The first long speech is the schoolboys' perpetual source of humour: carboard ripping and toxic smelling flatulence. Banza, attributing this to his bean laden diet, recalls how his teacher led an investigation into the culprit. With small primary school boys and a good sense of the ridiculous, she held them aloft to nasally detect the waft of lingering aroma.
This production is spellbinding and its momentum stays with me occupying my thoughts, whirring like the revolving stage. The text, finalised by Lorraine Hansberry's former husband and literary executor Robert Nemiroff, would bear much further study to grasp all its themes and nuances. Written from her viewpoint in the 1960s by American playwright Lorraine Hansberry, the original person to be described as "young, gifted and black", her unfinished play Les Blancs, examines an unnamed African country on the brink of revolution and independence from colonial rule. Lorraine Hansberry was in her mid thirties when she tragically died of pancreatic cancer.