Black British Women's Theatre: Intersectionality, Archives, Aesthetics [1st ed. 2020] 3030514587, 9783030514587

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Figures
Introduction: Intersectionality, Archives, Aesthetics
‘Black Woman’
Intersectionality
Archives
Aesthetics
References
Theatre of Black Women
History, Activities, Archives
Come to Mama, Moving Through, and Tiger Teeth Clenched Not to Bite (1982)
Silhouette (1983)
Pyeyucca (1984)
References
Munirah Theatre Company
History, Activities, Archives
On the Inside (1986)
thinkofariver (1987)
Our Bodies Are Our Maps (1990)
References
Black Mime Theatre: The Women’s Troop
History, Activities, Archives
Mothers (1990)
Drowning (1991)
References
Zindika
History, Activities, Archives
Paper and Stone (Written 1989; Produced 1990)
The Day Mother Took Us to the Seaside (1996)
References
SuAndi
History, Activities, Archives
The Story of M (1994)
References
Conclusion: In the Spirit of Sankofa
Looking Back
Archival Interventions: The Unpublished Plays of debbie tucker green
Future Possibilities
References
Index

Citation preview

Black British Women’s Theatre Intersectionality, Archives, Aesthetics Nicola Abram

Black British Women’s Theatre

Nicola Abram

Black British Women’s Theatre Intersectionality, Archives, Aesthetics

Nicola Abram University of Reading Reading, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-51458-7    ISBN 978-3-030-51459-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51459-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration by Ingrid Pollard, depicting Theatre of Black Women’s play ‘Silhouette’ (1983), featuring Bernardine Evaristo and Patricia Hilaire This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

I begin with thanks to the various editors and editorial assistants I’ve had contact with at Palgrave Macmillan over the years, for seeing this book through from proposal to print: your clear guidance and good-natured communications smoothed the process and expertly ensured its completion. And thanks to the reviewers, especially for encouraging the focus on archival materials: you truly helped to make this book this book. All errors that remain are of course my own; I am and will ever be learning. There would be no book at all without the playwrights and practitioners who welcomed me into their homes and workplaces, gave time and energy to telephone calls, Skype conversations and e-mail exchanges, and excavated memories and ephemera: SuAndi OBE, Bernardine Evaristo MBE, Maureen ‘Talibah’ Hawkins, Patricia St. Hilaire, Marjorie James, Zindika Kamauesi, Michelle Matherson, June Reid, A-dZiko Simba, Hazel Williams, and Denise Wong. Your pioneering activities gave vigour to British culture and society, and your generous permission to reproduce archival materials gives colour and life to the pages that follow. Thanks to the performers Cindy Afflick, Paulina Deutsch (nee Graham), and Cassi Moghan (nee Pool) for kindly allowing the use of photographs in which they feature, and to the photographers and designers of the images reproduced within: Karl Bartley, Sonia Boyce, John Clube, Desmond Ip, Heather Marks, Ingrid Pollard, Simon Richardson, Steve Speller, and the late Similola Coker (represented by her sister Daphne Towry-Coker). Thanks, too, to Fiona Young of the Tudor Trust for her help in establishing communications with the Coker family. Special thanks to Ingrid Pollard for the cover image. v

