Laroche, written and directed by Dr Carlette L Norwood, tells the story of the only black passenger on the Titanic, Joseph Laroche. Born in 1886, Laroche was a Francophone Haitian who left Haiti at the age of fifteen to live in France where he met his future wife, Juliette Lafargue. They married, had two daughters and while Juliette was pregnant with their third child they booked their passage back to Haiti on the Titanic in April 1912. Juliette and her daughters survived and later returned to France. Joseph drowned and his body was never recovered.
The play is on at Birmingham’s new performance venue, The Birmingham Black Box. The one thing it is not is a black box theatre; it’s a former factory in the industrial part of town which has been repurposed into an events venue. The performance space itself is very big and very echoey with a high roof and bare brick walls. There is a rostrum on one side, a bar on the other and cabaret-style tables and chairs in the middle. A lot of thought has gone into the audience pre-show experience. We are given Titanic boarding passes as we enter and there are gift boxes of Lifesaver mints (American Polos) on each table.
The play starts with the young Laroche, played by Torian Williams, leaving Haiti and it ends with the sinking of the Titanic. A cast of nine, plus a short cameo appearance by the director, play key moments in Laroche’s life with a variety of props and a few costume changes to indicate different locations and the passage of time. The show has a strong cast, the adult Laroche (Destiny Osagiede) and Juliette (Christina Appana) make an attractive and likeable couple and they tell an interesting story, but Norwood has struggled to find a theatre vocabulary with which to tell it.
The script is written as short, screenplay-style scenes which, in a film, would end with a smash cut straight to the next one to generate pace and excitement. In this staging, though, every scene change requires a blackout in which the actors go off, the stage crew come on and reset the furniture, then they go off, the actors come back on, the lights come back up and the action resumes. Over and over again.
Long sections of exposition, usually in the form of letters, are delivered in offstage voice-overs while no-one does anything on stage. Even when one of the letters is written by Juliette, who is on stage at the time, she sits and does nothing while a recording plays over the PA.
The whole of the first half is devoted to Laroche’s life, but in the second half, Laroche and Juliette take a backseat to the crew of the Titanic. There is some interesting stuff about why the wireless officer failed to raise the alarm about ice ahead—he wasn’t sent the correct codes—but it takes us away from the Laroches to a different story and a different group of characters which dilutes the emotional impact.
The acoustics are poor and, even with the cast miked and amplified, it was difficult to hear what they were saying. The lighting rig is about 20 metres away from the stage behind the audience, so the lighting is flat. The French characters speak in ‘Allo ‘Allo French accents, and the sinking of the Titanic itself is played with an empty stage while the cast run around offstage shouting.
There are lots of good things going on here. This is a story which is worth telling, staged by a new company with an artistic mission to serve the local community in a reclaimed and repurposed piece of Birmingham’s industrial past. The show was well-attended and I wish the company every success in the future, but this is a hesitant start.