Retrograde review – toxicity meets integrity in exceptional Sidney Poitier drama

Two white men are having a frank exchange of views on Sidney Poitier’s skin colour as they wait for him to arrive at an NBC studio office. It is 1955 and the 28-year-old actor (Ivanno Jeremiah) stands on the cusp of his Hollywood breakthrough.

“He’s Black-Black,” says Bobby (Ian Bonar), loosely based on Poitier’s real-life ally and screenwriter Robert Alan Arthur, who has written a leading film role for him. “Oh shit double Black,” jeers NBC’s snake-like lawyer, Parks (Daniel Lapaine).

The exchange is key to this tense play fictionalising a real-life meeting to which Poitier alluded in various interviews. It captures a toxic moment in American history when McCarthyism intersected with the civil rights movement and racist rightwing paranoia.

Parks wants Poitier to sign an oath of loyalty to America and denounce the actor, singer and civil-rights activist Paul Robeson before he is cast in the part. If not, Parks threatens Poitier with blacklisting. There are fantastic rat-a-tat exchanges between the three men, almost Mamet-like in their speed and savagery. Ryan Calais Cameron’s writing is sabre-sharp, every demotic and period inflection perfected, every threat hewn and glimmering with intelligence. With the playwright’s Olivier award-nominated For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy now in the West End, he is fast proving himself an exceptional talent.

The direction by Amit Sharma matches the tension in the script and we feel it rise from the minute Poitier enters the room. Parks is a racist bully who forces Poitier to perform Black jocularity for him, and represents the American right’s fragile sense of self. He plies Poitier with alcohol and speaks repeatedly of traditional American values, sounding like Hollywood’s own William F Buckley Jr.

Poitier, for his part, is sweet and upstanding, excellently played by Jeremiah. He appeases Parks with stories around his race, putting on a Caribbean accent on demand. But his moral dilemma – to be made a star in exchange for condemning Robeson – feels live and terrible as Parks shoves a contract in front of him, threateningly, cajolingly, manipulatively.

We see the good liberal in Bobby wilt as self-interest overcomes high principles and he behaves less like Poitier’s ally than a dithering boy. While this production dramatises a specific moment in Hollywood history for a pioneering Black actor, the dilemmas it flags up around what actors of colour are forced to exchange for entering the mainstream still echo today.

In one PBS interview, Poitier reflected on this meeting and said: “They tried to step on my sense of myself. I told them I pass.” This drama takes that laconic understatement and shows the courage and heroism it took to walk away.

• At the Kiln theatre, London, until 27 May