REVIEW: Through the Mud, Apphia Campbell, Traverse Theatre 2025 ★★★★

Apphia Campbell’s diligent and uncompromising account of the life of Black Panther revolutionary and fugitive Assata Shakur intertwines with a prescient examination of justice for People of Colour in the United States in the modern age in Through the Mud. With skill and craft, performances from Campbell as Shakur and Tinashe Warikandwa as U.S College Student Ambrosia Rollins unpack what makes an activist act, and how an act can define an activist.

In dual narratives that wrap around and often into one another, Ambrosia leaves behind a comfortable life in Pittsburgh to study in St. Louis in the aftermath of the murder of Michael Brown in neighbouring Ferguson, Missouri. As the wide-eyed idealistic teenager arrives at college, a class in African American Literature soon begins, and as she learns of Shakur’s ideology in her academic life, her personal life concurrently becomes inseparably changed by her involvement in protest and memorial surrounding Brown’s death.

Caitlin Skinner’s tight and unrelenting direction skews time on a knife edge throughout – accounts from Shakur and Rollins jab into one another without repent. Their words often flow into each other, utilising vignettes from both their lives that feel eerily similar, and show reflectively how little has actively changed for Black People in America since both of their plights began. The actors fill in for the defining characters in one another’s lives – most pertinently in Campbell’s performance as Rollins’ classmate Tre, within which Rollins finds motivation in rebellion, rather than what appears to be an instinctual timidity forged by Middle Class comfort.

Music performed by the duo and written by Campbell lends layers both cultural and narrative – with folk tunes blurring into chants that defined the protests so prominently featured on TV screens around the world at the time. As singing intersects the piece, the segues are often natural enough to carry the story forward, although at times jar against the gut-punch nature of the dramatic sensibilities of the rest of the presentation. Campbell’s original songs are pertinent and powerful, and mesh naturally with the lyrics borrowed from both the gospel, protest, and blues vocabulary.

Concise and sharp production design leaves both performers with a treasure trove of props and set that never for a moment feels too cumbersome. As we flit between classroom, courtroom, protest site and refuge both performers feel at ease drifting the set and props into their right places. Large-scale projection behind the pair highlights potent moments in the story, and every element of the piece’s design slots together with ease.

As it comes clear that both women are trapped in a system damned to indict them, we are asked to examine not just the systems of prejudice that permit that injustice, but also how individual actors act within that system to suppress, repress, and violently act against Black civilians in America. While the piece does not take a particular angle on the veracity of Shakur’s criminal conviction, it asks us to consider the broader lens of repeated, insufferable discrimination and injustice that defines the American legal system. It brings echoes and clarity to the phrase No Justice, No Peace that you will struggle not to be moved by.

At points, we’re offered a little more tell-than-show here – it’s a mighty effort to fit these two stories into a space as limited as sixty five minutes, and the all-encompassing nature of the plot demands we carry forward on a rampant pace throughout. While exposition-heavy, there is an evident and striking effort to convey both the comparative assaults on liberty across time periods alongside the defining moments of these women’s lives. It is Campbell’s clear and intrepid research that delivers the piece’s momentum, and a blistering final moment of resistance.

Prescient and unwavering – Through the Mud charts the course of a messy path to actualising the beliefs that comprise one’s identity, and exposes the systemic and violent fissures that push people to inevitable praxis.

Recommended Drink: Pair this with a Manhattan – bittersweet and potent.

Performances of Through the Mud have now concluded at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh for 2025.