Interweaving themes of love and hate, black and white, life and death, Alice Childress’s Wedding Band explores interracial love in South Carolina 1918, a time of pandemic, racial segregation, and disenfranchisement in the Southern united states.
Julia (Deborah Ayorinde), a black seamstress, and Herman (David Walmsley), a white baker, have been secretly in love for ten years. Their interracial relationship is illegal and taboo in both white and black communities. When Herman falls fatally ill with Spanish influenza, their relationship is exposed to both the black community, a guest house run by a woman called Fanny (Lachele Carl), and Herman’s pretentious white family members who vehemently oppose their relationship.
Childress does not simply unfold the story in a dichotomy of white oppressors and black victims. Instead, the play vividly reveals the most fascist nature of segregation: it is double way. It nurtures only hate, indifference, and misunderstandings, devouring all possible flames of love and hope. While Herman’s sister Annabelle (Poppy Gilbert) expresses straightforward racism against Julia by frenetically cleaning the glass Julia hands to her, Nelson (Patrick Martins), a guest in Fanny’s house, confronts and accuses Julia of her relationship with a white man, which leaves him feeling excruciatingly betrayed.
The play shines through stark humour, with the “bad guys” (Herman’s mother and sister, basically) performing in a moderately comic manner that eases the tone. Nevertheless, it grows darker after the interval, with a climatic confrontation scene between Julia and Herman, where truth remains bare and probing, even ironic: when Julia tries to raise the issue of race to Herman in a most grave manner, Herman continually demonstrates how poor his family was. Black people meet the penniless working class. Childress poses her question here: who is the real “bad guy”?
Paul Wills’s minimalist, industrial design, full of metallic fence panels, not only features sheer coldness but also explicitly answers that question, declaring the play’s brutal political background. In the second act, as the ensemble, a white bell man (Oven Whitelaw) and Nelson work together to put two half pieces of a fence into one, symbolically reveals the consequences of apartheid: it blinds the eyes on both sides. To separate is to discipline, an art of pure, evil governmentality.
Ayorinde fairly completes her London stage debut as Julia, but it is Carl’s Fanny who almost steals the show, nailing the complexity of Fanny—her gossipy nature, her sisterly bond with other black women, her flirtatious attitude towards Nelson, and her protective nature of “her race.” Bethan Mary-James acutely portrays the innocence of Mattie, while Diveen Henry’s Lula showcases a mother’s excessive love and protection. Last but not least, the boos from the audience are testimonies to Geraldine Alexander’s performance as Thelma, Herman’s mother—a hypocrite full of bias in mind and full on the n word in mouth.
Performed throughout Pride Month at Lyric Hammersmith, Wedding Band also feels intrinsically and peculiarly queer: a love that must remain unseen and unheard, a love that is taboo, and a love that must overcome numerous social, cultural, and legal barriers. As director Monique Touko says, the play indeed “speaks to now.”
