‘Assata taught me” was the legend that started to appear on T-shirts worn by campaigners during the Black Lives Matter protests in the United States. Assata Shakur is an African-American activist, prominent during the 1970s in both the Black Panther movement and the Black Liberation Army, who was convicted of killing a state trooper – a charge she has denied. After escaping prison in 1979, Shakur found political asylum in Cuba where she has been living ever since. In 2013, the FBI put her on the most-wanted terrorist list. There is a $2m bounty on her head.
In Kalungi Ssebandeke’s two-hander, the final play in the Resist! season programmed by the Gate’s departing artistic director Christopher Haydon, the title has a double meaning. It refers both to Shakur’s status as an icon of black American resistance to racism and the power structures that keep racism in place, but also to a young black Cuban man, Fanuco (Kenneth Omole) who becomes Assata’s personal pupil when she rescues him from being beaten up by some Havana bullies.
Ssebandeke’s scenario is wholly imagined as it pits the disillusioned Fanuco, who dreams of a new life in America and having pots of money, against Assata (Adjoa Andoh), whose English lessons become history lessons too. He doesn’t think that he has any connection with Africa; she soon puts him right. “That boy is a revolutionary, he just doesn’t know it. But he will,” she muses. There is quite a lot of musing in the play, which is awkwardly structured around a series of weekly encounters between the unlikely pair. This leads to lots of short scenes interspersed with Assata talking to a photo of her grandmother.
Nonetheless it’s sparky stuff, and funny too as the swaggering, slyly charming Fanuco wheedles his way into the affections of the reserved and focused Assata. Both are touched by loss and that gives the evening an emotional dimension, but the real heart of the play is the way it sets up Fanuco’s naive belief in the bounteousness of the US against Assata’s knowledge of the realities of being poor and black, and asks questions about what it really means to be brave.
There are several different kinds of enslavement and betrayal under scrutiny here and, although the play finally tips over into melodrama, it never fails to grip, and it pulsates with anger. “They must love the colour of our blood more than they love the colour of our skin,” says Assata, detailing a litany of black lives lost. She offers one terrifying lesson to Fanuco to try to make him comprehend why knowing your past is crucial to living your future.
As so often at the Gate, the design is a little miracle: Frankie Bradshaw conjures old Havana with a tiled floor, beaten copper walls and a crumbling ceiling. The performances are galvanising, too, with newcomer Omole delicious as Fanuco, and Andoh investing real grace and power in a woman who refuses to accept defeat.
- At the Gate, London, until 27 May. Box office: 020-7229 0706.
