Full of fascinating data and excellent comedy: Messiah at Stratford Circus reviewed

I’ve joined the Black Panthers. At least I think I have. I took part in an induction ceremony at the start of Messiah at Stratford Circus. ‘Stand up,’ said the actor Shaq B. Grant to the predominantly white crowd. ‘Raise your right fist and repeat after me: “I am a revolutionary.”’ Everyone obeyed and chanted his mantra, some with more sincerity than others. Then the show began.

The subject is a notorious police raid on a Panther hideout in Chicago in 1969 which resulted in the death of Fred Hampton, a 21-year-old activist nicknamed ‘the Black Messiah’. The police alleged that the Panthers opened fire first. The Panthers claimed that Hampton sustained survivable wounds during the raid and was later executed by unnamed police officers. These controversies are examined in the play, which was ‘devised by Bear Trap Theatre’ using a script co-written by Jesse Briton and Paula B. Stanic.

It seems that many hands — perhaps too many — were involved in creating a show that encompasses several incompatible genres. It opens as a reconstruction of the police raid undertaken by a TV news show. It then morphs into a documentary about the lives of Hampton and his pregnant girlfriend before the shoot-out occurred. But this duality means that the set has to double as the real house and as the reconstruction in the studio. The chronology jumps between deeds that took place before the raid, during the raid, and afterwards on TV. In addition we watch fragments of historical exposition, a comic sketch about idiotic white people and a bizarre passage of dialogue (whose location is uncertain) in which Martin Luther King’s spirit interrogates a Chicago cop.

Towards the end, the play becomes a spy thriller about a mole within the Panther movement who passed data to the police without which the raid could not have occurred.