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The impact of Fairview, which had its UK premiere in November 2019, lies in its overturning of expectations. I was expecting to be entertained and challenged by this play. It had won its American author, Jackie Sibblies Drury, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama earlier that year and it was staged at the Young Vic, where the Artistic Director, Kwame Kwei-Armah, had been responsible for some innovative productions including Tree, Death of a Salesman, and a brilliant musical version of Twelfth Night. Moreover, the play was also only one hour and forty minutes long, with no interval, which meant that, even if it turned out to be disappointing, I wouldn'tbe disappointed for long.
The first act had me shifting uncomfortably in my seat. The scene was set for a family celebration with a middle-class black couple preparing dinner in their pristine house, bickering gently, flirting, and reacting to the arrival of their teenage daughter and the wife's sassy sister. The dialogue and the setting seemed impossibly old-fashioned and stereotypical, like a 1980s episode of the Cosby Show. Why had this won the Pulitzer Prize? Could the judges have been swayed by the fact that the author and all the actors were black? If this was irony, why was the invitation to laugh knowingly at the scenes unfolding on stage taking so long to arrive? The first act lasted for around half an hour.
Then Act Two started and my sense of discomfort deepened. It began as an exact repetition of Act One except this time the characters performed their roles in silence, accompanied by a voiceover of four white people talking about race. The quartet consisted of three Americans—a liberal female, a camp gay man, a jock—and one French woman, all of whom felt entitled to voice their opinions on different races and cultures. The French woman claimed loudly that Americans are obsessed with talking about race and that it is a really boring topic, whilst the liberal's attempts to appear empathetic to Afro-Americans bore an em