On Stage
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE 'Mister Johnson' Insults Africans By Joseph T Shipley Mister Johnson. By Norman Rosten. From the book by Joyce Cary. Directed by Robert Lewis. Presented by Cheryl Crawford and Mr. Lewis....
...His chief is tolerant of the clerk's lapses, then joins him in the largest of these...
...The presumptuously named Mr...
...Thus is the divine justice of the English god tempered with mercy...
...After the soaring success of My Fair Lady, the new plays have plummeted toward an all-time low...
...a few references to "the King" place it before Elizabeth II, but there is a sense of present time in it all...
...In the 1850s, a book and a play like Uncle Tom's Cabin, sentimental, overdrawn, partial and therefore false, was nevertheless biased on the side of freedom...
...At the Martin Beck Theater...
...It certainly has no proper place in a plav in America...
...It may be invidious to wonder why 36 Negroes accept jobs in such a play...
...In the light of the bus boycott, in the face of the African drive for freedom, such an attitude may well boomerang...
...The fact that in Mister Johnson the whites are little better than the Negroes is hardly a consolation...
...For his farewell party, Johnson goes to steal gin...
...The other is an odd fellow in a dark suit, always attended by a grinning, slave-like bushman...
...Yet, there is not one indication that the authors or the natives have the slightest inkling of any stir in Africa...
...Until Negroes refuse to accept parts in a play (as they are now refusing to accept places in a bus) if it sets them in caricatured or subservient or "second-class citizen" guise, we may expect such plays to be presented...
...He cheats a little, steals a little, lies a lot...
...Losing faith in god Rudbeck, Johnson decides to go away—especially as his bush wife went home when his payments for her stopped...
...But Rudbeck is apparently still sore at Johnson (I use words indicating the level of feeling), so that when Johnson cheats again he is fired...
...He boasts himself an Englishman...
...No date is given for the action of the play...
...When the road is built, the region thrives, whereupon the supervisor pardons the local man...
...Most of the Negroes in the play are primitive, superstitious folk, ignorant, incapable of grasping the better ways of the whites except in one respect: When it comes to matters of money, they exhibit a quick —I might almost say a white—recognition of values and ways of rapacious dealing...
...For the Englishman has his heart set on constructing a road to join the town with a larger source of trade...
...Two Negroes dress like the whites...
...So far as its attitude is concerned, the play might have been written a century ago...
...Johnson stabs him...
...But it must be a very smug white who will respond favorably to such a play...
...The Africans' gathering rise of self-respect, the desire to shake off the shackles of colonialism, to take their own blundering steps in self-government—all this is as though it had never been...
...Against a tilted backstage on which it is hard to walk, suggesting the trouble in reaching the isolated town of Fada in Nigeria, simple platforms of poles and bamboo rods roll in to outline the general store, the office or home of Rudbeck, the British officer in charge, or the home of his Negro clerk, Johnson...
...he and Johnson connive to use the cash in the safe to pay the workers, writing it off against the next year's appropriation...
...One is Johnson, the willing but weak follower in "civilized" ways...
...Here in the l950s...
...Wonderful is sustained by the prior repute of its star, Sammy Davis Jr...
...Among the English qualities Johnson copies are a laxity and laziness of moral fiber...
...we come upon a book and play, equally sentimental and false, that has no apparent purpose, theme or conclusion but the idea that only a silly sentimentalist would think these people capable of self-government and self-control...
...The Beautiful Changes and Little Glass Clock stopped within a week of their openings...
...Rudbeck, signing the order for Johnson's execution, thinks it such a damn shame that, instead of having the Negro hanged, the Englishman shoots him...
...the white storekeeper shoots at the thief...
...Johnson is proud of his post as clerk to the British authority...
...Similar arguments, however, have been used to condone the activity of prostitutes...
...He is named Benjamin and his function seems to be to prophesy that Johnson will come to no good end...
...Into what the program calls the "landscape" of the town boom the drums and surge the moods of the bush natives, primitive souls who perform dances that to my perhaps inexpert eyes seem West Indian rather than West African...
...His boss Rudbeck is his god...
...even so superb an actor as Earle Hyman, who plays Johnson, could find nothing better for many months than a messenger boy's job...
...Mister Johnson is alluringly presented in sets of superb simplicity...
...And the more Mister Johnson is a financial success, the more it marks a moral misfortune...
...The English supervisor, discovering the cheat, gives Rudbeck hell, which he passes along to Johnson...
Vol. 39 • April 1956 • No. 18
