Not long ago, members of Parliament were discussing reports that a rich white man had said Diane Abbott made him "want to hate all black women" and that she "should be shot". Diane, the first black female member of Parliament and former shadow home secretary, stood 46 times during the discussion to indicate she wanted to speak on the issue but was ignored.
Inevitably, that will discourage other black women from standing for Parliament and in turn reduces the chances of Britain ever having a black Prime Minister.
Zakiyyah Deen’s playful, often funny satire takes us to the black woman student Shanice’s experience of other reasons why that possibility is unlikely.
Most scenes open with a sentence beginning with the word “because” projected onto the theatre's back wall. And yet, early on, her encounter with the institutional party politics in London seems to pay off. Not only is she recruited for the campaign of the Yellow Party’s candidate John Gainsborough as an intern, but she also gets to shape how they run that campaign.
However, Shanice’s first encounter with Gainsborough must have been irritating. Assuming she is a toilet attendant, he lets her know the toilet paper is running out. Then he is off before she can correct him, leaving her with the likely suspicion he is basing his judgement on the colour of her skin.
That idea must cross her mind more than once during this seventy-minute performance in which she juggles first-year university with all the other stuff in her life, though chats with her boyfriend are reduced to long-distance phone calls as he takes a year out from the UK.
Sitting in the stalls at Kings College London, watching the suited Gainsborough ramble uselessly, she can’t help making a contribution. It leads to someone unconnected to the Gainsborough campaign suggesting she apply for an internship with the MP. At the interview, she tells him that as “a black working-class woman from a working-class family”, he needs her for the “diversity quota” and is added to the team.
Gainsborough, played by Ryan Whittle, exudes the vacuous entitlement of a Boris Johnson with the empty pledges of Keir Starmer. Having a practice run of a campaign speech, he promises “every vote for the Yellow Party is a vote for the Pragmatic Party.” Shanice, played by Zakiyyah Deen, mentions he missed out on actual policies such as health and social care.
Getting into the swing of the election campaign, he makes a point of posing with her for pictures in settings useful for publicity and at one point takes Shanice with him to a food bank, saying from her “background it is familiar territory.”
She gives him good ideas about how to organise a grassroots campaign and conjures up a practice debate session in which she plays the host of the show and the other candidates, allowing a satirical swipe at the “Nigel White Party” whose leader finishes his speech with a gesture that could be interpreted as a fascist salute.
Not surprisingly, she has difficulty juggling the tasks of being an intern with the academic demands. When she begins to think she may be pregnant, she has a “check-in” with the university which warns her that this is “academic work, not a poetry slam” and reminds her that she can defer one year but will still have to pay for the year even if she has commitments preventing her from further study.
The words “because she is too radical” are projected onto the back of the stage later in the play. She is shocked to read that the rates of maternal mortality of women from black ethnic backgrounds are four times greater than those of white women and rails against the extra money for weapons production but not for welfare.
As she heads off to a protest demonstration outside St. Thomas’s, we can guess the direction of her political journey, and it's not in the footsteps of John Gainsborough.
Zakiyyah Deen’s play sheds a thoughtful and entertaining light on just a few of the obstacles a black woman has to face navigating the institutional racism of British political life.