An Octoroon
National Theatre · 07 JUN - 18 JUL
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ extraordinary play comes to the National Theatre after a sold-out run at the Orange Tree Theatre.
Overview
‘This decade’s most eloquent statement on race in America today’ - New York Times
In 1859, white Irish playwright Dion Boucicault writes a hit play about America. Today, a black American playwright attempts to do the same.
Both old and new, An Octoroon gleefully remixes a Victorian melodrama set on a Louisiana plantation into ‘a dazzling deconstruction of racial representation’ (WhatsOnStage).
Critic reviews
Everything tunes you into the way you watch the play and so changes the way you see the world. That's the mark of a good show.
This is an energising production, unafraid of the necessary madcap messiness.
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s extraordinary play is both an adaptation of a 19th-century melodrama and a dazzling postmodernist critique of it.
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ radical reboot of the 19th-century racist melodrama is sensational but asks more questions than it answers
‘An Octoroon’ has its heart and its fighting fists in the right place
Memorably bold and uncomfortable satire finds its natural home
Messy, exhilarating and quite unlike anything else
Ned Bennett directs a tumultuous production that is gripping but slightly spoilt by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s monologues
Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins’s play gleefully uses blackface and whiteface to dissect theatre’s take on identity
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