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The material record of black British theatre is spread across a number of archives and institutions, and I’m grateful to their various staff for cheerfully (and repeatedly) retrieving innumerable items for consultation and helpfully answering my queries: the British Library, the Live Art Development Agency, Making Histories Visible (University of Central Lancashire), Special Collections at Middlesex University, Special Collections at Goldsmiths, University of London, the Theatre Collection at the University of Bristol, the Theatre and Performance Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Unfinished Histories. Thanks to Diane Morgan and nitroBEAT for permission to reproduce material from the Black Theatre Co-operative archive; Joan-Ann Maynard, Alexander du Toit, and Mark Edmondson at Goldsmiths; Finn Love at LADA; and Jack Glover Gunn at VAM for arranging the reproduction processes. I’m especially awed by the initiative and hard work of Susan Croft (Unfinished Histories, VAM), Len Garrison (Black Cultural Archives), Lubaina Himid MBE (Making Histories Visible), Kwame Kwei-Armah (Black Plays Archive), and Alda Terracciano (Future Histories—Black Performance and Carnival Archive), who personally ensured that this material was preserved and is publicly accessible. This book affirms your vision. I’m grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding the early stages of this project, and to the Department of English Literature at the University of Reading for funding copyright payments. Many colleagues have cheered my research on. Special thanks to David Brauner, Bryan Cheyette, Nicole King, Steven Matthews, Michelle O’Callaghan, Peter Stoneley, and Nicola Wilson for your intellectual insights and kind encouragement, and particular thanks to Mark Nixon and Peter Robinson for first sparking my interest in archives. The careful advice of Indy Biddulph and Chris Jones has been most welcome. I am indebted to Alison Donnell for her guidance, good humour, and generosity, and thankful, too, to Susheila Nasta and Graham Saunders for your vital roles in refining this work. As part of the Executive Committee of the Postcolonial Studies Association, I benefitted from several years of collegiality and shared endeavour, and for the opportunity to present my work in progress I am grateful to the organisers of many conferences and seminar series. It has been a particular pleasure to meet those who arrived at this subject before me and who have made space for others to follow: Mary Brewer, Lynette Goddard, Deirdre Osborne, Michael Pearce, and Ekua Ekumah-Asamoah. It is a thrill to pass the invitation on to the students at

 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

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Reading, whose responses to this work are always illuminating and who have further shaped my thinking and ways of articulating ideas. Finally, I want to fix in ink my appreciation of friends and family for their unwavering support during this project and always. Martin, Sandra, Richard, and Dick, thank you for reminding me that there’s a world beyond my work; your generosity and belief have truly sustained me. In this moment of celebration, I fondly remember those we love who are sadly no longer with us: Marion, Joyce, and Ted. Nadya Ali, Helen Bailey, Corinne Heaven, Ben Whitham, and David Yuratich have walked various parts of this intellectual journey with me, while Lorraine Briffitt, Rebecca Henry, Abigail MacLeod, and Olivia Thompson have brought both lessons and refuge. For many happy distractions—and for not asking about the book too often—I’m grateful to Hannah Adjei, Sonia Betts, Felicity Cross, Jael Damarsin, Jess Del Rio, Nikkie Foster, Sean and Liz Green, Mireille Haviland, Molly Hodson, Victoria Ingram, Vicky Parting, Amanda Schmid-Scott, Emma Scott, Lee and Nett Smith, Michael, Fiona, Matilda and Arthur Shapland, and Gem and Chris West. This has been a long project, and it’s a joy to have found a second family along the way: Phil and Gill, Emily and Chris, Becky, Jay, Lara and Sophie. And finally, Ben Blackledge: your kindness, strength, playfulness and insight are astonishing. For knowing me and loving me, and being you, thank you. In its own way, this book joins the struggle for justice: Black Lives Matter.

Contents

Introduction: Intersectionality, Archives, Aesthetics  1 Theatre of Black Women 23 Munirah Theatre Company 85 Black Mime Theatre: The Women’s Troop123 Zindika161 SuAndi201 Conclusion: In the Spirit of Sankofa229 Index249

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List of Figures

Introduction: Intersectionality, Archives, Aesthetics Fig. 1 ‘Vacant’: Advertisement in Black Arts magazine, issue 142, December 1991/January 1992, p. 41. Magazine clipping

