I thought the heart of this piece of theatre was interesting, well-staged and well- acted by the leads, Alfred Enoch and Sinead Cusack. However, the beginning and end left me pretty cold. The story is of Kaelo, now a graduate, the son of a South African father whose white mother left for England when pregnant. She has died and he is returning to South Africa to scatter her ashes. He stays on his maternal grandmother's farm and gradually learns the truth about his father's death while also making contact with his half-sister - a girl by a previous relationship his father had who has grown up to be engaged in property and something of a radical who sees Mandela as too compromising.
Without going into all the subtleties of the story, I found it engaging throughout and done in a way that kept me piecing the bits together to get at the truth. The staging was cleverly done - for example in the telling of the back story, Kaelo is suspended above the stage watching the action of his own past. He and Sinead Cusack (grandmother) acted convincingly, although some thought her accent was off-note. The same was true of the other actors and the scenes of conflict were particularly effective.
The hesitation for me was with the embedding of the play in a rather right-on evening with the audience dancing away before the start and at the end. This frivolity seemed entirely at odds with the serious content of the play itself - and not explained away by the closing words of the sister that partying is the way we do things in South Africa. This incongruity leaked into the beginning and end of the play itself. The opening scene was of Kaelo being woken for his plane by his flat mate who strutted around posing his gym-fit body. It struck a ridiculous opening note for me. Then, at the end, the scene between Kaelo and his sister reconciling by the tree seemed rather rushed and trite - a poor ending for an interesting ninety minutes.
Most of the audience were in the pit and engaged to some extent in the action. I was glad I was not there as their engagement seemed to me more likely to distract them than give them a greater understanding and insight into the themes that were being tackled. All in all, an interesting evening but not without flaws. The play is also somewhat dogged by claims of plagiarism gainst those credited in the blurb with its creation (Idris Elba and Kwame Kwei-Armah) and I was left with the mixed evaluation of some critics - though for my own reasons.
