REVIEW: THIS BITTER EARTH by Harrison David Rivers at White Bear Theatre, Kennington until 11 Mar

‘Brisk, efficient, intelligent, humane – one can only wish there were more like it.’ ★★★★★

While the West End continues to struggle with getting audiences back in by offering a range of musicals, juke box shows and adaptations of classic books like To Kill a Mockingbird, it’s the pub theatre sector that’s producing the thought-provoking issue kind of a play these days.

Harrison David Rivers’ two-hander features a young black writer and his privileged white lover navigating their relationship through the rocks of their reactions to the growing Black Lives Matter movement. Neil (Max Sterne) is a rich white activist, no need to work when the family trust fund means no need for a means of support. Jesse (Martin Edwards), who writes plays for his living, comes of poorer, Baptist stock, and a family not yet reconciled to his being gay.

The play premiered in America in 2017 (this is its first British outing) so its events come before the murder of George Floyd in 2020 ignited British interest in the terrifying number of black people – mainly black men – killed by white police officers, but the 2014 killing of Michael Brown for which no officer was convicted is the incident most referenced here.

Neil wants to protest; Jesse, to coin a phrase, prefers to remain an invisible man, resisting being defined by his colour. Their love, created here in perfectly choreographed sequences in a play that time-shifts back and forward throughout their ultimately doomed relationship. It might transcend the tensions this creates, but there’s a world outside their window, and that world can’t be kept at bay for always.

There’s an early harbinger that all will not end well, in a scene repeated three times but with slightly different information and emphasis for each as we realise what has happened that makes it impossible not to be moved by the depth of the relationship these two actors create in a simple set, they stage manage themselves almost unnoticeably.

It’s a brisk, efficient, intelligent, humane play, and one can only wish there were more like it.

Read director Peter Cieply’s article on the pub theatre scene and on his direction of This Bitter Earth here.

THIS BITTER EARTH by Harrison David Rivers at White Bear Theatre, Kennington 21 Feb - 11 March 2023

Box Office https://www.whitebeartheatre.co.uk/whatson/This-Bitter-Earth

Director: Peter Cieply

Produced by Storefront Theatre London and Sarah Lawrie

Reviewer: David Weir’s plays include Confessional (Oran Mor, Glasgow), Better Together (Jack Studio, London). Those and others performed across Scotland, Wales and England, and in Australia, Canada, Korea, Switzerland and Belgium. Awards include Write Now Festival prize, Constance Cox award, SCDA best depiction of Scottish life, and twice Bruntwood longlisted.