Fix Up
National Theatre, London

Matt Warman

We are all, indisputably, shaped by our culture. The notion of black, Jewish, disabled or national drama is a sensible one, for sure, but if we are indeed moulded by nurture, does that not imply too that we are made of the same stuff?

The ancient Greeks' classics resonate because they had the same hearts and stomachs that we too must carry with us, and thus greatness is not French, or Russian or even modern, but presumably transcendent and simply human. Kwame Kwei-Armah's Fix Up is good because it seems to acknowledge this, and imperfect because it doesn't seem to know enough else.

Brother Kiyi runs a black culture bookshop that doesn't sell many books and doesn't pay the rent. From philosophy to original narratives of the last slaves, everything that moulded a race is here, and nobody seems really to care. There seems to be far more interest in the prospect of the shop becoming an Afro-Caribbean hairdressers. Either way, the contents of Kiyi's books play little part in the play; his love of history looks insular and self-indulgent. He clings to his shop as though it were all that he had.

When Alice, a young, mixed-race teacher visits (ostensibly only because it's race awareness month), he's curt, barely polite, painfully possessive. He seems almost to embody everything that prevents the fruitful coalition of cultures, even with a person he might almost regard as his own. Militant activist Steve Toussaint, also, we later discover, behind the takeover of Kiyi's shop, openly considers her inferior because of her 'impure' parentage, and parentage turns out to be at the heart of the piece.

It transpires that Kiyi's bookshop and his history have become not so much a source of knowledge and enlightenment as a painful retreat, a pathetic excuse for a real life. And although it's to read Kwei-Armah's piece slightly against the grain, perhaps the closure of his shop is also a kind of justice. This is not a man who has made history matter, or who has apparently ever done much to make it accessible. His whole world is an insular one, and in Bunny Christie's quasi-realistic set, the books that tower to the sky are still very visible after the bookshop on the ground has closed; history, she seems to say, is inescapable, despite the best or worst efforts of Kiyi.

What's perhaps most intriguing in Fix Up is Kiyi's humanity, believably realised by Jeffery Kissoon. He's taken in an ex-crackhead (an excellent Mo Sesay) and is teaching him to read, and he plays the role of a hen-pecked husband with his draughts partner Claire Benedict. Retreating out of the way, Kiyi has started playing the father he pretends not to be.

The predictable denouement is still a painful and shocking affair as characters become forcibly acquainted with each other, the modern world, capitalism and culpability. It's not pretty, but it is obviously relevant to all of us. Knowing our roots and our families, and being alive to our friends, Kwei-Armah tells us, is far more worthwhile than academicist ephemera that merely happens to be about our own people.

In that sense, the play takes the debate about our current confessional culture to the logical next level: 'Here's my story,' it might say, 'and it will make your own more powerfully real.' What's problematic is that so many ideas bubble on the surface but are not explored completely - blackness for instance. But that's small criticism; there's a lot going on here from a writer with a grippingly told plot, much to say and no obvious axes to grind. It feels like it matters and lives in the mind. Little more could be required.

Till 11 January 2005