Caroline, or Change

I went to see Caroline, or Change with no idea what to expect, despite knowing that it was a revival of an enormously successful Chichester Festival Theatre production: I had done no research so as to come at it with no preconceptions. The most immediate impact of this was my joy in the opening scene on discovering that the appliances in the eponymous heroine's life are played by people: the Washing Machine (Me'sha Bryan), the Dryer (Ako Mitchell) and the Radio (Keisha Amponsa Banson, Dujonna Gift-Simms, and Tanisha Spring) – even the Bus (also Ako Mitchell) and the Moon (Angela Caesar) – the latter pair, obviously, not appliances. This lends an otherworldy, almost surreal frivolity but simultaneously a strong note of darkness to the production right from the opening scene. Caroline is a black maid in a white Louisiana household in 1963, and the cramped basement – metaphorically ‘underwater’ rather than underground, as the libretto repeatedly asserts – which contains these appliances, forms the world in which she lives the majority of her life: hence their necessary personification. Or in the case of the Dryer, devilification.