2

Theatre of Black Women Fig. 1 Theatre of Black Women, Silhouette (1983). Evaristo personal collection, London. Scene breakdown Fig. 2 Similola Coker, ‘Theatre of Black Women, Silhouette’ (1983). Evaristo personal collection, London. Production photograph. (Left to right: Patricia Hilaire, Bernardine Evaristo) Fig. 3 Theatre of Black Women, Pyeyucca (1984). Evaristo personal collection, London. Programme designed by Ingrid Pollard; printed at Lenthall Road Workshop Fig. 4 Ingrid Pollard, ‘Theatre of Black Women, Pyeyucca’ (1984). Evaristo personal collection, London. Production photograph. (Left-right: Patricia Hilaire, Bernardine Evaristo)

34 35 58 64

Munirah Theatre Company Fig. 1 Munirah, On the Inside (1986). Simba personal collection, St. Thomas, Jamaica. Programme. Designed by Anum Iyapo Fig. 2 Munirah, thinkofariver (1987). Simba personal collection, St. Thomas, Jamaica. Programme. Artwork by Sonia Boyce Fig. 3 Maureen ‘Talibah’ Hawkins, ‘… and this is now!’ (c. 1987). Hawkins personal collection, London. Typescript with handwritten annotations

90 93 108 xi

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List of Figures

Fig. 4 Munirah, Our Bodies Are Our Maps (1990). Simba personal collection, St. Thomas, Jamaica. Programme. Designed by John Clube112 Fig. 5 Jheni Arboine, ‘Munirah’ (c.1990). Simba personal collection, St. Thomas, Jamaica. Promotional photograph. (Left to right: Hazel Williams, A-dZiko Simba, Maureen ‘Talibah’ Hawkins, Michelle Matherson) 116 Black Mime Theatre: The Women’s Troop Fig. 1 Black Mime Theatre Women’s Troop, Mothers (1990). Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Core Collections: Playbills and Programmes. Flyer. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London Fig. 2 Desmond Ip, ‘Black Mime Theatre Women’s Troop’ (1990). Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Black Mime Theatre, Photographs of Mothers, THM/26/5/5. Publicity photograph. (Left to right: Sky Hunt, Cindy Afflick, Paulina Graham) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London Fig. 3 Black Mime Theatre Women’s Troop, Drowning (1991). Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Core Collections: Playbills and Programmes. Flyer. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London Fig. 4 Simon Richardson, ‘Black Mime Theatre Women’s Troop, Drowning’ (1991). Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Black Mime Theatre, Photographs of Drowning, THM/26/5/7. Production photograph. (Left to right: Tracey Anderson, Cassi Pool) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London Fig. 5 Steve Speller, ‘Black Mime Theatre Women’s Troop’ (1991). Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Black Mime Theatre, Photographs of Drowning, THM/26/5/7. Publicity photograph. (Left to right: Tracey Anderson, Cassi Pool) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London Fig. 6 Steve Speller, ‘Black Mime Theatre Women’s Troop’ (1991). Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Black Mime Theatre, Photographs of Drowning, THM/26/5/7. Publicity photograph. (Left to right: Arosemaya Diedrick, Cassi Pool) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

128

130 132

144

145

146

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Zindika Fig. 1 Black Theatre Co-operative, Paper and Stone (1990). Goldsmiths University of London. Future Histories—Black Performance and Carnival Archive, Records of Nitro Theatre Company, NTC/ P/T/1/21/2. Flyer Fig. 2 Karl Bartley, ‘Black Theatre Co-operative, Paper and Stone’ (1990). Goldsmiths University of London. Future Histories— Black Performance and Carnival Archive, Records of Nitro Theatre Company, NTC/P/T/1/21/4. Publicity photograph. (Left to right: Catherine Coffey, Susan Lycett, Marcia Rose) Fig. 3 Black Theatre Co-operative, Paper and Stone (1990). Goldsmiths University of London. Future Histories—Black Performance and Carnival Archive, Records of Nitro Theatre Company, NTC/ P/T/1/21/5/001. Still from VHS production recording

