Driving Miss Daisy To York

Driving Miss Daisy, as a title, put me in mind of the old Jazz Age blockbuster, You’re Driving Me Crazy, when I first saw the 1989 Academy Award-winning film, starring Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman. Only Alfred Uhry, now in his eighty-second year, could tell us if his Pulitzer-prize winning work, apparently inspired by his own experiences, makes any kind of passing allusion to the song. Certain it is, however, that the eponymous character does at times drive both her son and her chauffeur to distraction.

The play, set in the American Deep South, specifically in the birthplace of Dr. Martin Luther King, Atlanta, Georgia, opens in 1948. We find Miss Daisy Werthan, a spry 72-year-old having to be cajoled by her son, Boolie, to take a driver. She has had a series of bumps when behind the wheel but her pride, self-reliance and thrift all militate against her accepting the decision.

It’s difficult to believe but Paula Wilcox is now not far short of Daisy’s age at the beginning of the play. All the emotional nuances of growing old and the personal insight that comes with it seem to inform Miss Wilcox’s unforgettable portrayal which quite magnificently fleshes out the innate contradictions in Daisy. She’s a rich, haughty, suspicious Jewish lady, a retired school teacher, clearly once of indomitable will, but surprisingly she takes a pride in her unprivileged upbringing and has almost an obsession with avoiding ostentation. We wouldn’t have guessed it at the start, but she turns out to be remarkably forward-looking and without prejudice, in forming a platonic relationship with her Afro-American driver, that will grow and blossom over a quarter of a century. Socially miles apart, they are both in different ways products of their time and place, thrown together by necessity but, through some kind of strange synastry, coming to an affinity of great poignancy which leaves them emotionally reliant on each other.

Maurey Richards, the acclaimed American actor, clearly feels much empathy with Hoke, the chauffeur, and in a recent interview said, “[He] has been in my DNA, my mind and my heart since I discovered him in the 1980s because his story is so familiar. He’s so like my grandfather and my people who were originally from Memphis.” Not surprisingly, he gives an inspired performance as the proud, intelligent and far-from-fawning chauffeur, who always gives as good as he gets in his exchanges with Daisy. His sense of humour is wry but it amuses her and he is very far from cynical, has no self-pity and if he now holds the key to her car, and in a sense, to her life beyond the house, he does not betray the trust placed in him. He is self-evidently a good man and Daisy will recognise this and help him to learn to read, develop and prosper. They will grow old together.

The simple story, overflowing with warmth and compassion, interspersed with lots of tender humour, has nevertheless a moral undertow, providing an unusual take on the racial and class divisions of the period. The programme notes quote Uhry: “I was tired of all these stereotypes – that white people were running around being openly hostile and rude toward black people, and that black people were standing there with hat in hand saying, ‘Yassir, boss’ or else being firebrand revolutionaries.”

Yet, we can’t blind ourselves to the suspicion that Daisy’s liberal attitudes - shown not least in her pilgrimage to see Dr. King’s Nobel Prize speech - are in conflict with her initial misgivings about employing Hoke. Perhaps it takes the bombing of her synagogue to make her finally see the light and the similarity between them. Equally Hoke’s light badinage about Jews being proverbially tight-fisted does not pass unnoticed. The son, Boolie, nicely judged by another American actor, Cory English, seems at times to exist chiefly to provide comic relief, coping with his mother’s quirky demands. But, he becomes a spokesman for Capitalist interest when explaining to her what would happen to his business if he involved himself in the Civil Rights’ movement.

Clearly the quarter of a century depicted here was a period of astonishing transition and this is caught in the musical soundtrack, not least in Bob Dylan’s The times they are a-changin’ and in Billie Holiday’s deathless Strange Fruit, that howl of protest about skin-colour prejudice from the greatest of Jazz singers - based, with an exquisite nicety, on a poem by a Jewish-American writer, Abel Meeropol.

Clearly a huge amount of thought, skill, flair, inspiration and perspiration has gone into this in-house production, the music but one of many deft touches supplied by director Suzann McLean, Theatre Royal Associate Artist. Emma Wee’s simple design has much to commend it, allowing us never to lose sight of the car, either garaged or on the road, that provides the metaphor for two people’s journey to the heart of humanity.

Driving Miss Daisy is at York Theatre Royal, from June 7 to 29, at 7.30pm; in addition to which there are matinees, at 2pm on June 13, 20 and 27; and at 2.30pm on June 15, 22 and 29.
Box office: 01904 623568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk