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The Review - THEATRE by SIMON WROE
Published: 16 October 2008

Struggling to fix the American machine

REVIEW: RADIO GOLF
Tricyle Theatre

COMPARISONS to the US Presidential candidate Barack Obama will be two-a-penny for Radio Golf.
The late August Wilson’s final play centres around Harmond Wilks, who hopes to become the first black Mayor of Pittsburgh.
Yet in the rush to draw parallels audiences might miss the best part of Wilson’s drama, which is not the politics or the “black man in a white man’s world” social commentary, but the finely rendered, disparate portraits of morality on show.
Wilks is a developer with principles (how often do those two nouns rub shoulders?) intent on breathing life into the run-down neighbourhood of his childhood with a glitzy apartment and shopping complex.
The project is his campaign ticket; for his golf-obsessed friend Roosevelt, it’s the key to higher circles and big business.
Backed by his headstrong – but sadly underwritten – wife (Julie Saunders), Wilks wants to fix the “American machine”, an apparatus prone to refusing some of life’s “quarters”.
Two dubious pennies roll into Wilks’ office on the afternoon of his arrival: Elder Joseph Barlow, a garrulous old codger painting a house marked for demolition; and the tool-less construction worker Sterling Johnson.
Pictures of Tiger Woods and Martin Luther King adorn the walls of Libby Watson’s clever set but in the end it is the two crumpled dole prophets, with their acute sense of history and values, who exert the greatest pull.
A brace of open, fascinating performances from Ray Shell and Joseph Marcell (the butler from Fresh Prince of Bel Air in a former life) as the two wise fools comfortably steals the show, though Danny Sapani works hard as Wilks.
Wilson’s death in 1995 might explain the bagginess of the piece – it’s overlong and could do with a careful edit – but it is a landmark achievement for the Pittsburgh playwright nonetheless: the last of ten plays which Wilson wrote about the African American experience in the 20th century, one for each decade.
Who will take up his mantle in the golden age of Obamamania remains to be seen.
Until November 1
CNJ Booking line
0870 040 0070

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