Clybourne Park evaluate – property drama drives a bulldozer via liberal pieties - The Guardian

Fiendishly clever … Clybourne Park. photo: Robert Day

In Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 play A Raisin within the solar, the African American younger family unit are visited through a member of the residents committee from the largely all-white Chicago suburb the place they plan to circulation. He tries to purchase them off. How far we have in reality come in 50 years is the query at the heart of Bruce Norris's considerate, slyly provocative play, which is directly inspired with the aid of Hansberry's traditional, and means that our willingness to like our neighbour evaporates when property values are threatened.

In act one, set in 1959, a grieving couple – shattered by means of the suicide of their son in the house – are so desperate to stream that they've sold their property to the Youngers at a knock-down cost. The excruciatingly funny second half, which utilises some beneficial doubling, is decided within the same condominium in 2009. A younger white couple moving into the now mainly black neighbourhood are astonished to discover that the community are anything other than grateful for their arrival.

Skewers the audience … Wole Sawyerr, William Troughton and Gloria Onitiri in the play's 2d act. picture: Robert Day

Norris's play turned into explosive on the Royal court docket in 2010, and is likely to show incendiary during this finely acted revival, directed by Daniel Buckroyd, in an effort to tour leafy suburbs with some of this nation's maximum property fees. It's a drama that drives a bulldozer via liberal pieties and all attempts to use labels to disguise what we basically suppose. It skewers the viewers with a gleeful lack of political correctness, specially in a volcanic climax by which racist jokes are traded, leaving the viewers convulsed with laughter and the characters wholly speechless. Fiendishly clever.

• At Richmond theatre unless 30 April. field workplace: 0844 871 7651. Then travelling.