Although running beyond the boundaries of the festival dates, this new commission by the Royal Exchange is one of the main theatrical offerings of this year's Manchester International Festival (you can hear my chat with writer Ntombizodwa Nyoni and director Monique Touko at the MIF launch on the BTG podcast).
This story is a perfect fit for a Manchester festival as it recalls a real event in the city—in fact in Chorlton-on-Medlock, where my grandparents grew up—soon after the end of World War II in October 1945, but I'm sure I'm not the only Mancunian who knew nothing about it, though I've certainly heard of some of the high-profile delegates who attended and spoke at it. But then even at the time, it was hardly mentioned in the British press.
Nyoni's play begins with organiser George Padmore (Eamonn Walker) reading out his letter proposing the Fifth Pan-African Congress, before some of the delegates arrive and are introduced on a narrow screen over the variable heights of wooden blocks of the stage floor in Paul Wills's set design. In one of the early addresses on day 1, one of the delegates says that they hoped, with the election of Attlee's post-war Labour government, that "socialism would provide the answer to Churchill's imperialism", but that attempts to discuss this with politicians were "met with silence".
The play initially looks like it will be excerpts from speeches interspersed with some 'backstage' banter between the delegates, but it soon becomes much more than that, as the focus is more on the changing relationships between the people involved, with the issues discussed at the conference integral to this.
George is mentor to Kwame Nkrumah (Eric Kofi Abrefa), who is fiercely ambitious and wants George to give him more credit and more responsibility, plus he also thinks that other delegates see him as a bit of a joke. Kwame's friend and secretary Betty (Bex Smith) clearly wants their friendship to become something more, but he is too serious about his political ambitions to get involved. Jamaican delegate Alma La Badie (Leonie Elliott) launches a tirade at Betty questioning her motives for wanting to be with Kwame and whether she is strong enough to suffer the abuse she would get as the white wife of a black man and the mother of mixed-race children.
Alma is in awe initially of Amy Ashwood-Garvey (Pamela Nomvete), secretary to the congress and second wife to Marcus Garvey, but receives both her praise and her drunken abuse to find her role model is disappointingly human. In fact this is another running theme, as Kwame finds the human failings in George and George sees flaws in his hero W E B Du Bois, who arrives late to the conference from the US. George's partner and secretary Dorothy Pizer (Nicola Stephenson) is hurt that George has confessed his worries to Kwame and not to her.
Although medical student Makumalo Hlubi (Rudolphe Mdlongwa) claims he is only there for the women and the free food, all the delegates we see—a small fraction of the around 90 that were there—are serious about their mission. Len Johnson (Tachia Newall) was already famous as a boxer but was there on behalf of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Law student Joe Appiah (Joshua Roberts-Mensah) later became an MP in Ghana. Jomo Kenyatta (Tonderai Munyevu) is seen here serving the drinks at The Cosmopolitan, where they all relax at the end of each day, but he was key in the transformation of Kenya from a British colony to an independent country and became its first President.
Enthusiastic young Kwame later realised his ambitions as Prime Minister of the Gold Coast and then, after its independence from Britain, the first Prime Minister and then President of Ghana.
This was a significant event in Manchester's rich political history, a story previously untold in theatrical form to my knowledge. This play puts that event and the important issues it discussed on stage very effectively, even entertainingly, mostly through what happened between the speeches rather than by preaching to the audience, while making people who either were or were soon to be major players on the world political stage feel real and very human.