Lava at the Bush Theatre asks ‘is Britain racist?’ – and offers a red-hot answer

Switch on the radio or TV, especially in the last week, and it’s the topic on everyone’s lips: is Britain a racist country? Go to the theatre and the chances are you’ll be left pondering the same. The National reopened last autumn with Death of England: Delroy, about a young black man encountering overt prejudice. The Lyric Hammersmith recently offered Out West, taking in bigotry towards Gandhi in London and a white teacher’s reckoning with his racist working-class father.

Now the Bush presents a debut by Benedict Lombe, “a Kinshasa-born Congolese-British writer, based in London”. Lava levels some discomfiting accusations about white ignorance of and complacency around Europe’s colonial history – and it ends up calling for a spirit of black resistance to prevail.

Inspired (apparently) by the volcanic Mount Nyiragongo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the 80-minute solo piece takes the form of a testimony that stirs into molten accusation. Bolstered by an irreverent introductory dance, the initial phases are deceptively convivial and, thanks to the radiant charisma of actress Ronk? Adékolu?jo, a joy to watch. Her unnamed character talks us through a bureaucratic tangle with roots in familial displacement. The need for this dual citizen to renew her British passport flags up a stumbling block: there’s no first name on her South African one.

Roaming a set that suggests a ruined palatial structure, with fake lava seeping around its steps, Adékolu?jo takes us back in time, first shape-shifting into the stooped figure of the character’s mama, to give a potted history of the Congo, blood-stained and Belgium-ravaged. Mobutu, president of the newly styled Zaire – a country that has had “more name changes than P Diddy”, she quips – prohibited the baptism of children with European names, and this accounts for the blank where a vital marker of identity should be.

Detouring via the Biblical justifications for slavery, she sketches an outsider’s upbringing in post-apartheid South Africa, Ireland, Wigan and London, forever the object of alienating curiosity. We hear recordings of ignorant and defensive remarks by white interlocutors. As the production (directed by Anthony Simpson-Pike) declares its author’s frustrations more openly, the language starts bubbling with activist ire: “Black people. My people.”

The theatrical sector has a twin task at the moment. It must respond to the issues of the day, yet it also needs to rebuild after the pandemic, encouraging audiences back after tough times. My concern about Lava is that while it airs a valuable life-story that bears the bruises of history, and attests to Lombe’s way with words, it fosters an “us and them” spirit just as we’re all coming out of scarring isolation.

Inasmuch as I could feel the shame I was meant to, I felt it – and empathy with the prevailing sense of dislocation, too. But I also felt a pang of anxiety. In Lombe’s affirmation of racial solidarity, through shared struggle and victimhood, it looks as though parts of the theatre world are stepping, wittingly or otherwise, towards segregationism. I can’t applaud that.

Until Aug 7, then streaming online Aug 16–21. Tickets: 020 8743 5050; bushtheatre.co.uk