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SuAndi Fig. 1 Black Arts Alliance, Revelations of Black (1987). Making Histories Visible—Black Archive and Collection, Preston. Flyer Fig. 2 SuAndi, The Story of M (1994). Live Art Development Agency, London. V0238. Still from VHS production recording Fig. 3 Heather Marks, ‘SuAndi, The Story of M’ (2017). Still from digital production recording

204 215 216

Conclusion: In the Spirit of Sankofa Fig. 1 Sankofa bird © Reynolds/Fotolia

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Introduction: Intersectionality, Archives, Aesthetics

‘Black Woman’ This clipping (Fig. 1) promoting an unnamed artist serves as a suggestive starting point for a book on black British women’s theatre. It captures something of the fragile materiality of such histories: the advertisement was posted in the now defunct listings magazine Black Arts,1 issues of which have fortunately been preserved as part of the visionary ‘Unfinished Histories’ project recording the history of alternative theatre in 1960s–1980s’ Britain, directed by archivist and activist Susan Croft.2 The stories contained in such ephemera are at real risk of being forgotten unless active care is taken over preservation, access, and interpretation. In order to correct this cultural amnesia and secure hitherto hidden aspects of black women’s theatre as a central part of the nation’s creative history, this book foregrounds unpublished materials—manuscripts, production recordings, photographs, stage diagrams, technical plans, funder reports, company records, and correspondence—sourced from archives of various kinds, from artists’ personal papers to national collections. There is a wealth of material there to be explored. Yet, such endeavours must also confront the sombre reality of already unrecoverable loss—just as the identity of the self-promoting ‘black woman’ in this clipping is not known. As well as signalling a need for archival research, the advertisement hints at the aesthetics that characterise black British women’s theatre: this is an itinerant creative practice, in search of appropriate platforms and ways to connect with its audiences, energised by new writing rather than relying © The Author(s) 2020 N. Abram, Black British Women’s Theatre, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51459-4_1

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Fig. 1  ‘Vacant’: Advertisement in Black Arts magazine, issue 142, December 1991/January 1992, p. 41. Magazine clipping

on an established canon, dynamically eliding the formal boundaries between poetry and drama. This book therefore looks beyond the naturalistic tradition, valuing theatre that signifies through symbol, juxtaposition, choreography, and imagery, rather than exposition. Together with its innovative aesthetics, such theatre remains unflinchingly political: mapping the connections between the individual and the collective, contextualising lived experience within a wider cultural milieu. It is at once profoundly personal and of vital public importance. Such theatre, and this book, centre the irreducibly complex subject for whom American legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term ‘intersectionality’ (1989): ‘black woman’.

Intersectionality As the author of this advertisement does not identify herself, no more can be known of her or her craft; she passes unseen in the crowds of history. And yet the terms that title the advertisement do emphatically impose a name on her, in upper case and bold type: her corporeal characteristics become her identity. She appears insofar as she is body. There is a paradox at play here: the black woman is at once overlooked—that is, unseen—and overlooked, or hypervisible. This condition is well documented in black feminist theory, recurring in writings from across the years and on both sides of the Atlantic. Too often in identity-based campaigns for rights, the black woman has been made invisible. She occupies, as Heidi Safia Mirza has observed, the cultural blind spot between ‘a racial discourse, where the subject is male; and a gendered discourse, where the subject is white; [and] a class discourse, where race has no place’ (Mirza 1997, p. 4). White women must take responsibility for the effects of our wilful ‘blindness’ in producing this ‘invisibility’ (Smith 1978, p. 20). Yet, in a patriarchal society stratified by white supremacy, the black woman also is seen—by

