Tree review – Idris Elba and Kwame Kwei-Armah dance with identity

Family and politics collide as a British man sets out to unearth his South African roots – and get the audience off their seats

This show has the aura of a big event. It helps kickstart the Manchester international festival, is co-created by Idris Elba and Kwame Kwei-Armah, and begins and ends with the audience dancing together as if at a disco. The production has also made the news pages because of a claim by Sarah Henley and Tori Allen-Martin that they conceived the project and were then removed from it.

Leaving that issue to one side, what’s it like as a show? I enjoyed the experience as much as, if not more than, the play itself. There is a buzz that comes from a standing audience crowding round a vast peninsula stage to follow a story told through dialogue, music and dance. The action involves a first visit to South Africa by Kaelo, a young British man of mixed race, in search of his roots. Mourning the death of his white mother, he stays with his fierce Afrikaner gran while seeking the truth about the black father he never knew. In the process he confronts the violence of South Africa’s past and the divisions of its present.

What’s surprising is that much of this seems news to Kaelo: he is presented as a bright, intelligent guy yet he appears taken aback by things that are common knowledge. The plays jointly created by John Kani, Winston Ntshona and Athol Fugard have also given us sharper insights into the manifold contradictions of South African life. The one revelation here comes when Kaelo’s militant half-sister takes him to a political rally, where people brandish ferocious anti-Mandela banners and bitterly ask what has happened to the promises of the 1994 election where the forgiveness for whites was meant to be accompanied by the acquisition of land.

Even if the play mostly traverses familiar territory, it is ebulliently staged by Kwei-Armah. A dance ensemble embodies the ancestral ghosts of the visiting hero, the music of Michael “Mikey J” Asante pulsates with vigour and the audience is literally roped in to help put up the symbolic tree under which Kaelo’s dad is buried.

The show also boasts good performances from a strong cast including Alfred Enoch as the inquisitive Kaelo, Sinéad Cusack as his entrenched grandmother, Joan Iyiola as his angry half-sister and Lucy Briggs-Owen as his migrant mother. With the aid of Jon Bausor’s design and Duncan McLean’s projections giving us vistas of the veld, the show offers a kaleidoscopic spectacle that makes up for its occasional deficiencies as drama.

Contributor

Michael Billington

The GuardianTramp

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