It has taken almost half a century for Alfred Fagon’s play to be revived since its 1975 premiere at Hampstead theatre. It is high time, too: it is an example of the maverick imagination that made the late playwright a key figure in the black British theatre movement of his time.
The man of the title is set to die in a gutter off-stage but the characters we encounter could not be further removed from him: they are up-and-coming entrepreneurs Shakie (Nickcolia King-N’Da), an 18-year-old living in a fancy flat in Chelsea, west London, and his best friend Stumpie (Toyin Omari-Kinch), as well as Jackie (Natalie Simpson), the mother of Shakie’s child who has come to stay.
This is a play of many (perhaps too many) ideas, ranging from class, race and gender to cultural appropriation, social mobility, capitalism and geopolitics. So it is remarkable, and thanks to director Dawn Walton, that a work largely built around late-night conversations on these themes does not feel static.
The backdrop to the men’s ambitions is Enoch Powell and the racial discrimination of the early 1970s, but they are determined to make successes of themselves at any expense. Entrepreneurship is a defining theme and Fagon’s characters seem presciently close to Thatcher’s children – though they have different standpoints to blackness. Shakie is a businessman, commodifying African aesthetics by selling to rich white people “African chairs” that are, in fact, made in Yorkshire. “I’m going to sell the continent of Africa to the Americans,” he boasts. Stumpie, meanwhile, wants to take back black music from the white musicians who have appropriated it.
Both men’s stances contain fascinating ideas to do with cultural appropriation – but these get lost among the play’s other elements, or maybe conflated with the characters’ growing hunger for money. The pair seem like early versions of Del Boy and Rodney from Only Fools and Horses (“We could be millionaires,” says Stumpie), but the tone slips from sitcom to a kind of non-naturalistic horror as Jackie – a middle-class black woman – is turned into their prisoner and money-making commodity.
Harold Pinter’s influence on Fagon is clear to see in the increasingly brutal dynamic between the sexes. Simon Kenny’s set design – delightful in its period detail – is stripped of its backdrop in the second half to reveal the stage’s innards, and characters begin speaking to each other facing the audience, in less realist modes.
The play strips itself down and travels towards barbarism: the men’s language is sexist, antisemitic and brutal, and there is unforgiving misogyny in the plot. But this development is not wholly satisfactory; Jackie’s motives remain underexplained and, dramatically, the menace is not there, perhaps because it feels too improbable. Yet we see the final tragedy before it comes.
But the actors bring immense conviction and charm to their parts and the drama leaves us with many points of provocation, whatever its weaker points. If this is Fagon’s legacy, we need more of it.
• At Hampstead theatre, London, until 10 July.