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simultaneous modes of oppression. She lives what Sara Ahmed calls the ‘violent collisions […] between the racialized and gendered gazes’ (1997, p. 161); she is, in Moya Bailey’s coinage, uniquely subjected to ‘misogynoir’ (2014). If she is seen at all, she is always already ‘overdetermined’ (Spillers 1987, p. 65), twice objectified. What can theatre offer in response? How can it counter such sedimented oppression? As an embodied art form, drama directly answers to this corporeal fixation. By controlling the presence of bodies onstage, it corrects both the problem of objectification and the problem of invisibility. This makes it an appropriate tool to—to borrow Paul Gilroy’s words— ‘compensat[e] for very specific experiences of unfreedom’ (1993, p. 123). Black British women have long used performance to reveal and resist such ‘unfreedom’. The (black, female) performers make themselves visible to the audience on their own terms: as present in and part of Britain, and as successful, professional actors. They also assert their subjectivity by looking back at the audience, taking up what bell hooks calls an ‘oppositional gaze’ (hooks 1992). The mechanics of objectification are thus reversed, and the audience is brought to account. It is no accident that many of the practitioners featured in this book literalised this by hosting post-show discussions, running public workshops, and explicitly framing their work as educational or consciousness-raising. By combining visual and verbal modes of representation, theatre invites its audiences both to look and to listen, and thereby to recognise ourselves in relation to others. When we do, we are called to new ways of being in the world. This book focuses on five black British theatre companies and playwrights, active from the 1980s through the turn of the millennium, whose practices creatively contest essentialist ideas of gender and ethnicity. Though they were not necessarily known to each other, a common idea emerges in the work of these intersectional artists: a  model of identity through encounter. Theatre and performance are always embodied, of course, but in the works studied here those bodies function not to guarantee a fixed individual identity but as the public site of a subject’s dynamic, interactional, formation. The dramatic arts are uniquely equipped for this since performance depends on the relationship between actor and character: the performer is identified with the character yet is not identical to her; the character is other than the performer, yet cannot exist without her. Theatre wisely teaches us that the subject is not isolated, autonomous, or pre-existent; rather, she is formed through her interactions with others. Black British women playwrights and performers have mobilised this

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feature of performance with particularly vivid effects. By complicating the ways in which actors’ bodies appear onstage—through cast doubling, careful choreography, and audio-visual distortions, amongst other things— they prompt audiences to think again about how black women experience and, in turn, re-create the world. In this book, the term ‘black British’ prioritises those of African and/or African Caribbean descent who have enduring connections with Britain by birth or migration. Yet such delineations are never simple: for example, the Jamaican heritage of Denise Wong, the Artistic Director of Black Mime Theatre, includes a Chinese grandparent, testament to the histories of indenture in the Caribbean. At times (in the chapters on Munirah Theatre Company and SuAndi) the term ‘Black’ is capitalised at the subjects’ request, in line with its contemporaneous usage as a politically inclusive signifier. In the introduction to the 2002 edition of his book There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, originally published in 1987, Paul Gilroy observed that ‘The symbolic and linguistic system in which political blackness made sense was a phenomenon of assertive decolonisation’ (Gilroy 2002, p. xiv). This historic practice of self-identification foregoes specificity to promote solidarity between ethnic groups, registering the shared experience of being racialised as a minority. That said, this book does not explicitly attend to the cultural practices of the Asian diaspora in Britain, which has its own histories and aesthetic traditions and demands its own analysis.3 Similarly, the focus in this book on women playwrights and performers is not to deny that male artists also engage in innovative and important stagings of identity: exemplary among them are Inua Ellams, Ronald Fraser-Munro, and Mem Morrison, among others. But black masculinity has its own contexts and complexities, which cannot be given in shorthand, and this book is a necessarily bounded project that focuses on intersecting regimes of oppression, the nexus at which racism and sexism coincide. Indeed, the earlier chapters in this study find black women forming female-only theatre companies and arts collectives, sometimes in direct response to or resistance against a dominant male norm. Although there are certainly productive connections to be made across identity groups, as other scholars (Goddard 2015; Pearce 2017) have shown, this book is content to study the connections and developments within the work of a more specific cohort. It is something of an irony that although anti-essentialist scholarship applauds and amplifies creative efforts to question identity categories, it is

