Cash Holland as Ruth
and Solomon Israel as Walter
A Raisin in the Sun
Lyric Hammersmith Theatre, London, October 2024
Photo by Ikin Yum
092 – A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry
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When Lorraine Hansberry’s ground-breaking play, A Raisin in the Sun, opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in New York in 1959, its author became the first African American female author to have a play performed on Broadway, and she did so with her debut at the age of 29. Hansberry’s drama of personal dreams was ground-breaking because of its realist portrait of a black working-class family. As the writer James Baldwin wrote: “never before, in the entire history of the American theatre, had so much of the truth of black people’s lives been seen on stage.”
In the two years following its New York premiere, A Raisin in the Sun was translated into 35 languages and performed all over the world. Hansberry’s own screenplay of A Raisin in the Sun was filmed in 1961, with Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee. Tragically, Hansberry died from pancreatic cancer five years later at the age of only 34. Her play’s portrait of personal dreams and public prejudice remains as funny, moving and relevant as ever, more than sixty years on.
We record this episode very shortly after an acclaimed new production of the play has finished a UK tour, concluding at the Lyric Hammersmith theatre in London. I very much enjoyed the production and the chance it offered to delve into this landmark play, so I am delighted to be joined by the production’s director, Tinuke Craig.
Tinuke Craig
Tinuke Craig trained at LAMDA and at the National Theatre Studio. In 2014 she won the Genesis Future Director award and was the Gate Theatre’s associate director from 2015 to 2016. She has worked with the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the Old Vic in London, where from 2021-2023 she was Baylis Director. In November 2024 Tinuke was named Associate Artistic Director at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre.
Her directing credits include the RSC’s The School for Scandal, The Colour Purple at the Curve in Leicester, Sarah Kane’s Crave at Chichester Festival Theatre, and a wonderful production of August Wilson’s play Jitney at Leeds and the Old Vic Theatre, which inspired our own episode on that play with Tony Marshall and Wil Johnson from the cast of her production.
Tinuke recommended August: Osage County by Tracy Letts.
Photo Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre.
The Footnotes that accompany our episode on Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, include notes on Nina Simone’s ‘Young, Gifted and Black’, the Hansberry family’s fight for their home, the character of George, and how music underlines different cultural identities for the characters in the play.
113 – Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
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Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play, Arcadia, is viewed by many as his finest play, renowned for the breadth of its intellectual interrogations and its formal invention. The play is a structural masterpiece of ideas, as well as a teasing detective story, joyous comedy, and emotionally rich exploration of love and loss.
As we record this episode a wonderful new production of Arcadia is playing at the Duke of York’s theatre in London’s West End, following its acclaimed run at the Old Vic theatre earlier this year. I am delighted to share the challenge and the pleasure of exploring Stoppard’s dazzling drama with the director of the new production, Carrie Cracknell.
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.
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