As one of the flagship presentations of this year’s biennial London International Festival of Theatre, Anna Deavere Smith makes her first stage appearance in the city for 25 years, performing the latest of her socially and politically engaged verbatim solo pieces. Notes From The Field consists of 19 testimonies culled from over 250 interviews. It is a coruscating indictment of the school-to-prison pipeline, whereby U.S. public budgets are spent with increasing disproportion on imprisoning disadvantaged young people, predominantly of colour, rather than providing them with an education adequate to keep them out of jail. Smith impersonates a range of educationists, politicians, former inmates and teens.

Sometimes the very range can be a problem. When I reviewed a third-party revival of Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 earlier this year, I criticised that performer’s sometimes overdone accents. I now see that she was simply (albeit over-enthusiastically) following Smith’s own example. However firmly your heart and that of the person you’re characterising are both in the right place, and even however accurate your portrayal may be, delivering their words in, say, an almost comedy-Scandi accent devalues them. It prioritises performer skill or dramaturgical process above the material, which is the last thing Smith wants.

However, this same commitment to performance also rebuts what had been my main worry before seeing the work, that it would not be sufficiently theatrical. It’s a nominally solo work, but Smith engages with double bassist Marcus Shelby, with an onstage cameraman and above all with us. Costume changes become part of her characterisations, and most importantly she ensures that her subject matter is anything but abstract.

Smith had apparently been unsure whether her piece would have its intended impact in London, doubting that a British audience might allow itself to be sufficiently “concerned”. She can be somewhat reassured by the ovations with which her tour de force as both actor and writer is being greeted. However, it remains to be seen whether a middle-class Royal Court audience whose theatregoers of colour at the performance I saw could be (and were) counted on my fingers will translate that into active concern.

Written for the Financial Times.