Retrograde: Donné Ngabo's Transfixing Performance as Sidney Poitier

Strange things happen when an actor plays another, more famous actor. The outcome can be a bewildering sack of tics and mannerisms, or it can be mesmerising, like an actual communion with the dead. In Melbourne Theatre Company’s production of the UK playwright Ryan Calais Cameron’s taut three-hander Retrograde, the improbable task of bringing the screen legend Sidney Poitier to life falls to a newcomer, Donné Ngabo. The result is transfixing; a breakout performance to rival Poitier’s own in the 1955 film Blackboard Jungle.

It’s there in the walk, initially. The play keeps its powder dry by delaying Poitier’s entrance considerably and, when we do finally see him, he’s silently walking to a Manhattan meeting in an impeccable chestnut suit. That meeting – in the wake of Blackboard Jungle’s success – is with Mr Parks (Alan Dale), an NBC lawyer who has drafted the contract Poitier has come to sign with the network, his big break. Joining them is a screenwriter and industry bruiser, Bobby (Josh McConville), Poitier’s friend and champion. Surely, the meeting will be a cinch, a mere formality.

Formality is a problem, though. Parks is put off by Poitier’s reserve and decorum, needling him to have a whiskey and take off his tie. This opening banter – Parks posturing and bellicose, Poitier quietly exasperated – is unnerving and sets the tone for the rest of the play. Between these two positions, Bobby bobs like a cork, desperate to unite seemingly incongruent personalities through charm and, when that fails, shouting.

Of course, congruence is a rare commodity in racially divided 1950s America, as Poitier’s own filmography would go on to illuminate. At this juncture in his career he has to play nice by giving the white man what he wants. Just how much he’s being asked to sacrifice becomes clearer later, when Parks reveals a “loyalty oath” adjacent to the contract and a terrible demand that will shake and shape Poitier’s future.

Because more concerning to a network lawyer in this particular moment in history is not that Poitier is black but that he might be red. Senator Joe McCarthy has whipped the US public into a frenzy of anti-communist hysteria and Poitier is in danger of being blacklisted because of his previous associations, particularly with Harry Belafonte and Paul Robeson. The contract is revealed to be Faustian and Parks is Poitier’s smirking, bigoted Mephistopheles.

It’s a terrific setup for drama and the director, Bert LaBonté, steers it tightly and with great assurance. There’s a notable precision even with minor details and, if that dampens the passion a little, it allows for moments of great clarity and resonance. The set designer Zoe Rouse’s clean, mid-century modern New York corner office is so stylish you half expect Don Draper to walk in, and her costumes are thoughtful and striking. Rachel Lee’s lighting is smart and unobtrusive, while Jethro Woodward’s sound composition is cleverly complimentary.

Dale seems slightly underprepared as the increasingly vile Parks, with the occasional missed cue or fudged line, but he has a strong grip on the character’s moral vacuity and expansive ego. McConville is excellent as Bobby, the opportunist facing his own moral reckoning; he shuffles and squirms, hedges and equivocates, hinting at depths unspoken and unacknowledged.

Ngabo’s is the central performance, though, and he delivers with grandeur and dignity that remind us directly of Poitier’s on-screen persona, then allows us behind the curtain to see the ambition, pride and luminous rage underpinning it. The physicality, all those angles and head thrusts, is superbly evocative of Poitier at his most dazzling. But it’s the voice, clipped and sonorous, that reaches into the uncanny: it’s indistinguishable from the real thing.

Retrograde plays some curious games with the historical record, obscuring facts and shifting timelines, which deliberately blurs the edges of its social-realism and spins the work closer to mythology. It’s full of priceless witticisms – “He’s as dumb as a soup sandwich” and “Does your ass get jealous of your mouth because of all the shit that comes out of it? – that land like physical blows. It’s like watching two fighters slug it out in the ring under the eye of an increasingly ineffectual referee.

Anchored by an unforgettable performance by Ngabo – clarion and majestic, vast and deep – Retrograde feels like a fresh wind. The play has its flaws – it’s emotionally manipulative and resolves in a way that feels both highly predictable and faintly pat – but it’s also stirring and cathartic. The swirling horrors of conformity and acquiescence are shown for what they are, gusts of hot air that disperse under the headwinds of history, while something shining and true remains.

Sidney Poitier was a colossus and this finely wrought, rigorous and heartfelt production not only shows us why, it brings him back from the dead to teach us how we might fight the McCarthyists of our own time.