Black Power Desk – Brixton House Theatre

(L-R) Rochelle Rose, Veronica Carabai and Chanté Faucher in Black Power Desk at Brixton House Theatre, London. Picture: Helen Murray

Black Power Desk continues at Brixton House Theatre, London until 28 September 2025

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

In 1967, home secretary Roy Jenkins established the Black Power Desk, a classified operation to monitor and infiltrate Black activism. Robin Bunce and Paul Field uncovered its existence while researching their biography of activist Darcus Howe, co-founder of the British Black Panthers. What they uncovered was eventually incorporated into a 2017 TV miniseries Guerrilla, a fictional drama inspired by the experiences of Howe and other activists.

Writer Urielle Klein-Mekongo has taken the name of that covert operation for her own fictional interpretation of true events. Black Power Desk is primarily set within a Harlesden restaurant, The Drum – shades of Notting Hill’s Mangrove – which also acts as a music venue and a forum for community activism. Veronica Carabai’s Dina is trying to organise and lead the local community. She faces resistance partly due to her youth, but mainly due to her womanhood – especially from Fahad Shaft’s openly misogynistic Colin. Even her fiancé, Jarvis (Alexander Bellinfantie), who is trying to be supportive, talks over her and for her at any and every opportunity.

Dina’s central relationship, though, is with her sister, Rochelle Rose’s Celia. Working as a waitress and singer at The Drum, Celia is not as politically active as her sister, but the pair’s main rift is rooted in their shared grief at the loss of their mother a year previously.

The sisters’ relationship forms the emotional core of the musical. Indeed, many of the songs, with music by Renell Shaw and lyrics by Klein-Mekongo and Gerel Falconer (who also plays The Drum’s owner Carlton, as well as overseeing the show’s ‘rapperturgy’), focus on the sisters’ emotions, both with each other and between Celia and her new boyfriend, Jack (Tomos Eames). Those numbers – especially when performed by Rose, whose phenomenal voice elevates everything – are more effective than the political story.

There is a lot of exposition required to set the scene, and the way Klein-Mekongo front-loads it in Act I makes her book feel incredibly lumpen, especially with some pedestrian direction by Gbolahan Obisesan during such scenes. Such groundwork may be necessary to establish the scenarios that drive the rest of the musical, and it’s possible that mixing musical numbers and politics upfront might help the production feel more cohesive.

Such combinations do emerge as the show progresses, although the book remains less sophisticated and intelligent than the music. The police presence – Alan Drake’s sexist, racist Officer Pullen and Casey Bird’s Officer Marks, subject to Pullen’s misogyny but outdoing him in the white nationalism stakes – is unsubtle to the point of cartoon villainy, generally (and disappointingly) reducing their despicable actions to the point of pantomime. One exception is one of their raids of The Drum, in which Pullen performs an intimate search of Carlton’s wife, Maya, which is performed with harrowing emotion by Chanté Faucher.

As the play progresses into Act II, the songs and raps become more political, especially after a protest turns violent. Klein-Mekongo’s script is clear that the violence is instigated at the behest of the police, so that Pullen can justify his arrests. This plot point has roots in truth, as does the prospect of the police having paid informers working undercover, but some of what the book presents as big twists feel more like hackneyed tropes.

More effective is Carabai’s key moment as Dina attempts to represent herself in her Old Bailey trial. It is one of many moments where the audience is expressly addressed – here as jury, elsewhere as participants at an activists’ meeting or as the audience to The Drum’s house band. It’s perhaps one of the musical’s best attempts to get over the impact of police harassment and racism on the Black community.

But the heart of the piece remains the sisters’ relationship. Rose, who has been impressive throughout, is rewarded with a torch song near the end as her character – heavily pregnant, newly single, potentially homeless and still estranged from her sister – contemplates the course of her life. It cements Rose’s ability as a singer that one hopes will one day see her cast in a show whose writing is better able to match her talent.

Black Power Desk is not that musical, alas. But its final message – to the Black characters, as well as Brixton House’s audience – makes its mark. Whatever the corruption and provocation of the ruling classes, “this England is as much yours as it is anyone else’s”. Events of recent weeks, with England flags weaponised against those who are not white, make that message all the more important to hear.

Scott Matthewman