The retrogradient

The only word you can use with 'relevant' now is 'painfully'

Ivanno Jeremiah in Retrograde at the Apollo Theatre. Photo: Marc Brenner

I’m getting tired of hearing myself say that the themes of a work of art are even more relevant now than they were yada yada. It would be great if the world could go back to being just moderately awful instead of hurtling screaming to hell in a self-driving Tesla, unable to silence the sat-nav.

What I’ve seen

And yet here we are, at press night of Ryan Calais Cameron’s brilliant 2023 play Retrograde, transferring at last from the Kiln to the West End where it belongs. It should go to New York, if anyone has any sense. God, it’s good.

In this blistering three-hander, set in real time in a stuffy NBC lawyer’s office in 1956, the young actor Sidney Poitier (Ivanno Jeremiah, mesmerising) is on the cusp of something. His breakout role in Blackboard Jungle has made him a rising star, and he’s here with his pal Bobby - Poitier’s real-life friend, the writer Robert Alan Aurthur, played with sweaty energy by Oliver Johnstone - are here to ink a big studio contract with wise-ass lawyer Parks (Stanley Townsend) - but Parks has a nasty surprise in store for Poitier.

Incidentally I reviewed this show in the Observer, which you can read here. Anyway, Calais Cameron has honed in to imagine a real incident, when Poitier was asked as part of a movie contract to sign a loyalty oath, an undertaking to not do or say anything or associate with anyone with even a tenuous link with communism, and to publicly denounce his hero, the singer and activist Paul Robeson.

It’s now well known that a number of civil rights figures were deliberately lumped in with the red scare, in a covert attempt by the FBI to undermine the movement as part of their COINTELPRO dirty tricks campaign (did you know J Edgar Hoover was the director of the FBI for FORTY EIGHT YEARS? I had no idea). Poitier - talented, dignified, gracious, with strong convictions and unassailable integrity - was both a person of consequence, and a person of interest, so they set about trying vigorously to assail it.

Jeremiah is fantastic in the leading role. His Poitier is proud but respectful, reserved but passionate, gamely but warily navigating a terrain that he’s increasingly aware is riddled with mines. His unease, as he checks his watch, hoping to get back to his restaurant job (he has a wife, kids, he needs the money) while Parks cracks open the whisky and tells him to loosen up, is palpable.

And Calais Cameron’s script, directed by Amit Sharma, is great, echoing the fast-talking, wise-cracking style of the era’s movies - talky but funny, casually sweary (never Poitier, at least almost never) and stuffed with what we’d now call micro-aggressions, not all of which are micro.