Fix Up (review)

Nicholas Hytner's commitment to attracting a diverse audience to the Royal National Theatre has succeeded, in part, because of his well-publicized £10 ticket offer. He has made the London theatre experience as affordable as a cinema ticket in Leicester Square. In addition, and perhaps not as remarked upon, has been his commitment to ethnic diversity. The greatest testament to his program's success could be found in the stalls just before Fix Up began: two African American female members of my college student group noted with satisfaction that finally the audience reflected their own ethnic make-up and interests. This audience diversification has occurred, in part, through the production of three works written by young Black British playwrights. Roy Williams's Sing Yer Heart Out For the Lads initially premiered during the Transformations season in 2002 and returned in the summer of 2004 to run concurrently with the Euro Cup Football Competition. Kwame Kwei-Armah's Elmina's Kitchen ran in the summer of 2003 and played for a limited time on the West End in the Summer of 2005. Finally, Kwei-Armah's Fix Up played during the winter of 2005. With Fix Up's appearance in the Cottesloe, the National has now featured plays by Black British authors for four straight years.

"Fix Up" refers to the name of Brother Kiyi's bookshop, which is in imminent danger of being closed by the lease owner to make room for a beauty parlor. While Brother Kiyi's shop has been a neighborhood staple for years, both he and the shop have been under-appreciated and under-utilized by the surrounding community. Brother Kiyi offers knowledge about black literature, culture, and politics, which the community does not seem to access. During the play's action, the bookshop only has one customer, Alice, who has actively come seeking knowledge about her ethnic and familial past. Another regular presence above the bookshop, Kwesi, is a politically-minded black activist whose actions awaken the suspicions of the other characters and the audience, but not Brother Kiyi's, until it is too late. Two other visitors consistently call on Kiyi: Carl, a community care case who Kiyi befriends and teaches to read; and Norma, the neighborhood's leader and voice of reason, who plays checkers with Kiyi and provides financial assistance too late to save the shop.

While the play mainly mourns the fate of these unappreciated representatives of black culture and history, it also addresses a number of other concerns facing black culture in Britain, including the foregrounding of African American suffering and history over that of British Blacks; the lack of acceptance in the black community of dual heritage identities; the hypocrisy of a black political movement not invested in the economic struggle of the black individual but instead in the capitalistic values of the surrounding white English society; and the absence of an intellectual black voice amidst a black society more interested in current pop culture crazes rather than its unacknowledged past. All are powerful topics rarely discussed on the British stage, especially in a venue with the prestige of the Royal National Theatre. Unfortunately, none of these provocative issues fully comes to fruition in the Cottesloe production.

The fault does not lie with the solid direction of Angus Jackson and the actors' performances, especially Jeffrey Kissoon as Brother Kiyi, who subtly captures the sympathetic bookshop owner, and in one of the play's most powerful moments, conveys the survival mentality and heartbreak of Kiyi 724as he cuts off his hair when all around him is lost. Equally, the stunning set by Bunny Christie conveys the cramped nature of Kiyi's bookshop. Books fill the set...