainly knows what will get theatre audiences’ attention.

And in Race, he goes straight for the jugular: two ambitious, worldly-wise lawyers, one white, one black, out for big bucks; a young, sharp, attractive black intern; a white multimillionaire accused by a black woman of a hotel-room rape. 

The switchback ride starts at the top of the curve and the emotional and intellectual roller-coaster never stops. Disclosure follows disclosure – new evidence, allegations, betrayals, lies. Mamet says it’s a play about lies. But it’s not just a did-he-do-it and if-he-did-can-we-get-him-off?: sub-plots erupt. What’s the significance of the slight adjustment on the intern’s cv? Does it matter that the white lawyer found out but ignored it?  What’s with the relationship between the intern and the African-American lawyer?

The breakneck pace is fuelled by Mamet’s machine-gun dialogue. The nature of the case, the cynicism of the lawyers and the ideology of the intern (played by Nina Toussaint-White: what’s in a name?) gives the writer licence to say anything he wants about race and “what has our 230-year national experience been but a dialogue about race?” he asks in the unusually interesting programme notes.

But here’s the flaw. The play is not as bold and shocking as it thinks. Racist epithets and jokes have been hurled about the stage in a number of productions in recent years. Writers have confronted it before, though Mamet retains his ability to spew out a pithy phrase. Many of the comments on race in Race are less interesting than those on the legal system, which add to the bite of the play’s early scenes.

It doesn’t have anything particularly interesting to say about sex, though the attitudes to women may be as revealing to many as the racism.

It’s an immensely entertaining 80-minute production, and a coup for the Hampstead Theatre to secure its London premiere. But it’s rather bleak and short on nuance – too black and white to be convincing.

* Race by David Mamet is at the Hampstead Theatre, Eton Avenue, Swiss Cottage, London NW3 3EU, until 15 June. Info: 7722 9301/ hampsteadtheatre.com

+ Interview with the director

Clarke Peters in Race

Image by Hampstead Theatre