By Adam Bloodworth
Kwame Kwei-Armah’s play (which he also directs) Beneatha’s Place is a more straightforward proposition than its circuitous history might suggest. It’s the first UK staging of his 2013 work, which premiered in Baltimore and acts as an unofficial sequel to Lorraine Hansberry’s seminal 1959 play about the African American experience.
You don’t really need to know any of that, but it’s useful background and helps to explain the rather strange cold-opening of this new staging, which places a young, black, female activist against the backdrop of the student protests of the 1950s. It then zips several years forward and some 5,000 miles east, where the titular, American-born Beneatha (Cherrelle Skeete) is moving into her new home in the suburbs of Lagosalongside her new husband Joseph, a patriotic Nigerian academic with political aspirations.
This is very much a play of two halves, the first a tense, occasionally very funny political thriller in which various factions attempt to manipulate the principled Joseph, including local councillors and a shady (white) American diplomat who lives in the same village. It explores the legacy of racism and colonialism, which the couple find they cannot escape by simply leaving the US – if anything it seems even more insidiously entrenched on the African continent.
This legacy is given physical manifestation in the couple’s home through Joseph’s collection of racist masks, posters and ephemera shipped over from the States, an uncomfortable, tangible reminder of what the couple have tried to leave behind. The second half represents an about turn: decades later Beneatha returns to the Lagos house, having lived in America in the intervening years.
Now a respected university professor, she’s accompanied by a posse of (predominantly white) academics, brought there to discuss the next year’s curriculum: namely whether African American Studies should be replaced by Critical Whiteness Studies. The white, performatively woke lecturer most strongly advocating the change argues that black students are put off by the former’s legacy of oppression, while the central role of white people in the toxic miasma of racism should be properly stated.
It’s not an entirely successful structure, the first half teeing up fascinating questions which the second then addresses in the most literal of ways. It reminds me a little of Jonathan Spector’s play Eureka Day, which came to London last year, in the way its characters are unashamedly used as ciphers for the Big Issues at hand. What is remarkable is how prescient Beneatha’s Place was, its ideas having been dragged kicking and screaming into the cultural conversation in the decade since it premiered.
It’s also exceptionally well acted, especially Skeete who manages to convincingly age 50 years through subtle changes in tenor and bearing. While bordering on the didactic, the fiercely relevant issues discussed (updated since the original), canny direction and excellent acting make this another worthwhile staging by a Young Vic which seems to rarely put a foot wrong these days.
Beneatha’s Place is playing at the Young Vic now
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