Giffnock welcomes Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park

Following the success of Rapture’s The Red Lion, Michael Emans now directs the multi award nominated play Clybourne Park which takes to the Eastwood Park Theatre stage tomorrow evening.
By Dawn Renton
Published 24th Sep 2019, 09:19 BST

“How many white men does it take to change a light bulb?”

It’s 1959 and President Eisenhower is in the White House. Bev and Russ are moving after the tragic death of their son, and they have inadvertently sold their house to the neighbourhood’s first black family.

Fifty years later, in 2009, with the first Black President just having taken office, a young white couple buy the same house in what is now a predominantly black neighbourhood.

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In both instances, racial tensions escalate, the stakes are raised, and the play asks the question: have our attitudes to race really changed? Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Tony, and Olivier Award for Best Play and hailed as “shockingly entertaining” and “appallingly funny”, Clybourne Park is a razor-sharp satire about the politics of race.

The cast features Robin Kingsland (Rapture’s The Browning Version and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?), popular Scottish performer Jackie Morrison, leading Royal Shakespeare Company actress Frances McNamee, Adelaide Obeng (Not Bound Within for The Albany), Benjamin Stratton (The 39 Steps), Jack Lord (War Horse for the National Theatre), Steven Scott Fitzgerald (The Browning Version) and Vinta Morgan (The Merchant of Venice for Almedia Theatre).

Talking about the play, Director Michael Emans said: “I am thrilled to be directing this play. It is challenging, in that it dares to ask the audience whether their attitudes to race, gender, disability and class have really changed. We might feel that we live in a more enlightened age, but do we really?

The play also satirises those who claim to be politically correct and give themselves status through their supposed insight.. but are they really insightful, or when you scratch the surface do old attitudes exist?

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The play is also very funny, laugh out loud, with a dark satire that illuminates both the best and worst of human behaviour.

I love Clybourne Park, it’s both daring and hilarious and undoubtedly a play for our times.

We have a great cast, a great play and a great story.

“All we need now is you, our audience, hope to see you there.”

Catch Clybourne Park at Eastwood Park Theatre on September 25.

For tickets, visit www.eastwoodparktheatre.co.uk/boxoffice