Blues for An Alabama Sky review: ‘Hand Samira Wiley the Olivier award now’

So cool as Poussey in Orange Is the New Black and Moira in The Handmaid’s Tale, Samira Wiley makes an auspicious UK stage debut in Blues for An Alabama Sky at the National’s Lyttelton theatre. She’s luminous, amusing, and sexy, with a soulful singing voice and, looking sensational in 1930s fashions, a body that fashion designers would kill to dress.

In Pearl Cleage’s play, which was written in 1995, Wiley plays the sort of character who’d be hard work as a friend and yet enthralls everyone around her – a Harlem singer named Angel Allen who when we first meet her is drunk and out of work, having just been fired from her job in the chorus line.

She demands to be the centre of attention around which her roommate and gay best friend Guy (Giles Terera) and neighbour Delia (Ronke Adékoluẹjo) must pivot. She’s a seductress who only has to lean out of a window, fan in hand to cool the hot summer breeze, to snag a gorgeous passerby. And she’s a fabulous, flawed heroine brought to life by an entrancing Wiley, who sports a short waved wig on top of her usual buzz cut and gets right under the skin of a character who has guts and guile to spare.

The gorgeous guy who enters her life, Leland (Osy Ikhile), is an out-of-towner from Alabama who it transpires isn’t so gorgeous on the inside. He’s a god-fearing man with staunch morals whose prejudices are slowly revealed, culminating in a diabolical act that I won’t reveal here but that draws gasps and screams from the audience.

As directed by Lynette Linton, this handsomely mounted production is less about the plot than the characters, although there’s an abortion storyline (penned long before Roe v. Wade) that chimes loudly today, as indeed does the theme of intolerance that nonetheless doesn’t stop fashion designer Guy from being his authentic self in a bygone era where doing so was daring but also dangerous.

So good in Hamilton, Terera shines even brighter here. Obsessed with Josephine Baker, he’s a pearl-clutching, jewellery-wearing, out-and-proud self-styled “notorious homosexual” who dreams of journeying to Paris and clothing the French performer. This isn’t a musical, more a play with the occasional song, so Giles also gets to flex his vocal chops and he and Wiley have such a rapport that I imagine they’re now best friends off-stage too.

Adékoluẹjo is captivating, either when she’s swooning over Osy’s Leland or falling for Sule Rimi’s doctor Sam (with both actors on consummate form). And if the plot takes a while to get going, that’s OK. It is, as I say, all about the characters.

And getting to see Samira on stage is revelatory. She’s so good they should hand her the Olivier Award for best actress now.

Rating: 4/5

Blues for An Alabama Sky is at the National Theatre, London, until 5 November For more information visit nationaltheatre.org.uk and for great deals on tickets and shows click here