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Dir: Thea Sharrock.
Cast: Paterson Joseph
Description: An ex-convict from the southern states, aided by his British ally, worms his way into a dictatorial rule of a remote West Indian island. The people begin to hate his leadership, so he escapes to a forest. The heat and the sounds of trackers, forces him into a desparate, violent stand. Drama by Eugene O'Neill, with Paterson Joseph as the Emperor.
Trains: Tube/BR: Waterloo 
Phone: 0207452 3000
Website: www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/?lid=1541
A tyrant's nightmare: the Emperor Brutus Jones (Paterson Joseph) runs from rebellious subjects but is pursued by his inner demons
Nearly 90 years after its New York premiere Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones still startles with its novelty, timeless political relevance and daring theatricality. These elements are realised in a spectacular production by Thea Sharrock that inevitably lacks the claustrophobia and invention of her staging of the play in 2005 at the tiny Gate theatre, where audiences peered down at a prison-pit playing area.
Moving from the realistic terrain of a West Indian island palace, where the black dictator of the title is poised for flight from his revolting subjects, O'Neill takes an expressionistic and psychological turn. Drums tap out alarming bulletins. Paterson Joseph's swaggering, white-uniformed Emperor, festooned with medals, escapes to a forest and finds it the heart of darkness. He goes to pieces as he comes up against revenants, ghosts of his criminal past - the black man and the white he killed.
In Robin Don's beautiful symbolist design on a revolving stage, the walls of a gold palace are dramatically tilted away to reveal a dark, damaged obverse - that which is repressed.
O'Neill, though, is concerned with more than dramatics of guilt-tripping. Jones's nightmare journey is not simply a Freudian/Jungian voyage of discovery, repressions of the personal unconscious disclosed. It opens up into a history of black oppression in America, relayed in vivid dramatic pictures and reverse chronology.
Jones, whom Joseph makes histrionic and fearful but in rather mechanical fashion, becomes the universal or archetypal black: he faces up to his nemesis, Dwayne Barnaby's sinister, dancing witch-doctor and slave ships. He panics when set to be auctioned at a slave market, the stage thronged with white 19th-century planters.
He murders a thuggish prison guard. He gambles. Finally when serving as a Pullman car attendant he learns from white passengers that "de big stealing' makes you emperor". He becomes a tyrant whose black-on-black brutalities ironically perpetuate the injustices done to his race.
Five musicians and 40 dancing, miming, trooping supernumeraries bring O'Neill's timeless, dark-night of the soul vision menacingly alive.
• Until 31 October. Information: 020 7452 3000.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
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