Wedding Band theatre review — riveting 1962 race drama feels all too relevant

Read the words “wedding band” on the page and you probably envisage a circle of gold, a symbol of hope and commitment. Say them aloud and you might hear “wedding banned”, which has an altogether different meaning. It’s into that contradiction that Alice Childress’s astonishing 1962 play dives, illustrating with sharp wit and passionate anger the devastating cruelty of racist segregation in the US. 

It’s taken more than 60 years for Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White to reach the London stage, but it leaps into life in Monique Touko’s beautifully acted production, eloquently balanced between warmth and pain. What’s awful is that this drama, though set in 1918 and composed before the Civil Rights act, contains many lines that fly off the stage as if written today. 

Julia is a Black seamstress in South Carolina (played superbly here by Deborah Ayorinde), who has been in love with Herman, a white baker (David Walmsley), for 10 years. Their union is a marriage in everything but name: she buys his socks for him; he bakes her special cakes. When he comes to visit, they fall easily into a teasing, bickering conversation that speaks of enduring affection. Ayorinde and Walmsley deliver all this with tender, funny intimacy. 

But this is 1918 in America’s Deep South; marriage is out of the question. Their relationship itself is dangerous — for them, but also for those around them. By placing them in the heart of a vividly drawn community, Childress skilfully illuminates the corrosive impact of living in a society steeped in bigotry. 

Her characters are funny, flawed and authentic: a group of women getting by. They gossip, squabble, pray and laugh together, but Childress deftly paints the countless ways that their lives are conditioned and circumscribed. Amid the warmth and affectionate comedy of the play’s early exchanges, there are sharp barbs — the ease with which little Teeta’s white friend, Princess, assumes superiority, fleeting references to slave masters, to the Klan, to lynchings. And when Herman falls gravely ill with flu, these simmering tensions suddenly reach boiling point.

The shift in tone is a tough one, with the play veering close to melodrama (Herman’s hysterical sister would be more effective if more quietly poisonous), but Touko wisely offsets this by balancing the rich naturalism of the characterisation with a more expressionistic, ritualistic edge. Paul Wills’s symbolic set of wooden and wired fences expands and contracts in tune with the mood and the staging ends with a gentle, communal act of redemption.

Key to Touko’s production is the way the cast give weight to Childress’s affectionately drawn characters: snobbish, prurient landlady Fanny (Lachele Carl); impassioned, volatile confectionary maker Mattie (Bethan Mary-James); Lula (Diveen Henry), riddled with anxiety for her adopted son Nelson (Patrick Martins), whose army uniform does not protect him from racist attacks. Through their back stories Childress deftly draws in other issues — class, religion, domestic violence. 

At the heart is Ayorinde’s scintillating Julia, whose pain, anger and determination burn off the stage. It’s in her anguish — and her hope — that we most see the ugliness of a system that ties people in knots, wrecks their simple plans for happiness and steals into their bedrooms to control who they may love and how they may die. In a world still riddled with division and prejudice, that hits home.

★★★★☆

To June 29, lyric.co.uk