Between Riverside and Crazy: a retired Manhattan cop’s foul-mouthed but affecting fight with the world
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It’s no wonder that the address, Riverside Drive, is in the title of Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2014 drama, which is belatedly making its blistering UK premiere: the Manhattan apartment occupied by Walter “Pops” Washington is almost its own character. In Guirgis’s eloquent stage directions, it’s “a rent-controlled palace ruled by a grieving despot king” – and, if the landlord ever found a reason to turf out its irascible occupant, it would fetch 10 times its current rent.
Walter’s is a precarious form of power, but he wields it nonetheless. This cantankerous, retired black NYPD cop takes in strays and lost souls, such as recovering drug addict Oswaldo and his son Junior’s ditzy girlfriend Lulu, so that he can prove his beneficence. He basks in them respectfully calling him “Dad”.
His relationship with his own ex-con son is much more fraught, especially since the death of Walter’s wife just before Christmas. In Max Jones’s striking design, the apartment is frozen in grief: a rotting Christmas tree, still ghoulishly decorated, occupies one dusty corner, while her former bedroom is a huge floral shrine, and Walter now spends his days slumped in her old wheelchair, drinking whiskey for breakfast. He has trouble letting go: he has also been embroiled in a lawsuit against the city for eight long years, ever since a “white rookie Justin Bieber motherf----er” cop shot him.
That memorable line encapsulates Guigis’s startling writing: at once expletive-strewn, verbally virtuosic, explosively funny, and richly profound on race, morality and more. Every conversation is a prize-fight for Walter, who was rendered impotent by that shooting, and now has a burning need to assert his masculinity. There’s a Willy Loman aspect to his stubborn pride and demand that he receives what is fair. But there is a wide gulf between how Walter would like to be perceived and the real man – not so much an upstanding working-class hero as a habitual liar and raging alcoholic, who cheated on his wife with prostitutes.
The same goes for the vivid supporting characters. One riveting scene sees Walter’s former colleagues, Audrey and Dan, switch from trading cosy war stories to pressuring Walter to drop his troublesome case. The ravenously ambitious Dan, played with palpable sleaze by Daniel Lapaine, freely admits that solving this problem would be good for his career. Even the “church lady” (a scene-stealing Ayesha Antoine) who visits Walter is strangely contradictory: in a surreal sequence, she offers up both holy communion and sex.
Michael Longhurst expertly handles these wild tonal shifts, and Danny Sapani, who was recently an excellent Lear, is similarly titanic here as this sly, savagely funny, belligerent patriarch whose authority is ebbing away. However, on press night he occasionally tripped over his lines.
Ultimately, the radical daring of Guigis’s play comes not from the sudden bursts of violence or projectile vomiting, or the many, many “f---s”, but from the suggestion that even the most flawed of us deserve love, freedom, family, even salvation – and, if we’re very lucky, a prime piece of real estate.
Until Jun 15. Tickets: 020 7722 9301; hampsteadtheatre.com
