Bruce Norris’s award-winning American comedy has got its well-deserved transfer from the Royal Court to the West End. I enjoyed it even more the second time round. Clybourne Park, a fictional suburb of Chicago, is an all-black community. A white couple wants to move in and do some renovation and building work. The blacks don’t want them destroying their heritage. The same thing happened fifty years ago; except then Clybourne Park was an all-white community and the whites didn’t want blacks coming in and the value of their properties going down.
Norris witty satire on liberal condescension and racial prejudice is lethal; the viciously rude language may well shock some playgoers. Political correctness goes out the window as blacks and whites vie with each other with outrageously offensive racist jokes. The pitch-perfect timing of the actors in these overlapping exchanges in Dominic Cooke’s excellent production is a real pleasure.
Sophie Stewart, who looks as if she might have stepped out of an advertisement of the period, gives a clever caricature of a 1950’s housewife which in no way diminishes the pathos of the role. Stuart McQuarrie plays it all dead straight and his rage is very convincing. Stephen Campbell Moore is appallingly funny as a racist who cannot keep his revoltingly insensitive mouth shut.