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This flashback to Sidney Poitier vs Hollywood racism is wickedly funny
The London Standard
|March 27, 2025
Unfolding in real time in a tight and wickedly funny 90 minutes, Ryan Calais Cameron's play dramatises the moral challenge faced by Sidney Poitier at the start of his career in the racist, paranoid Hollywood of 1955. Should he denounce colleagues in the civil rights struggle, including the heroic Paul Robeson, to get a foot on the ladder in an NBC TV movie?
Originally staged by director Amit Sharma at the Kiln in 2023, it's part thriller, part melodrama — the wisecracking, racially charged dialogue full of heightened cinematic crackle and snap. This West End transfer, with Ivanno Jeremiah reprising his supple and riveting performance in the lead role, also shows how prescient Cameron was. Poitier emerged in a mad, wicked period of American life. And it seems we're right back there.
This story is from the March 27, 2025 edition of The London Standard.
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