Playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah has an interest that is both intelligent
and passionate in the various debates about the future of the black
British community. I’m afraid it sounds glib to say that perhaps he
needs to take more of an interest in writing plays, but it’s not wholly
unwarranted. The last of his trilogy at the National Theatre,
Statement Of Regret in 2007, was
not so much a dramatisation as simply an enactment of the debate on the
matter of reparations, and now
Seize
The Day chronicles the campaign of an imaginary near-future
black candidate for the London mayoralty in terms of conversations
rather than events.
Of the two crucial moments which more or less bookend the play, the
first – when television presenter Jeremy Charles punches a black youth
committing a street assault, and so becomes not just a celebrity but a
hero of sorts – is seen on a video prologue, and the second – his
keynote speech to a major conference at which he is due to announce his
candidacy – happens offstage between scenes. The rest of the time we
see Jeremy talking: with his wife (white), his mistress (black), the
youth he punched out and the various members of the lobbying campaign
who have adopted him as their “face”. The talk is for the most part
lively (although once again Kwei-Armah slips in a number of undigested
quotations, from poet Henry Reed among others), and the character of
street youth Lavelle in particular is a fine creation: an Alfred
Doolittle for our times, with unapologetic straight talk instead of
brass-necked charm, but at least as smart as anyone he encounters.
Kwei-Armah’s own direction, too, keeps the characters moving as they
speak, but none of it amounts to action as such.
The protagonist’s central conflict between personal integrity and
political expediency, with the added dimension of race, is similar to
that of August Wilson’s
Radio Golf,
seen at the Tricycle last year. As Jeremy, Kobna Holdbrook-Smith mars a
strong performance by overdoing the naively over-expressive body
language. Karl Collins is a used-rhetoric salesman as “adviser” Howard,
and Aml Ameen as Lavelle is simply magnetic in every one of his scenes.
But nothing alters the basic fact that this play is all “tell” and no
“show”.
Written for the Financial
Times.