Beneatha’s Place – Young Vic, London

Writer and Director: Kwame Kwei-Armah

The revival of Kwame Kwei-Armah’s Beneatha’s Place is an exploration of cultural and national inheritance set across two time periods in which Nigerian, African American and white British and American colonial experiences interact across the life of a single woman, told in the same room decades apart. Ten years after it was first performed, this Young Vic production gives space to the play’s central ideas about claims to racial identities and the political trade-offs between independence and control in determining what kind of future might be possible.

American-born medical student Beneatha and her academic husband Joseph Asagai return to Nigeria where he grew up in the weeks before independence. It is 1959 and the couple find themselves in a predominantly white gentrified neighbourhood in Lagos where Asagi’s role in the independence movement draws attention. 50 years later Beneatha returns to this home to deal with the aftermath and finds very little has changed.

At the heart of Beneatha’s Place is a discussion about whether race is a subject that can be studied or is an experience that has to be lived to be truly understood, and these two slightly different perspectives shape both the content and presentation of the two Acts of Kwei-Armah’s play. The audience is first presented with a dramatic composition and then an intellectualised encounter among social anthropologists linked together through the character of Beneatha to explore Nigerian-American-British interactions over time as society reorientates Black histories into teaching opportunities for white people.

Directing his own play, Kwei-Armah’s drama could have been written yesterday, the astute dissection of academic debates about race, white privilege and economic advantage seem more prescient than ever in a production that grips with equivalent but quite a different power in its two very different parts. In the first, Kwei-Armah creates an emotional connection, building up the characters and allowing the audience to be shocked by the casual use of racist language and implication – “you people”, “natives” and “your tribe.” And then in Act Two, the debate takes precedence, slowly revealing the ingrained assumptions and prejudices among the white academics desperate to seem the most tolerant or neutral voice in the room: A section that has both drama and pace in this well-managed production.

But there are more interesting gradations in the play about the complexities of Black identities, particularly in Act One where the performances from Cherrelle Skeete as Beneatha and Zackary Momoh as Asagai lay the foundation for those later interactions. As an African American woman married to a Nigerian man, there are fault lines in the union about their engagement with their white neighbours. Momoh is ferocious in these exchanges as Asagai accuses his wife of wanting to assimilate and being too trusting while Skeete presents a far more reasonable although no less savvy character who knows her own mind.

That certainly comes through into Act Two where Skeete is outstanding as the leader of the group, a commanding but calm presence, troubled by the ghosts of the past but nonetheless determined to make the change. Sebastian Armesto is excellent in the dual role of kindly neighbour charming the young Beneatha and the keen academic who has talked himself into a post-race world without taking anyone else with him. There’s good support from Tom Godwin and Nia Gwynne as patronising ex-pats and quarrelsome academics unable to separate their own personal experience from the subject of study.

Debbie Duru’s simple marbled interior creates a blank canvas onto which the actors can project the story and the play’s core issues, while Asagai’s collection of derogatory dolls and memorabilia is a meaningful backdrop to this play about the distortions that affect experience, presentation and understanding. The second scenario is a little contrived and perhaps the ending too neat, but with a running time of just two hours, Kwei-Armah’s play packs plenty of punch a decade on.

Runs until 5 August 2023