“Your grandmother didn’t leave a third-world country so you could volunteer in one.” The over-achieving and over-anxious young black woman standing in front of us has the weight of her family’s expectations on her thin, middle-class shoulders. It’s Oxford or bust for her, and her dad is certainly not entertaining the idea of a gap year.
Racheal Ofori’s exuberant solo show – part of CPT’s festival of feminism, Calm Down Dear – offers snapshots of black women finding out who they are and where they fit in the world as they negotiate their own and society’s expectations of them. There’s the young woman from Ghana who comes to London to study wearing rose-tinted spectacles, only to find that everything is smaller, colder and less possible than she had imagined.
There’s also the all-singing, all-dancing pastor who gives it to her congregation straight when it comes to the responsibilities of young black men as fathers. Best of all, there is the teenage Candice, who has become a special project for her white school counsellor, but whose only problem is that she sees the world and all its racial and economic realities with a clear-eyed, quiet and often poetic anger. Even teenagers like herself are a business, fodder for an education system that works in the interests of capitalism, not children. I’d willingly spend more time with Candice.
Ofori is an engaging performer, and this is a script of real potential, slipping and sliding with grace between the boundaries of theatre, spoken word and comedy. But what it doesn’t do, because the sketch-style format works against it, is offer any real depth. Too often the show feels like a scattergun showcase case for Ofori’s undoubted talents, rather than a meaningful and textured examination of identity and cultural stereotypes.
• Until September 26. Box office: 020-7419 4841. Details: cptheatre.co.uk
