BWW Reviews: BLACK BATTLES WITH DOGS, Southwark Playhouse, April 13 2012

Becky Brewis

Playwright Bernard-Marie Koltès left a disclaimer: "Black Battles with Dogs is not about Africa, it is not about the blacks – I am not an African playwright – it is not about neocolonialism, not about the racial question."

He is being deliberately provocative, discouraging prescriptive interpretations of a play that no doubt touches on all these things. But his play (at Southwark Playhouse until 5 May) is about specifics, not generalities. And the specifics at stake here are the unlikely dynamics that develop between four people in the dislocated backwater of a French construction site somewhere in Africa.

As the play opens we learn that tempers have flared in the claustrophobic heat. Someone has
been killed and the relatives want the body.

A tight cast make Koltès' script (translated by David Bradby and Maria M. Delgado) crackle. Paul Hamilton plays a hardened long-term ex-pat, and Joseph Arkley brings a reckless energy to the stage as Cal, a lean live-wire. Over a whisky and a game of dice on a long night, Cal pauses between racist outbursts and reflects on the arrival of his boss' fiancée: "Women bring humanity to the game," he says.

But betting on dice is just one of many games being played, and when a neurotic Rebecca
Smith-Williams steps nervously into the harsh sun, the kind of humanity she represents is out of place. People treat each other differently here and the rules of the game are as hard to make sense of as the coded calls of the local guards, signalling across the camp at night.

If there are multiple games there are also multiple parts to play – something that's reinforced by Osi Okerafor's observant portrayal of the only African we meet, the dead man's brother.

As he steps out of the safety of The Shadows he is wary, conscious both of a need to placate the white men to get what he wants, and of the watchful eyes of the African guards on the lookout for any breach of loyalty from one of their own.

It is a typically effective touch of Alexander Zeldin's direction to have the audience mounted on either side of the playing area, facing each other like the camp guards stationed in watchtowers. Southwark Playhouse's cavernous vaults under the railway arches make an atmospheric setting, with the engulfing darkness at each end suggesting the black wilderness outside the French camp.

Blackness is obviously a threat here for the two white men who, stranded together in bored vigil, vulnerable in their patch of too-bright light, fidget away the nights against a background noise of dogs and guards. There is a feeling of real depth, as the actors run or call out from distant recesses.

Koltès' note on his play refers to Conrad, and there is certainly something of Heart of Darkness in this haunting piece: of an aborted administrative programme described in a language of feverish detail. The hasty arrangement of drab corrugated iron and temporary fences is relieved only by a delicate tree straight out of a Japanese print: a splash of pink as garish as Rebecca Smith-Williams' dress and an equally bald attempt at prettiness. Like most of the characters – and even the construction site itself – these things don't belong here.

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