''People don't want books, they want a party and to look good," moans Brother Kiyi, the proprietor of the Fix Up bookshop, north London, in Kwame Kwei-Armah's new play. Kiyi has created a shop with a comprehensive stock of black literature and history. He has little prospect of selling his volumes, but he would like at least to lend them, if only young black people could be as interested in their heritage as they are in straightening their hair.
The shop is clearly not a commercial proposition. It provides work for Carl, a reformed drug addict who also gets help there with his stammer and learning to read; and upstairs lives Kwesi, a political radical secretively plotting to change the world. So Kiyi argues with good reason that Fix Up is a sanctuary as well as a place of learning. But it seems, above all, a hermitage for Kiyi himself. The former convict has waist-length Rastafarian locks that sit oddly on him. He keeps the world at bay, sheltering behind his book stacks from reality and his personal history.
Kiyi's sadness at seeing black youth disdain its antecedents and pursue white fashions turns to despair as his landlord plans to revoke his lease in order to turn the bookshop into a black hair salon. For a while, Kiyi feels an unusual rush of hope. A good-looking mixed-race woman becomes a regular visitor to the shop. Alice, who was brought up by foster parents in Devon, seems an unlikely candidate to feel the tug of her black ancestry. However, her black father and white mother abandoned her as a baby, and that makes her yearn to understand her origins. She finds deeply moving testimonies in the 24-volume Voices of the Past, which consists of interviews conducted by social anthropologists with surviving slaves in 1899. In particular, she is gripped by the stories of the "half-caste" women, the products of liaisons between masters and slaves who were none the less torn away from their mothers to be sold to new owners. She contrasts the pain of those separations with the apparent callousness of her own parents in dumping her.
Alice's arrival in the bookshop creates havoc. The sex-obsessed Carl falls in love with her. When she rejects him, the only explanation he can think of is that she thinks him not good enough because he is so much darker than she. Alice is more interested in the well-educated Kwesi, even though he proves to be a male chauvinist. Kiyi seems wistfully attracted to the girl when she reveals her penchant for older men - a natural reaction, perhaps, to her painful longing for her missing father. Kiyi's interest in Alice upsets his long-established platonic friendship with Norma, a woman who talks fast and tough, but not quite enough to disguise that she loves the reclusive bookseller.
All the characters are well drawn. Claire Benedict as Norma has the best one-liners, though the audience has to work hard to catch them. In middle age, she has achieved dignity. Yet this is compromised by a ridiculous wig made from straight black Chinese hair, and by the fact that she must always see Kiyi in his shop, with no hope that he will ever wish to visit her at home. Mo Sesay gives a credible account of Carl, a good boy who wants to break with his miserable past but cannot escape from being patronised by everyone he knows. Nina Sosanya convincingly portrays an Alice who appears articulate and self-confident, but who constantly displays the scars of her early life, which make her vulnerable and angry.
The play's designer, Bunny Christie, has created a wonderful set of bookshelves that soar the height of the stage, with a beautifully constructed chaos of volumes, papers and swags of material. Fix Up indeed seems a most alluring haven. The play's director, Angus Jackson, keeps the dialogue moving crisply. The flirtatious banter between the militant, racist and sexist Kwesi and the mixed-race Alice is particularly good. Each finds one half of the other attractive.
There was much to enjoy in the script and the acting, but I found the whole unsatisfying. The play's dramatic effect relies on the stark contrast between its first and second acts. Establishing the bookshop as a paradise of calm is achieved during an almost soporific first half, followed by a second of high melodrama. Unfortunately, both seemed overdone. By curtain down, everyone feels betrayed, everyone gets hurt, and they all have a good screech. Paradise, needless to say, is lost.
The play deals interestingly with racism among black people based on skin tone (shade-ism). It lampoons black people's preoccupation with tampering with their curly hair, which is used as an image for a broader discontent with being black: "Though I don't want to be white, I'd like to have hair like that."
We might agree with Kwei-Armah that the young have a deplorable tendency to show a frivolous disregard for their cultural history. We may lament their neglect of education. But sadly, the play has little new to say about those familiar themes.
Booking on 020 7452 3000 until 23 March
