Kwame Kwei-Armah's last play at the National, Fix Up, argued there is no future for a people that denies its past. But his new play takes the discussion a stage further by suggesting that a fixation with history can also be corrosively damaging. While it is fascinating to see a writer pursuing his own internal dialectic, there are times here when you feel the action is rigged in pursuit of the ideas.
The setting is the London office of a black political thinktank whose founder, Kwaku Mackenzie, is in a state of collapse. Grieving over the death of his Caribbean immigrant father, he is hitting the bottle, hardly able to pay his staff and hung up on the idea of fighting for reparations for slavery. But he faces near-mutiny when he introduces his illegitimate son into the office and goes on television to drunkenly argue that reparation money should be paid to impoverished West Indians rather than those of African descent. He opens up a racial divide in the office and the wider society, destroys his credibility as a cultural warrior but, even as he is being steered towards a mental home, remains openly defiant.
Kwei-Armah's arguments are fascinating and, like Roy Williams in Joe Guy, he acknowledges the tensions between West Indians and Africans. But his play suffers from its own form of confusion. Emotionally, Kwei-Armah sympathises with Kwaku. Yet he also seems to side with the character who claims, "If we get caught up in our own shit, no one wins." While applauding the play for its honesty, I also feel it introduces too many themes: the private battle between Kwaku's legitimate and bastard sons, the running conflict between the traditionalists and the office radicals who want to focus on black-on-black violence. By the end of the evening, one's head is swimming with the sheer weight of the material.
But Jeremy Herrin's production contains a fine performance from Don Warrington, full of ruined grandeur, as the disintegrating hero. Colin McFarlane as his once-trusted lieutenant, Javone Prince and Clifford Samuel as his warring sons and Oscar James as his ghostly father also possess real weight. There is no denying that the play is full of moment-by-moment dramatic power. But the big question is how one reconciles the need to understand the past without being submerged. To that, Kwei-Armah has no very clear answer.
· In rep until January 10. Box office: 020-7452 3000. A version of this review appeared in later editions of yesterday's paper.
