Statement of Regret

After the banal cliches of The Giant at Hampstead on Tuesday, what a refreshing change!  Statement of Regret is Kwame Kwei-Armah's third play at the National, and it's a zinger that holds the attention all the way through.  It's a much better play than Elmina's Kitchen, the first part of his trilogy about the black experience in the UK.  I didn't see Fix Up, the second.  I can't say I have focused as hard as I should have done this year on the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade (though I now look with a different eye at glorious Georgian country houses built with fortunes from the West Indies). I can't imagine a more creative and skilful treatment of the legacy of slavery than this one.   Kwei-Armah places the action in the dodgy world of a fictitious think-tank, the Institute for Black Policy Research, headed by Kwaku Mackenzie, a middle-aged man who is cracking up.  The IBPR, angling for government favour and press attention, is a microcosm of the strains and pressures affecting the black community, so it's a brilliant premise.  Mackenzie's mental disintegration is the result of a mixture of dementia, guilt over the death of his neglected father and alcoholism, but the play suggests the roots of his collapse also lie in the complex inheritance of slavery for those of West Indian origin.  Mackenzie opens up a rift between West Indians and Africans by seeking reparations only for the former, but the tensions in the office are also personal.  When he returns, rum bottle in hand, from an extended break in the Caribbean, his wife marches out because he's screwing his pretty researcher.  He brings in his illegitimate son Adrian, a brilliant Oxford graduate, as an intern, and upsets his legitimate son who is the insitute's press and events officer.  There's homophobia, racism, sexism, guilt, humour and betrayal, all delivered by an excellent cast led by Don Warrington (yes, the man from Rising Damp) as Mackenzie senior.  Kwei-Armah's achievement is to deliver a serious play of ideas that never lapses into wordiness. The ideas flow naturally because the characters and the action flow naturally. The only element that misfired for me was the character of Val, the office 'religious adviser', a richly comic creation but one whose dramatic relevance to the story seemed very limited. I don't know what black theatregoers will make of this play, though at the preview I saw I caught gasps of recognition from the audience when the author's razor-sharp dialogue hit a particularly painful nerve.  Kwei-Armah writes with forensic skill but never with cold detachment about a subject that is raw, painful and very personal.  He makes us care about his characters, however flawed.    At the end of the play one gets the feeling that as the IBPR implodes, Mackenzie and the West Indians, heirs to the legacy of slavery, are doomed while the Africans will walk away unscathed. This particular white liberal thought it was a great evening's theatre, well directed by Jeremy Herrin, whose work I haven't seen before.   I do hope that like Elmina's Kitchen, it gets a transfer to the West End.