Roots
10 September 2023
Almeida Theatre
4.0 out of 5.0 stars
Roots recently opened at the Almeida, and it’s a show that needs a little time to really show what it has in store for you. Roots runs without an interval, which at an hour and 45 minutes is a great decision. I also thought towards the end that an interval might have made people leave without seeing the tremendous ending, so a run-through show is perfect for Roots.
Beatie comes to visit her family out in the countryside somewhere in Norfolk. She now lives in London with her fiery political activist boyfriend Ronnie, herself inflamed with new ideas and a yearning for intellectual conversation. As she spends two weeks talking about nothing but Ronnie, his friends, his activism, and his stimulating conversation, she nervously awaits his arrival, to meet her family for the very first time after three years of being together.
The play starts very slow and mundane, with rural people doing rural things, being involved in their comfortable little lives and not caring much about the outside world, while Beatie tries to start conversations, debates, arguments. Her family is not interested in the world at large, they are quite content to only be interested in their neighbours and own personal affairs. The mundanity and almost reality TV -esque feel of this play is slow and dragging, Beatie facing constant resistance from her family to be even remotely interested in larger cultural ideas and concepts makes her seem more and more like a know-it-all, almost an arrogant better-than-thou voice relentlessly berating everyone for not being intelligent and learned enough.
But as the plot moves along, slowly, creepingly, it becomes clear that Beatie herself struggles fitting in with Ronnie and his friends, having been raised in a small place with small-minded people, she feels she has never had a chance to be more, to learn how to be interested in culture, how to express big and complex ideas with just the simple words she was taught. Roots shifts into an examination of why culture is important, why political interest is especially needed for less engaged people, how we can raise ourselves through being more selective in what type of media we enjoy. If the masses don’t care about complex concepts, the media will keep things simple, stripped down to please the masses.
While some of the ideas sound somewhat classist and dismissive, the roaring speech at the end of the show really gives Beatie a voice beyond berating her family. She gets to fully inhabit her own mind and speak her own truth, examining what is holding her back and how to combat her own limitations. The profundity of this speech is delicious, never mind how long it takes to get to this point. The occasionally dragging mundanity of what came before aids in heightening the impact and fully engaging the audience when Beatie finally disseminates and criticises her own behaviour as well as the disengagement of her family, shouting about how not engaging in the world around you makes it spin without you, criticising the dumbing down of the masses by the masses through what they choose to focus on and engage with.
While the play is a little heavy handed at times, and can feel dragging and boring at first, it fully gets going in the last half hour and the final crescendo is more than worth going to see it!
