Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Read the words \u201cwedding band\u201d on the page and you probably envisage a circle of gold, a symbol of hope and commitment. Say them aloud and you might hear \u201cwedding banned\u201d, which has an altogether different meaning. It\u2019s into that contradiction that Alice Childress\u2019s astonishing 1962 play dives, illustrating with sharp wit and passionate anger the devastating cruelty of racist segregation in the US.\u00a0It\u2019s 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\u2019s beautifully acted production, eloquently balanced between warmth and pain. What\u2019s 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.\u00a0Julia 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.\u00a0But this is 1918 in America\u2019s Deep South; marriage is out of the question. Their relationship itself is dangerous \u2014 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.\u00a0Her 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\u2019s early exchanges, there are sharp barbs \u2014 the ease with which little Teeta\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s production is the way the cast give weight to Childress\u2019s 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 \u2014 class, religion, domestic violence.\u00a0At the heart is Ayorinde\u2019s scintillating Julia, whose pain, anger and determination burn off the stage. It\u2019s in her anguish \u2014 and her hope \u2014 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.\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2606To June 29, lyric.co.uk<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Read the words \u201cwedding band\u201d on the page and you probably envisage a circle of gold, a symbol of hope and commitment. Say them aloud and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-118814","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118814"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118814\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":118815,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118814\/revisions\/118815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}