“I’m so ready, so anxious”, says a young Assata Shakur as she joins the Black Panther Party in the 1970s US. The notorious black liberation activist and currently the FBI's ‘Most Wanted’ woman, living in Cuba, adds: “I’ve got all these ideas, all this anger, like a fire in my gut – and I gotta use it for good, or else I'm gonna explode”.
A new one-woman play, Woke, tracks Shakur’s ascent, political education and ultimate criminalisation; interspersed is the fictional story of the wide-eyed Ambrosia, who enrols in university in 2014 as the Ferguson riots kick-off in Missouri, following the killing by police of an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown.
I spoke with the writer and performer of Woke, Apphia Campbell, ahead of the play’s opening at the Battersea Arts Centre in London this week, before it travels to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe this summer. She kindly gave me a dress rehearsal tape to watch – and what I saw was a force of nature.
