James Haddrell speaks on new musical Mandela opening at the Young Vic

For years depictions of imprisonment, particularly wrongful imprisonment, have provided the backdrop for some of the most enduring tales across literature, film and theatre.

Whatever the precise nature of the imprisonment, the apparently timeless appeal of stories like Stephen King’s US prison drama The Shawshank Redemption, Ken Kesey’s asylum-based One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and John Sturges’ POW drama The Great Escape proves that there is something about the plight of a righteous person being victimized by the system that is guaranteed to draw us in.

However, sometimes real-life outdoes fiction.

Consider the story of an idealistic young lawyer who leads a campaign to sabotage the right-wing Government of his nation, finds himself sentenced to life imprisonment for conspiracy, is finally released 27 years later, and four years after that becomes president of the very nation that locked him up.

Most producers would surely consider the story too fanciful – wrongful imprisonment, fine, but becoming president?! And yet that is what Nelson Mandela did, and that is the basis for the new musical Mandela, opening at the Young Vic at the end of this month.

For the show, which is now in rehearsal, American actor Michael Luwoye is set to portray his second major historical figure, having previously played Alexander Hamilton in the Broadway mega-hit musical, while Danielle Fiamanya takes on a very different iconic figure in Nelson’s wife Winnie Mandela, having recently understudied Elsa in the West End production of Frozen.

It is no surprise then, given the calibre of the leads, that this is a musical – a sung-through work with book by Laiona Michelle Music and lyrics by the South African brothers Greg Dean Borowsky and Shaun Borowsky.

Promising the rhythms of South Africa, the production picks up Nelson’s story in 1960, two years before he is arrested (on just one of many occasions, but this time with a life-changing outcome).

This was the year of the Sharpeville massacre, when 249 unarmed South Africans were killed or injured by police while taking part in a protest against the country’s pass laws (which demanded that all black adult South Africans carry a dompas, or a kind of passport, with them at all times).

For one member of the international creative team for the show, which includes people from America, the UK and South Africa, the story is particularly pertinent.

Talking to The Guardian earlier this month, choreographer Gregory Maqoma spoke of growing up at the time of apartheid, with soldiers in the classroom at school to monitor curriculum teaching and scenes of civil war outside.

“If it wasn’t for people like Nelson Mandela, there was a huge chance our country would have gone up in flames.”

Picture: Michael Luwoye as Mandela / Picture: Emilio Madrid