Statement of Regret by Kwame Kwei-Armah: National Theatre (Cottesloe)
I went to see Kwame Kwei-Armah's latest play not knowing what to expect: I hadn't seen anything of his before - not even Elmina's Kitchen, which won awards for him a few years back. I came out thinking I'd seen decent, interesting but flawed play of ideas.
Statement of Regret is set in a black London lobby group, the "IBPR". I couldn't help wondering all evening what that might stand for: Institute for Black People's Rights? It's founder and head Kwaku, played by Don Warrington, is a washed-up version of the man he once was. Stuck in the thinking of the 1970s and 80s, he's still obsessed with campaigning for reparations for slavery. He's drinking too much, having sex with his researcher, and relying too much on his colleague Michael (played straightforwardly but well by Colin McFarlane as a kind of Trevor Phillips in the making) to carry the public leadership and image of the institute. As the play starts, the two men are celebrating: opening champagne to mark the appointment of a minister for race - the institute's biggest policy success. But things will never be quite the same again.
While Kwaku's been away, things have been changing. Michael has been offered a safe seat by the Tories. And the young and ambitious Idrissa (Chu Omambala) wants to IBPR to give up the old ideas and the old campaigns, stop blaming white people for the black community's problems, and raise its profile with new, sexy and provocative ideas. Plus, thousands of pounds are missing from the institute's accounts, and Kwaku doesn't know how everyone's going to be paid.
It's at this point that the flaws in the play start to show. It's always difficult to believe in the washed-up Kwaku: Don Warrington's performance as a man under pressure disappointingly hovers between the suggestion of past brilliance and hints of current depression and alcoholism, but neither aspect of Kwaku really takes life. And the two aren't welded into a coherent individual. Perhaps, though, this is as much or more the fault of the script than of the actor: Kwaku is potentially a terrific tragic hero, but perhaps the writer needed to offer the actor more on which to build a performance to measure up to that. I did notice that towards the end, when Kwaku's gone over the edge and has his most emotional, desperate lines, Warrington's performance seemed energised and lit up - just as the play was ending, I wanted more of him.
Kwaku brings in his secret illegitimate son Adrian (Clifford Samuel) to work as an intern: he debates race and history with Idrissa, and rakes up tension with Kwaku's other son Junior (Javone Prince), the one whose childhood he witnessed, but the one who feels he's let his father down. Adrian's entrance is a turning point for Kwaku and for the play, but you can't help feeling he's really only there so as to link, symbolically, the play's political ideas with that of a fractured family arguing about who is most loyal, who deserving. The question of the missing money is never satisfactorily cleared up: you have to conclude it's simply there to put pressure on Kwaku, to allow the revelation that Junior had once before put his hand in the till, and to create space for the mysterious Soby (Oscar James) to sell his ideals and take Idrissa's provocations a step too far towards a kind of black racism: a mad, drunken anti-semitic and anti-African West Indian chauvinism.
Things fall apart, the Institute implodes. There's the same twist involving Soby that Charlotte Jones used in Humble Boy. And as I've said, Kwaku finally becomes at the end the kind of compelling figure you wish he'd been from the beginning. Perhaps Kwei-Armah was inhibited from making this character even bigger and more central because he's clearly a crazed, alternative self-portrait: you sense he's what the playwright fears he might have become if he, too, had spent years in the race business and, like Kwaku, was existentially bored with the whole thing.
Michael Billington was quite friendly to the production in the Guardian: and since like him I like political, ideas plays, I can understand why. I liked this play, and would certainly like to see a future production. But I have to agree with Paul Taylor in the Independent: it's a flawed play, and this perhaps not the best possible production.
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