Fela!

This ecstatic, rambling tribute to the life, Black Power politics and music of Afrobeat icon Fela Kuti revolutionises the jukebox musical. There’s nothing nostalgic or easy about cult choreographer Bill T Jones’s show, which started life as an avant-garde dance piece before it conquered New York’s Great White Way.

Now it’s in London, it may attract a younger, blacker audience to the National. But whatever your origins, it reminds you that music can be a matter of life and death as well as a leisure-choice.

Despite gobsmacking choreography, Jones’s three-hour show does feel too long for its format of a re-created concert – even one that’s set in Fela Kuti’s legendary Lagos club-cum-stronghold, The Shrine. Lengthy riffs from an assertive band, blood-thumping polyrhythmic dancing from Fela’s nine ‘Queens’ and consciousness-raising anecdotes from their polygamous husband (the uncannily talented Sahr Ngaujah) offer urgent, pulsing build-up.

The crowd hollers and gamely participates in a booty-shaking masterclass. But at times it seems that ‘Fela!’, like Kuti’s wildly dilated music, is all build-up and no climax.The plot is flaky: often lost, and more often wilfully abandoned, it tells Kuti’s amazing story through confusing flashbacks and stirring confrontations between him and his activist mother, Funmilayo, who died after the Nigerian army raided his compound.

Ultimately, ‘Fela!’ is about engagement, not entertainment. When Kuti finally meets his dead mother, in a swooningly fluorescent Yoruban ritual, it makes his struggle into your trippy epiphany. When ‘Fela!’ succeeds, it makes the crowd into a collective: by testing its boundaries through dance; by daubing Victoria Climbié and Stephen Lawrence’s names on coffins next to Funmilayo’s; by having the charismatic Ngaujah ask, knowingly, ‘Who here has been to prison?’

 At its hottest, ‘Fela!’ makes you feel the pulse of ecstatic protest: especially through the vivid, muscular power of Fela’s barefoot dancing Queens: styled like beaded goddesses or punk mermaids, they dance up a storm. Their messy, fervent tribute showcases the audacity of Fela Kuti’s protest songs through the greater audacity of their context: a revellers’ insurrection against corrupt rulers, whose brutality could not break up the party.