The Death of a Black Man review, Hampstead Theatre: A funny and provocative revival
With a crack cast of actors, Dawn Walton’s revival of this 1975 play is palpably a labour of love, alive to the play’s impious humour and swagger as well as to its anger
Hampstead Theatre kicks off its new season with a timely, seriously challenging revival of a rarity from its own back-catalogue. Alfred Fagon’s play The Death of a Black Man received its award-winning world premiere at this venue in 1975. A hardened cynic might say that the decision to take a fresh look at this ebullient, funny and provocative three-hander on the main stage was an obvious choice; it arrives in the grievous light of the death of George Floyd, under the knee of a racist white police officer in Minneapolis last year. But the cynic would be wrong.
With a crack cast of actors in the tortuous, torturous triangle on which the play centres, Dawn Walton’s revival is palpably a labour of love. It’s alive to the play’s impious humour and swagger as well as to its anger. It is alert to how the play feels even more prescient now than it would have done in 2020 (when the revival would have happened, if it had not been for Covid-19 and lockdowns). But it gives us, in a great yeasty wallop, the play that Fagon wrote. It does not burden the piece with the wisdom of hindsight, nor does it try to disguise or minimise what now comes across, revealingly, as the play’s dated gender politics. This is the King’s Road in Chelsea in the Seventies, baby, and the sexual tensions are unresolved, clouded in the fug from the ganja spliffs.
The main character is Shakie, 18 years old and on a money-making mission. He wants to redistribute to his own bank account the wealth of the white American tourists and beatniks of the King’s Road, who like to pick up cheap antiques and imagine that they are getting into Black Lives by doing so.
Nickcolia King-N‘Da is superb in the part. The play is set in 1973, the year that the visiting team of cricketers from the West Indies beat the English on their home green. Our first glimpse of Shakie gives us his vision of himself – at the wicket, hitting for six all the balls bowled him. Fired up by the success of the visiting team, he’s in army fatigues, in a rapturous fantasy of getting even with the English. Land of free speech? It may pride itself on Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park, but to Shakie, England is a conspiracy to preserve the status quo. Hence his desire to outsmart it, with his snazzy turquoise-coloured suits and winning manner, as if he’s an honorary member of the Four Tops and high on his own adorability, pouring a never-ending supply of bubbly into pricey champagne flutes.
Into his rented pad come the two other characters. Jackie, an ex-girlfriend aged 30, whom he met when he was 15 and pretended to be older than he was. She is his “baby mother” – having given birth to their daughter, Priscilla, whom she has left in the care of her grandparents in Jamaica. Her objective for this visit is what? Revenge? Residual, injured lust for “Little Boy Blue”, as she calls Shakie? Natalie Simpson works wonders with a part that seems, to me, to underestimate Jackie. Why does she veer between ciggy-waving sophistication and a spooked, eroticized helplessness that ends up reminding one of Strindberg’s Miss Julie?
The play makes common cause with the fight against racial injustice by the victims of the Windrush generation. But it does so by letting you feel the tragicomic plight of people at a particular time.
None of the three characters knows how to handle the news that Shakie’s father (a gifted jazz flautist) has died of neglect outside a betting shop in Manchester. The men respond by talking big and becoming more and more misogynist (Toyin Omari-Kinch captures beautifully Stumpie’s born-again Pan-African zealotry). Jackie implodes.
This is a revival of wonderful aplomb.