Wedding Band – London Reviews

"Remarkable '60s revival leaps through time to grab you by the throat"

"It’s an exhilarating find, blending politics, prejudice, social realism, melodrama and romance – all brought to life in a swaggering production"

"This extraordinary, sprawling play about a mixed-race couple failing to escape the segregated South Carolina of 1918 was written by the pioneering black American writer Alice Childress in 1962."

"It’s an exhilarating find, blending politics, prejudice, social realism, melodrama and romance. Monique Touko’s swaggering production leans into the contradictions. I loved 90 per cent of it and was exasperated by the remainder, but this rediscovery is more exciting than half a dozen tired revivals."

"Seamstress Julia (Deborah Ayorinde, an experienced screen actress making a bombshell stage debut here) joins a community of misfits in a set of backyard rental rooms."

"It’s staged on a skeletal set of wire cages and fences by Paul Wills, who keeps a final, beautiful image of redemption in store. Touko is an actors’ director, drawing a superb, raging central performance from Ayorinde as Julia and allowing the supporting characters space to breathe, and to accommodate audience laughter."

"Finally debuting on the London stage in 2024, Alice Childress’s 1962 drama about forbidden love in the American South was worth the wait"

"You’re never quite sure as the couple swerve from deep devotion to one another to heated conflict between each scene. Herman – played tenderly by David Walmsley – avoids all conversation about white violence. Julia – a superb and scene-stealing Deborah Ayorinde – is desperate for him to realise the pain he’s caused. Together, they act like magnets: on one side organically connected, on the other, on opposing fields."

"Among all the pain, there are some very funny scenes too. And, there is a final, gorgeous picture of redemption that makes the whole stage vibrate. At times, it is hard to believe this play was so many written years ago: Touko has launched it into the present, giving her actors the space to make their characters overflowing, wholes. What a way to give this play its first London entrance."

"High-stakes passion in the segregated south"

"Alice Childress’s powerful story of a biracial couple is set in South Carolina in 1918, but burns with the heat of the civil rights era when it was written"

"Ayorinde and Walmsley capture the couple’s lived-in ardour and something of their unspoken shame. Though the drama’s nucleus is this love story, which collects dread after Herman catches the Spanish flu and is incapacitated in Julia’s bed, the women in Julia’s Black neighbourhood are given centrality, too."

"This could have made for a stark drama, but under the direction of Monique Touko (who recently brought School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play to this stage) it radiates warmth and humour alongside the dread. The south fulminates with dangerous nationalism and angry flag-waving so that you feel the women’s vulnerabilities."

"There is a sultry quality to the staging that captures the sweaty heat of this backwater but a sensuousness too. Paul Wills’ set is beautiful, designed as a row of houses made from grilled doors"

"Childress was an activist but lessons are not preached here. Racial politics is blended into the drama and its tragedy. This is an important, affecting revival that will no doubt introduce many to the power of Childress’s work"

"Riveting 1962 race drama feels all too relevant"

"It may be six decades old, but Alice Childress’s play at the Lyric Hammersmith in London is unnervingly topical"

"Read the words “wedding band” on the page and you probably envisage a circle of gold, a symbol of hope and commitment. Say them aloud and you might hear “wedding banned”, which has an altogether different meaning. It’s into that contradiction that Alice Childress’s astonishing 1962 play dives, illustrating with sharp wit and passionate anger the devastating cruelty of racist segregation in the US."

"It’s taken more than 60 years for Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White to reach the London stage, but it leaps into life in Monique Touko’s beautifully acted production"

"Her characters are funny, flawed and authentic: a group of women getting by. They gossip, squabble, pray and laugh together, but Childress deftly paints the countless ways that their lives are conditioned and circumscribed."

"At the heart is Ayorinde’s scintillating Julia, whose pain, anger and determination burn off the stage. It’s in her anguish — and her hope — that we most see the ugliness of a system that ties people in knots, wrecks their simple plans for happiness and steals into their bedrooms to control who they may love and how they may die. In a world still riddled with division and prejudice, that hits home."

"The first hour is exhilarating"

"Alice Childress’s play about miscegenation in the American South offered pathos, humour and snark, but went awry in the second half at the Lyric, Hammersmith"

"Well, that was frustrating. Alice Childress’s play — written in the 1960s, but only now receiving its UK premiere — promises great things in the first half. It also offers a glimpse of an issue — miscegenation in the American South — that has traditionally been the stuff of lurid melodrama. The first hour or so is an exhilarating, unpredictable mix of pathos, humour and snark. Sadly, it all goes awry in a weirdly overextended second half."

"I’m still very glad I saw it — Ayorinde is majestic and Bethan Mary-James and Diveen Henry lead a fine supporting cast. It’s just tantalising to ponder what might have been."