Caroline, or Change

‘The battleground here is profoundly personal, as each character seeks their own deepest integrity.’

The first thing to reach you is Sharon D Clarke’s voice. In a slow moving first number her rich, emotion-laced singing keeps you watching. She plays Caroline, a domestic worker in 1963 Louisiana, the year John F Kennedy is shot. Working in a hot, stuffy basement for a liberal white Jewish family, Caroline feels trapped by circumstance. Her eldest boy is fighting in Vietnam, her husband has left, and she is struggling to support her three younger children on $30 a week.

The family she works for has troubles of its own. The mother has died, and the brooding, clarinet-playing father (Alastair Brookshaw) has remarried, to a woman from New York (Lauren Ward) who is desperately trying to win the love of her new stepson, the eight-year-old Noah.

Noah seeks refuge in the basement with Caroline, who shows him no particular warmth, other than a willingness to let him take a drag of her one cigarette a day. Nevertheless, the audience can see that they are fond of one another, until the stepmother – in an effort to teach Noah the value of money – tells Caroline that she can keep any spare change she finds in his pockets when doing laundry.

This tiny act brings between Noah and Caroline the full corrosive force of the power, race and class dynamics of the time. Sharon Clarke is excellent at stoking an explosive fire inside of her, fooling the audience into hoping that she will erupt out of her cramped conditions and join the winds of change around her. It is her eldest daughter, played by Abiona Omonua, who gives voice to our hope, who speaks out loud and clear.

But ultimately, the journey in Caroline, or Change is not sweeping or dramatic. It sneaks up on you, finally grabbing you by the heart as you realise that the battleground here is profoundly personal, as each character seeks their own deepest integrity in the face of degradation.

How do you experience oppression and still hold on to your best self? How do you live with unearned privilege and power, and do the same? This, ultimately, is the question that the writer Tony Kushner asks in this simple, yet nuanced, tale. Caroline, or Change resists resorting to heroes or villains. Each character is flawed and human; most are relatable. Amid the singing soap bubbles, a demonic dryer and a Supremes-style trio singing radio tunes, we see that persecution – and, more importantly, resistance – often happen in the minutiae of life.

Caroline, or Change runs at Playhouse Theatre, London, until 2 March.

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