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resignedly titled by the very terms it seeks to critique. As Judith Butler concedes, ‘we must follow a double path in politics: we must use this language to assert an entitlement to conditions of life […] and we must also subject our very categories to critical scrutiny’ (2004, pp.  37–38). As such, the titular invocation of ‘black British women’ makes it possible to collate common experiences and map recurring creative techniques; it is a tool to facilitate comparison rather than a statement of absolute sameness. Permission for this practice is claimed from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s useful formulation of ‘strategic essentialism’ (1987). The provisional claim to a shared (‘essential’) identity serves a particular (‘strategic’) purpose in this book: to acknowledge the social processes of gendering and racialisation operating in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Britain, as well as the creative practices that critique them. It should not be thought to endorse an essential, ahistorical identity, but instead understood as pointing to the shared experience of being seen as black and female in contemporary Britain. Whether in theme or form, each play featured in this study represents or responds to the experience of being identified from the outside by an objectifying gaze. A more specific shared experience further validates this particular study: the practitioners named here have all navigated their way through (or around) the British theatre industry, with its aesthetic tradition of social realism, its elevation of solo playwrights, its dearth of female decision-­ makers and artistic directors, and its habit of defunding black arts. Grouping black women dramatists together reveals patterns in their interactions with this industry, exposing its mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion and making visible their achievements whilst indicting systemic injustices. It is only with such candid knowledge of the problems of the past that we might craft a more equitable environment for the future.

Archives To date, most critical studies of black British theatre have prioritised published plays. This is vital work, establishing black British theatre as a worthwhile subject for study and enhancing the profile of key figures. The risk is that focusing only on published texts skews perceptions of the field, under-­representing the amount of material available for analysis and over-­ estimating the prevalence of social realism. Some scholars have acknowledged other sources beyond the published text: the holdings of large institutions like the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Library

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feature in surveys (Osborne 2014, p. 161), inform specialised discussion (Goddard 2007, pp. 133–153), and are recognised in endnotes (Griffin 2003, p. 243). This book goes further, recovering all of its source materials from archives of various kinds: public collections, digital repositories, and individuals’ personal holdings. It studies a number of unpublished works for the first time: various early pieces for performance written by Bernardine Evaristo, and her co-authored work with Patricia Hilaire for Theatre of Black Women, Silhouette (1983) and Pyeyucca (1984); poems constituting the three productions by Munirah Theatre Company, On the Inside (1986), thinkofariver (1987), and Our Bodies Are Our Maps (1990); and Zindika’s The Day Mother Took Us to the Seaside (1996). Other works that have been previously discussed in scholarship—Mothers (1990) and Drowning (1991) by Black Mime Theatre Women’s Troop, Zindika’s Paper and Stone (1989), and SuAndi’s The Story of M (1994)—are given fresh attention informed by additional archival sources and new interviews with the practitioners. The chapters that follow assemble a record of each production from the fragments that remain, including draft typescripts, press reviews, photographs, audio and audio-visual recordings, storyboards, and scribbled diagrams. Where this source material is held in private collections and is not currently publicly available—as for Theatre of Black Women and Munirah Theatre Company—it is described in detail, going some way towards compensating readers for that distance. The reproduction of selected items in facsimile gives a fuller sense of encounter. An archival methodology is of clear practical use to a study of black British theatre: it enables access to texts, styles, and stories that have been forgotten. Drawing source material from the archive bypasses some of the interventions performed by theatre directors, arts funders, and publishers, who may propagate or suppress particular kinds of work, thereby skewing the representation of the field onstage or in print. In practice, of course, the material collated in archives—even in personal collections—is similarly subject to processes of selection and curation, in the sense that it is only kept because it has already been deemed valuable. But an archival methodology does enable the recovery of plays that went unpublished or unproduced as a result of their unconventional content or aesthetic innovations. Textual transcription is possible only for work that is primarily verbal; it accommodates only secondary use of visual or aural expressive modes. Happily, recent years have seen an increase in the publication of non-­ naturalistic plays, such as Mojisola Adebayo’s two collections (2011, 2019) and Cush Jumbo’s Josephine and I (2013)—both of whom adopt

