Fairview

Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Pulitzer-winning play is simultaneously a microcosmic, tightly controlled look at a family through the prism of a middle-class sitcom, and a history of racism and racial politics in all its disglory.

If Tom Scutt’s coral-coloured set – an open-plan, American middle-class home – looks fake, that’s because it is. You can almost smell the MDF. It feels as if we’re watching an episode of any mediocre US family sitcom made over the past four decades.

So we watch: Beverly is getting everything ready for her mother’s birthday dinner. Husband Dayton isn’t doing much to help, sister Jasmine is stoking up arguments, and daughter Keisha isn’t home from school yet. The family is black, by the way, and Sibblies Drury’s play eventually demonstrates how the prejudices of white audience members are likely to have already kicked in at this point.

The play explores the role of the (white) onlooker. Under Nadia Latif’s direction, it feels as if we’re watching a nice, friendly bit of fiction, but the subtlety lies in the way that we’re also made aware of how crafted that semblance of normality actually is.

Latif holds her cast on so many carefully constructed planes at once. Nicola Hughes, Donna Banya (who really shines at the end), Rhashan Stone and Naana Agyei-Ampadu (particularly exquisite in her delivery) form a tight family unit.

The play then not only pulls the rug from under the audience’s feet spectacularly, it also kicks us in the shins as we stumble. The dialogue is dizzyingly good, capturing the circular way people talk about race, both liberals and those on the right; the visuals explore ideas of appropriation and authenticity; and then there’s the whole tangled knot of an audience predominantly made of white people watching black people perform for them.

From its tightly scripted, comfortably familiar opening act, Fairview increasingly becomes more hammering and insistent. By the end, there is no ambiguity about what Sibblies Drury is saying. We’ve gone from show to tell in their most extreme forms.

It earns its inelegance, though – or, rather, it justifies how hopelessly ineffective elegance is as a stylistic tool.

And there’s the ending. Fight Club rules apply, sorry, so I can’t talk about it. All you need to know is that it’s an experiment in form that has purpose beyond its own cleverness, though it is dazzlingly clever.

Fairview is a play of shattering ingenuity and ambition, served by a stunning production that doesn’t flinch for a second. It’s a play that will likely make white audience members feel ashamed of being an audience member, while at the same time – and who knows how Sibblies Drury and Latif pulled this off – glad to be there to be able to witness it.

Fairview playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury wins 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama