Why A Black Woman Will Never Be Prime Minister takes us through 9 months (or 3 trimesters) of a young woman’s quest to break the cycles she comes from. She is child of a single mother who works incessantly to make a better life for her daughter; her daughter who has taken that gift and translated it into acceptance to university and an internship with a candidate for prime minister, alongside a steady relationship. The text intersperses spoken word poetry with direct address monologue and two-handed scenes (with her boss at the internship). The production moves fluidly through these elements, propelling the story forward as we learn that external barriers aren’t the only forces at work against this young woman; indeed she learns she became pregnant just before uni began, so that the trimester cycle of uni and the political campaign dovetail with her own pregnancy.
The two performers do a capable job bringing the characters and world to life, and the director sets a fun stylistic tone upfront; however as the seriousness of the challenges she is facing shift, the tone of the production doesn’t quite shift to the same degree, causing those more serious and touching moments to not work as well as they could. The script was strong in parts but did have some rather expository elements which could be done without.