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versions of the multi-role-playing technique traced throughout this study. Of the plays featured in this book, SuAndi’s The Story of M is the only one to have been published (2002)—and, indeed, it has been republished twice since (2010, 2017). But even published texts should not be mistaken for definitive. In The Story of M the constitutive significance of choreographed movement, symbolic gesture, and visual technologies is invisible in the script, even where it is illustrated by still images, so the study of performance recordings usefully complements analysis of the published text. Only the videos can capture the sense-making relationships between movement, speech, soundtrack, and visual projections, as well as the nature of audience response. Further, the 2017 edition of SuAndi’s playscript features additional footnotes, glossing reference to specific places and people in anticipation of a new, younger, and perhaps international readership, showing how even a published text is not fixed and final. Similarly, tucker green’s publications candidly state that the text ‘went to press before the end of rehearsals and so may differ slightly from the play as performed’ (tucker green 2005, p. 2, 2008, p. 2), and indeed there are variations between the 2008 and 2010 print runs of random, indicating that the live performance did indeed reshape the script. A diachronic perspective reminds us that all works have their histories, even those seemingly stabilised through publication. An archival recovery project is also conceptually appropriate when studying the work of a population that is culturally silenced. While histories of racial politics routinely recognise black men for ‘their visible acts of riots and rebellion’ (Mirza 1997, p. 8), this book remembers the no less radical interventions made by women in the cultural industries. It works both to make these practitioners visible and to correct their misrepresentation. As such it shares with Heidi Safia Mirza’s pioneering collection Black British Feminism a dual aim to ‘excavate the silences and [the] pathological appearances of a collectivity of women assigned as the “other”’ (1997, pp.  20–21). By looking beyond the material authorised by publication, this study promotes ‘[t]he retrieval of counter memories, of subjugated knowledges’ (Mirza 1997, p. 5), adding another dimension to the written record of British theatre. Crucially, an archival methodology corrects the mistaken view that black theatre is perpetually emerging and lacks a lineage. As playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah lamented: ‘History has taught us as black artists that our work is at best contemporary’ (Osborne 2010, p.  29). Ironically, Kwei-Armah’s statement unknowingly repeats the (unpublished)

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sentiments of director Yvonne Brewster articulated fifteen years earlier: ‘Our work is new every morning. We are newly discovered with each day’ (1995). Some practitioners do show a retrospective awareness of their predecessors’ work, as when SuAndi refers to Theatre of Black Women, Munirah, and Barbara Burford (McMillan and SuAndi 2002, p. 119). But the interviews conducted for this project reveal little direct influence or inheritance, suggesting that connections have rarely been made across generations. Scholarship has sometimes unwittingly contributed to this historical erasure. For example, Aleks Sierz’ insistence on a contemporary ‘in-yer-face’ aesthetic forecloses the historical dimension of black British theatre (Sierz 2001). Instead, this book actively remembers black British theatre history, answering to Deirdre Osborne’s call—issued over a decade ago—for scholarship to ‘trace a trajectory of continuity, inheritance and aesthetic development across recent decades’ (2008, pp. 123–124). The misperception of black British theatre’s novelty not only does a disservice to the past but also bears a material cost in the present: playwrights who are viewed as new and emerging rather than as established and enduring may be overlooked for funding and receive fewer professional productions, as SuAndi has observed (SuAndi 2002, p. xii). By documenting the longevity of the black British theatre tradition, this book hopes to foment more hospitable conditions for its future. Of course, an archival methodology should not be mistaken for providing a pristine or somehow especially authentic version of black British cultural production. Materials must be handled wisely and with attention to their enunciative context. For example, director Paulette Randall cautioned somewhat provocatively in an interview for the Evening Standard that press reviews should not be read uncritically: ‘not so long ago, critics were afraid to be honest about black work. In the late Seventies and early Eighties, any black play done in London got a good review in Time Out […] You could do any old bollocks’ (Caplan 1994, p. 44). It is because of such bias—not despite it—that ephemera are a useful record of their time. Archival research has its own special pleasures—seeing an author’s emendations in their own hand, for example—but the researcher cannot afford to be naïve: the preservation of an item in the archive does not guarantee its factual accuracy. It is not uncommon to find misrepresented dates, titles of works, and even personal names, especially in media produced by organisations or individuals with limited financial resource or administrative support.4 Critical vigilance is necessary.

