Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom sets a recording session in 1927 in which a blues singer keeps a studio full of white producers waiting while she decides what she is willing to give them. Her band is downstairs in a rehearsal room, running through numbers and talking, and the argument that matters is happening there.

Levee, the trumpet player, wants his own arrangements recorded and his own band after that. Toledo, Cutler and Slow Drag have been at this longer and know what the promises are worth. Over an afternoon the four of them work through music, food, religion, women and the terms on which a Black musician is allowed to make a living, while upstairs the session stalls over a bottle of soda nobody will fetch, a stammering nephew and a contract nobody intends to honour.

August Wilson wrote the play in 1982 and it was the first of his ten-play American Century Cycle to be produced, in 1984. It is the only one of the ten set outside the neighbourhood that anchors the rest of the cycle, and it established the method he used for the rest: a single day, a confined space, and long stretches of storytelling that carry more weight than the plot around them.

The talk is the event. Wilson writes monologues that arrive without warning and run for pages, and the band's easy back-and-forth keeps tipping into something harder. The music is present throughout, played and rehearsed on stage, and the sound of it is part of what is being argued over.

The ending comes fast and lands on the wrong person, which is Wilson's point. What has been done to these men has to go somewhere, and it rarely travels upward.