[In For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf,] Ntozake Shange sets out to evoke the plight of black women and at the same time somehow to celebrate them and their triumphs in life through a series of monologues, usually taken straight by one of the seven players, sometimes illustrated by one while another speaks. She sees herself very much as a poet, and that may well be the case. But she is farthest from proving it when she most desperately strains to do so. Which, unfortunately, is often in the most prominent parts of the show, like the opening and closing numbers of the two parts.

In these, and every now and then elsewhere, she tends to fall into a loose, dithyrambic style that Dylan Thomas would have recognised. The words twist and turn in an anguish of frustrated communication, and it all...