One Night in Miami

It's a warm evening in Miami, the date is the 25^th February 1964 and a cheeky, charismatic and stunningly beautiful 22 year old Cassius Clay has just won the boxing heavyweight championship of the world. Instead of celebrating with a wild night on the town, the already reflective Clay, just before he will emerge to the world as the iconic Muhammad Ali, chooses to spend a quiet evening in a Miami motel room talking with his three closest friends, the football icon Jim Brown, soul star Sam Cooke and the African American radical political leader Malcolm X. The play “One Night in Miami”, making its London debut, imagines what actually transpired on that memorable night, a night which will transform the lives of these four men forever.

Kemp Powers' powerful play shows all four men at a pivotal moment in their lives, where their impact on history is as yet unknown even to themselves as they try to find their place within mainstream society, a society still bitterly divided by race, where a black man refusing to conform to second class status is greeted with suspicion at best but more often violence. The young Cassius Clay, played here beautifully by Sope Dirisu, emanates a gentle almost naïve charm, in many ways he's presented here as the most unformed. He is torn between his youthful desire to simply enjoy his new found fame and the wish to seek something far higher as he sees in his mentor and friend Malcolm X. He also finds himself the centre of a tug of war between Malcolm X's desire for a more politically inclusive Islam and the much narrower, and controlling interpretation of the faith practised by the radical African American organization The Nation of Islam, an organization Malcom X was once a part of but from which he is now exiled.

Cassius Clay in many ways in this play is the youthful prodigy of all three men, older figures whom he clearly admires whilst not yet knowing whose influence will have the most lasting impact on his life. All three gently lecture the young boxer on how to exist as a famous African American in a society where there is little respect for their achievements. Jim Brown, played here powerfully by David Ajala, emerges as someone who tries his best to walk the middle path, to do his job on the field as one of the most successful football players of all time whilst trying not to cause too many ripples. Sam Cooke on the other hand seems, at least on the surface, is happy to be cast as a romantic apolitical soul singer despite the fact that this is now the dawn of the civil rights movement where music was in the midst of a radical change. Ironically it was a time when the music of the more politically engaged white singers chimed far more closely with the radical social changes taking place.

Presiding over all this is the thoughtful, powerful presence of Malcom X, who in turn cajoles and chastises all three men for not turning their attention more fully to the outside world, to the plight of all African Americans. He challenges them to use their new found fame for something much bigger than themselves. One of the most powerful moments in the play comes when the character of Sam Cooke is encouraged by the figure of Malcolm X to sing songs with a greater political resonance. He points out that the song with the most powerful impact at the time was Bob Dylan's Blowin’ in the Wind; he laments the fact that it was a white rather than a black a singer who wrote it, since for him it encapsulates how perhaps every African American was feeling at that moment. It's only later that the character of Sam Cooke reveals that he has indeed been doing just that and begins shyly to sing the first few bars of what would go on to be what most music critics now agree is one of the greatest contemporary songs ever written, his classic “A Change is Going to Come” a song which would after his untimely death go on to become an anthem of the civil rights movement.

All the performances in this extraordinary play are standouts. The British/American cast are extraordinary and the accents of the British actors flawlessly blend with those of their American counterparts, a testament to the excellent work of dialect coach Charmian Hoare. But the one performance which dominates the evening is that of Francois Battiste as Malcolm X. He gives the character a sad almost knowing sense that his life would soon be cut short. He therefore pushes the others to live lives for the benefit of all, rather than disappearing into a life of personal indulgence.