Review: JITNEY, Old Vic

August Wilson's Jitney, a play about Black taxi drivers in Seventies Pittsburgh, last opened in London in October 2001. Cloaked in the resonance of 9/11 and a nation still in shock, it walked away that year with the Olivier award for Best New Play. Two decades on, thoughts run to the Obama presidencies, Black Lives Matter and a world almost unimaginable when this play was written in 1979.

Jitney was the first of Wilson's ten-part Pittsburgh Cycle, a series which includes the acclaimed Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (recently filmed for Netflix with Viola Davis and the late Chadwick Boseman) as well as Fences and The Piano Lesson (both of which won Pulitzer Prizes while three others were nominated). Today, Wilson's towering influence on African-American culture can be seen in other Pulitzer-worthy works like Clybourne Park as well as the films of auteur Spike Lee.

The title comes from the name for an illegal cab service, usually run from a storefront. Jim Becker is an ex-steel worker who has been running the company for 18 years. His staff would give any manager nightmares: Turnbo is the relentless pot-stirrer who (to great comic effect) can't help sticking his nose into other people's business; Youngblood may or may not be stepping out on his babymother Rena with her sister; Fielding is an old alcoholic unwilling to change his ways and Doub served in Korea in the early Fifties and still recollects grim war memories of stacking bodies in six-high piles (PTSD much?). Then there's Shealy, a bookie who pops in to use the phone and run his numbers game while Rena herself visits to interrogate her apparently wayward boyfriend.

His staff, though, are not uppermost on Becker's mind. The local authorities are boarding up the neighbourhood in the name of slum clearance and they are coming for his jitney's office in a couple of weeks. Meanwhile, his son Booster, who has been serving 20 years for murder, is being released imminently and the two haven't spoken or even seen each other since Booster went to prison.

In this co-production by the Old Vic, Headlong and Leeds Playhouse, Wil Johnson's Becker is a towering figure, especially in his powerful scene with Booster where the two air their grievances in desperate and angry interchanges. Sule Rime is another star turn as the gossipy Turnbo who arguably is a more important character as he impels and ties together much of what happens. As the sole female member of the cast, Leanne Henlon as Rena is admirably forthright in putting Youngblood straight and letting him know in no uncertain terms where he is going wrong even when he thinks he's doing right.

Wilson weaves the various subplots fluently and fluidly and Tinuke Craig expertly keeps the momentum up during the two-hour-thirty-minute runtime through snappy direction. The verbal sparring can sometimes be hard to follow in detail but the general flow is never in doubt. Even though it has relatively little to relate about the African-American experience compared to his later works, Wilson's script isn't short on barbed wit or insights into the human condition.

In fact, it isn't short on anything: the play's chief flaw comes from Wilson trying to fit ten dollars worth of characters and drama into a five-dollar bag and not being able to settle on which story he really wants to tell or how: the interlinked stories have the feel of Steinbeck's Cannery Row while having Becker as the moral centre throughout an increasing series of diversions smacks more of Heller's Catch-22.

Despite the plaudits heaped on Wilson's other works, Jitney didn't open on Broadway until 2017, almost forty years after it was written. It is not hard to understand why this runt of the Pittsburgh Cycle litter was ignored for so long. Wilson re-wrote it again and again over the decades and consequentially this final version feels over-worked; moreover, it has somewhat lost sight of whatever the original artistic intent was. Craig does wonderfully to transcend the dated references and bring the Seventies vibe to the stage through set and costume design and, ultimately, the success of this production rests on her talented shoulders rather than Wilson's overstuffed text.

Jitney is an Old Vic, Headlong and Leeds Playhouse co-production and will be at the Old Vic from 9 June - 9 July before touring

Image: Manuel Harlan