Tony Marshall as Fielding and Wil Johnson as Becker
Old Vic Theatre 2022
Photo: Manuel Harlan
049 – Jitney, by August Wilson
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August Wilson’s play Jitney is set in the run-down office of an unlicensed taxi company in a poor black neighbourhood in Pittsburgh in 1977. The cast of characters is the crew of drivers, each of whom has a story to tell, and all of whom depend on the cash earnings from this underground business. Unbeknownst to everyone other than the firm’s boss, Becker, the building they occupy is under notice of demolition, and the business and their livelihoods are under threat. The social and economic challenges that these characters face in 1970s America resonate strongly today, and the relationships and hopes and fears of this ensemble of characters are certainly universal.
Jitney is one of August Wilson’s series of plays known as the Pittsburgh or Century Cycle, which comprise 10 plays about the black experience in America, each one set in a different decade of the 20th century. It was first written in 1979 and performed in Pittsburgh in 1982, but Wilson subsequently rewrote large parts of it in 1996, which led to multiple more productions around the United States, before it was finally produced in New York in April 2000. It received its British premiere at the National Theatre in October 2001, and as we record this it is being revived at the Old Vic Theatre in London in a vibrant, funny and topical new production.
I am delighted and privileged to be joined in this episode by two members of the cast from the staging of Jitney at the Old Vic: Wil Johnson, who plays Becker, the boss of the taxi firm, and Tony Marshall, who plays Fielding, a funny and poignant character with a fascinating back story.
I heartedly recommend the Old Vic production, directed by Tinuke Craig. It runs at the Old Vic until 9th July 2022, and then is on tour in venues in Worthing, Bath and Cambridge until 6th August 2022.
Wil Johnson
Wil Johnson has an extensive list of TV, film and stage credits, including many familiar TV series such as Cracker, Waking the Dead, Waterloo Road and Emmerdale. His stage appearances include Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead at this same Old Vic, Sweat at the Donmar and in the West End, a UK tour of Glengarry Glen Ross and Othello at the Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh and King Lear at the Royal Exchange in Manchester, among many others.
Tony Marshall
Tony Marshall has had a prolific career as a TV actor, in television series such as Coronation Street, The Bill, All Quiet on the Preston Front, The Queen’s Nose, Only Fools and Horses, Doctors and Life on Mars. He is perhaps best known for his role as Noel Garcia in Casualty, which he made his own for 12 years until January 2021 when topically his character died of Covid19.
The Texts
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112 – Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet
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David Mamet’s modern American classic, Glengarry Glen Ross, is a blistering commentary on the cut-throat reality of the American dream, and its poisonous impact on those who have bought into the myth and machismo of that dream. The play had its world premiere in the small Cottesloe theatre at the National Theatre in London in September 1983, and was first performed in New York the following year, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Mamet also wrote the extended screenplay for the star-studded 1992 film version.
As we recorded this episode a new production of the play was playing at the Old Vic theatre in London, with an all-female cast. This is a particularly provocative idea, because one of the primary themes of this play is masculine identity, and the salesmen in this Chicago office do not hold back in their display of machismo.
To explore Mamet’s unflinching slice of 1980s dog-eat-dog capitalism, I am joined by arts journalist Mark Lawson.
111 – The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertolt Brecht
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Bertolt Brecht’s ‘gangster spectacle’, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, is both an exuberant and funny piece of theatre, and a chillingly topical political satire. Set in the 1930s Chicago of Al Capone, Brecht presents a parody of the rise of Hitler through the character of the gangster Arturo Ui. The play is a universal cry for vigilance against the rise of unscrupulous, populist leaders who threaten democratic societies and global peace.
As we recorded this episode a new production of the play by the Royal Shakespeare Company was playing in Stratford-upon-Avon, starring Mark Gatiss as the title character.
I am delighted to be joined by both the show’s translator, playwright Stephen Sharkey, and by Brecht scholar, Professor Tom Kuhn, to guide us through Brecht’s political parody.
110 – Our Town by Thornton Wilder
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Playwright Edward Albee described Thornton Wilder’s Our Town as “the greatest American play ever written.” In fact Wilder’s quintessential portrait of rural America in a bygone time has somehow transcended its iconic American setting to become a universal meditation on mortality, community, and how we live our individual lives, wherever that may be.
The play premiered on Broadway in 1938, winning Wilder the Pulitzer Prize, and it has been a staple of school, amateur and stock performance ever since. In fact, according to critic John Lahr writing in the introduction to the text of the Penguin edition, “the play is performed somewhere in the world every day.”
Howard Sherman, author of Another Day’s Begun – Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in the 21st Century, joins me to explore this American classic.
Michael Sheen as the Stage Manager in Our Town, Welsh National Theatre, photo by Helen Murray.
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