Fix Up

Synopsis

‘I m forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive. But the future of the Negro in this country is precisely as bright or as dark as the future of the country - James Baldwin, 1963. It s Black History month but you wouldn t know it in Tottenham where Revive PLC plan to turn Kwesi s All Black African Party hotbed into luxury flats, and it looks like Kiyi s ‘conscious bookstore will soon go the same way. And then a beautiful visitor shows up in their midst and life goes from bad to worse. Set against the inexorable march of progress in contemporary London, Kwame Kwei-Armah s second play for the National explores race and roots with verve and wit.

Our Review:

17 December 2004

The bearings of the past on the present and the importance of education to realise that are already being pertinently observed at the National Theatre in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, set in a grammar school. Now Fix Up, a new play by Kwame Kwei-Armah in the NT Cottesloe, filters a similar theme through the prism of black experience, and the legacy of slavery that looms large within it.

Whereas Kwei-Armah’s Elmina's Kitchen (which was first seen in the Cottesloe last year and won him the 2003 Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright) was a powerful family drama played out amongst three generations of men in a Hackney café that topically resonated around gun crime, the new play gathers together a more diffuse cross-section of individuals in a north-east London bookshop and puts them on a collision course of external pressures and internal philosophies in the search for their identities.

...

Read more of the review

Latest User Review

62.252.0.10) - 27 January 2005:

Saw this play tonight and thought it was really terrific. Funny, full of heart and vitally intelligent....

Read more and add your own review