Following the US Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action in universities, Kwame Kwei-Armah’s highly-charged play about race and the ownership of history could scarcely feel more timely. Or be more of a challenging workout for its audience’s presumptions and prejudices, whatever their skin colour.
It begins in 1959 with young black Chicagoan Beneatha (the brilliant Cherrelle Skeete) moving with her Nigerian activist husband Joseph Asagai to a white enclave in Lagos in anticipation of the country’s independence. Then it jumps forward to the same room today where Beneatha, now a dean of African American studies at an Ivy League college, is told by her mostly white colleagues that race is “over”.
