The Emperor Jones

Paterson Joseph in The Emperor Jones

The theatre works in mysterious, sometimes glorious ways. By way of proof, one need look no further than the National Theatre's astonishing new production of The Emperor Jones, which takes a production first seen almost two years ago within the smallest of confines and expands it for the Olivier stage within an inch of the play's groundbreaking, disturbing life. Those, like myself, who first admired Thea Sharrock's take on the play at the Gate Theatre in Notting Hill—a directorial approach that positioned audiences around the side of a sunken, rectangular playing space—can be forgiven for assuming that Sharrock's method wouldn't transpose well to so large an arena. But with a bravado few directors are given the opportunity to exercise in quite this way, Sharrock has simply altered her perspective, turning a drama steeped in the sweatiest claustrophobia into a large-scale public demonstration of one man's psychic freefall. That man, of course, is the eponymous "emperor," Brutus Jones, as acted across 70-minutes with quite staggering virtuosity by Paterson Joseph, returning to his former role with redoubled—make that re-tripled—vigour.

The result joins Marianne Elliott's concurrent National Theatre Saint Joan in a stirring NT repertory in the 2007 10 Pound Travelex Season: two major reclamations, both directed by women, both boasting performances that take their respective actors well beyond the boundaries of natural empathy towards the role. Whereas Anne-Marie Duff offers a Joan who seems irradiated from within, Joseph's fevered, febrile conman-turned-madman makes a bid to join the ranks of great O'Neill performances, on a par with Colleen Dewhurst's Josie Hogan all those decades ago or, more recently, Jessica Lange's undervalued, still-resonant West End Mary Tyrone. Robin Don's set is a study in glittering decay, a glistening gilt-edged structure that is revealed to be every bit as punctured and pockmarked as the fraying mind of Joseph's Brutus, who reels about the Olivier stage in medallioned splendour that is itself a sham. Far more forcefully than at the Gate, one sees this character as a dry run for the later flimflam men whom O'Neill would write so memorably: people like The Iceman Cometh's Hickey who have given themselves over to life's illusions and are then awakened to an acrid reality that threatens to do them in.

Paterson Joseph and John Marquez in The Emperor Jones

The Emperor Jones essentially chronicles Brutus's race against death—toward that defining moment where the silver bullet of which he so passionately speaks reaches its logical, unforgiving destination. But what separates this character out from any of the O'Neill heroes who came later is, of course, his race. With an empathy that some might regard as arrogance or condescension, O'Neill is here chronicling the black experience to a degree matched, perhaps, among white theatre artists only by the Gershwins in Porgy and Bess or, more recently, Tony Kushner's book for Caroline, or Change. That's not to say that audiences today will so readily accept language along the lines of "When I know the game's up, I kisses it goodbye." (Later, remarking, "I's emperor yet, ain't I?" Brutus sounds the American vernacular equivalent to Webster's similarly self-defining Duchess of Malfi.) It's to Joseph's credit that the speech emerges as fresh and characterful throughout, even as his dethroned, self-doubting monarch must physically confront first a black world and then a white one that won't let him in. The supernumeraries who at the Gate had to gather outside on the street due to lack of space here flood the Olivier aisles and the ramps of Don's set, though there's never any denying the riveting solo show Joseph is proffering centre-stage.