Manchester has long been the locus of world-shattering political meetings, from Marx and Engels writing the Communist Manifesto in Chetham’s Library in 1845 to Chaim Weizmann, later first President of Israel, meeting UK Prime Minister Arthur Balfour in the Queen’s Hotel in 1906 and convincing him of Zionism.

Another of these pivotal events took place 80 years ago, in October 1945, when the Fifth Pan-African Congress was held in a hall just off Oxford Road. Politicians, trade unionists and activists from all over Africa and the diaspora met to discuss the most pressing question of their time, the decolonisation of the African continent and its people.

Liberation, the new play at the Royal Exchange, commissioned by the Exchange and the Manchester International Festival and written by Ntombizodwa Nyoni, is set at the conference, but is not so much concerned with the business in the hall as the interactions backstage of some of the most important delegates. Directed by Monique Touko, it makes for an interesting and revelatory production.

Chief among the delegates is conference organiser George Padmore, a Trinidadian ex-communist living in London, and his partner and helpmeet, a white woman, Dorothy Pizer. Padmore is played with great weight and experience by Eamonn Walker, so that his private uncertainties expressed to Pizer, a staunch and determined Nicola Stephenson, are surprising and rather moving.

Padmore’s assistant is Kwame Nkrumah, a name from my childhood. A young lawyer with political ambitions in his home country (the Gold Coast, later Ghana), Eric Kofi Abrefa gives Nkrumah an abrasive charm. He is determined to let Padmore help him draft the manifesto that congress is expected to endorse, and he persists and persists. But it was not clear to me whether the argument is about control of the content or Nkrumah just wanting his name on the cover.

Another name from my childhood, Jomo Kenyatta, an extremely funny Tonderai Munyevu, spends much of the play behind the bar, doling out the gins. I got little sense that he will be one of the people behind the extremely violent 1950s Mau Mau uprising that led eventually to the liberation of Kenya.

The South African delegate Makumalo Hlubi, an exuberant and delightful Rudolphe Mdlongwa, is too young to have been brought down by failure, and rips into the other delegates in the nicest possible way, while Tachia Newell as Len Johnson, a Manchester boxer and son of a black father and white mother, brings local issues and particularly racial integration into the frame.

But the evening is stolen by the women, and largely in the second act. Pamela Nomvete as Amy Ashwood-Garvey, a famous Jamaican activist, and Leonie Elliott as Alma la Baddie, a Liverpool social worker, have the best lines and are fine actors. Perhaps we empathise with them because they talk about the role of women in a male-dominated movement? It’s a modern question, as is racial integration.

Stephenson also gets her chance to run with the ball in act two, as does Bex Smith as Betty Dorman, the conference secretary, very much at the bottom of the pecking order but doing her best to reconcile contrary instructions and emotions.

This all sounds a bit dry, but it’s a lot of fun. The production is interlaced with music composed by Ife Ogunjobi, and dancing directed by Kloe Dean, and it is incredibly funny too. The director has made Liberation celebratory, without stinting on how difficult the struggle can be. I would have liked a little more of the politics taking place in the hall, but I left with plenty to think about. And, as someone who remembers the 50s and 60s and knows what happened to Nkrumah and Kenyatta, I wonder whether it might be helpful for younger members of the audience to have a ‘what became of’ rundown at the end.

Nevertheless, this is an entertaining and informative evening out. You have until July 26 to see it.

By Chris Wallis, Theatre Editor

Main image: Eamonn Walker (George Padmore). Credit: Isha Shah Photography.

 

Liberation is at the Royal Exchange in Manchester until July 26, 2025. For more information, click here.