Fela Kuti's legacy is not merely confined to his genius in creating a new style of music, Afrobeat, that blended funk with jazz, Ghanaian/Nigerian High-life, and traditional West African chants and rhythms. His provocative lyrics, which criticized the corrupt military regime in his homeland, Nigeria, triggered a cat and mouse game - leading to numerous beatings, imprisonment, and the death of his mother.

Kuti travelled to London to study at the Trinity College of Music and was fired up by America's civil rights movement when he met Sandra Isadore who introduced him to the work of Malcolm X and other black activists.

Returning to Nigeria, he developed Afrobeat and his unique political maverick approach to shaming the government –underscoring his attempt to run as a presidential candidate in the nation's first shot at democracy.

His fascinating story unfolds in the transformation of the Olivier theatre into The Shrine, Kuti's club in Lagos where attendees could arrive at 11pm and wait until 3am for him to appear. It is gawdy and exuberant with the area boys bringing audience members on stage to dance to the hypnotic beat of the African drum.

The Shrine is a multi-media sensation combining bright pictures, newspaper clippings, and moving images of Nigeria during this period. Combined with a soundtrack of Kuti's most popular songs which advance the narrative, it is a decadent and sumptuous taster of Naija, the slang pidgin English for Nigeria, in all of her contradictory glory.

There is audience interaction when Kuti, played by Sierra Leonean, Sahr Ngaujah, teaches us how to shake nyash (pidgin English for bums). With his signature warm up of “everybody say yeah, yeah!” he is charming and gregarious - unfortunately his Naija accent doesn't hit the mark and neither does that of his mother, Melanie Marshall - the "first woman in Africa to drive a car".

Those are minor quibbles. However, there are some great witty moments such as Kuti likening colonialists to guests who are fine to tolerate at first, but then outstay their welcome when ashtrays and towels disappear.

The Queens, his dancers and wives, epitomize the magic ability of black hair to be single plaited, cornrowed, mohawked and chinabumped into creative hairstyles. There is an eclectic African spin on groovy costumes of belts snaking around their legs combined with rah rah skirts and bra tops that show off lithe bodies moulded to the addictive tempo of Afrobeat. The infectious and athletic choreography of Bill T-Jones, will, no doubt lead to a surge of Nigerian dance classes.

Nigeria's experiences with Shell oil company and Ken Saro-Wiwa are well documented but there are some assumptions that the audience is familiar with the stories behind the IMF and WTO colluding with the military when in the final scene, his family bring out coffins with their names on it.

It would have been great to see some of these explained more fully. Sadly over thirty years later from Kuti's last performance in The Shrine, there are still contemporary references to black diasporic communities and their fights to secure justice in corrupt systems through the names of Stephen Lawrence and Victoria Climbe embossed on the coffins .

Kuti's criticism of the Nigerian military was probably most poignant through Zombie, a parody where he mocked the army's inability to think for themselves, which became a rallying call through the homes, schools, and markets of Nigeria.

In 1977 this led to a storming of his commune, the Kalakuta Republic, by one thousand armed soldiers, and his mother's throwing from a window which ultimately resulted in her death. Kuti had declared the commune independent from the Nigerian government in 1970. On stage it is a silent, chilling depiction of the attacks that happened. Later Marshall delivers some fantastic operatic singing style in the psychedelic scene where Kuti visits her in the underworld to seek her permission to leave Nigeria.

Focusing on Fela's recollection of his mother and Isadore in shaping his political activist beliefs, the production lacks a sense of urgency or danger about the Nigerian military outside of The Shrine. Mapping out relationships with his band members or music management would have enhanced the complexity of Fela's portrayal. He is almost presented as a sanitized humanitarian who had a regular pot habit that was endearing and comedic, but this impacted upon his relationships. His friends and colleagues say he had extreme mood shifts and was temperamental. How could he advocate political freedom on the one hand and yet marry 27 wives and have numerous concubines? Where also are the tensions between them on stage? And the consequences of this lifestyle are erased by no reference to his death from Aids.

With Kuti's controversial life it is difficult to reduce this to a two and a half hour theatrical experience that would do all of the strands justice, but some of these broader questions are either superficially touched upon or not addressed at all.

As a British Nigerian, it is also painful for me to see there is still so much resonance in Kuti's criticisms of Nigeria today – despite her “embrace” of democracy - poverty, mismanagement, and corruption still blight the country. Nevertheless, in Naija pidgin English to the management behind this rollercoaster and energetic production: dese people don try, o! (i.e. they have done well).

FELA! can be seen at the National Theatre, Southbank, London SE1 and will be broadcast live to cinemas around the world on 13 January 2011.

by Uchenna Izundu