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In practice, this book’s archival methodology is shaped by the nature and content of the relevant collections. As Michael Pearce laments, ‘archives are incomplete, records are scattered and […] recordings of live productions are rare or difficult to access’ (Pearce 2017, p. 4). Often this is a consequence of the time: black British women’s theatre burgeoned in the 1980s, many years before methods of documentation and dissemination were democratised through digital recording devices and widespread access to the internet. But while archival material is often dispersed, it does exist. The Theatre and Performance Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum (VAM) is the most substantial and active relevant repository.5 It holds the full administrative records for Black Mime Theatre (BMT), which were promptly deposited after the company’s dissolution. This includes touring schedules and data on audience attendance, as well as fascinating audio-visual footage of performances. VAM also holds the archive of the English Stage Company/Royal Court Theatre, which receives deposits on an ongoing basis including publicity materials relating to its productions of debbie tucker green’s plays. VAM is also home to the records of the Arts Council of Great Britain (ACGB), which contain historical and biographical information about the companies it funded, including Theatre of Black Women, Black Mime Theatre, and Black Theatre Co-operative, champions of the playwright Zindika. The Women’s Theatre Collection at the University of Bristol holds miscellaneous relevant ephemera, such as magazines and production programmes, and its Record of Live Art Practice—formerly known as the Live Art Archive— contains publicity materials and some recordings.6 Further relevant ephemera are housed at the University of Central Lancashire as part of Making Histories Visible, an interdisciplinary visual art research project led by Turner Prize-winner Lubaina Himid MBE.7 The British Library also holds typescripts for a number of plays, as a result of venues observing the Theatres Act of 1968, which required that one copy of each new play publicly performed in Britain should be delivered to the Library of the British Museum.8 The accessibility of archived material can be affected by local curatorial practices. Previous VAM policy was to extract publicity posters from their respective company files and move them to the Theatre Collections’ Poster Collection, a series organised by production venue, and likewise to move production recordings to the Video Collection. Whilst this collections management strategy does usefully assert the presence and participation of Black Mime Theatre in an expansive British theatre history, it fragments

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the record of the company’s activities. The practice is no longer current at VAM, though these historic actions have not been undone. Such institutional practices not only affect the ways in which archival materials are accessed but can indirectly impact on their interpretation, as the context of encounter shapes the scholar’s perception of the material. The physical nature of the preserved material also determines how it can be used. For example, newspaper and magazine clippings extracted from their source volumes may lack the metadata necessary for their citation, such as issue number, page number, or date of publication. Audio-visual materials form a vital source for this book, especially when analysing Zindika’s and SuAndi’s work for which full production recordings are available. VHS recordings of Zindika’s plays are held by Future Histories—Black Performance and Carnival Archive, alongside the files of Black Theatre Co-operative (BTC, now nitroBEAT) and the national umbrella organisation Black Theatre Forum, previously named Black Theatre Alliance. The story of the Future Histories archive is instructive, showing how the fate of archival materials is dependent on the holding institution: the project was founded by Alda Terracciano and its archive was  previously held by Special Collections at Middlesex University, but this was put at risk by the closure of the Trent Park campus. Thankfully, the collection was then given a home by Special Collections and Archives at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2012.9 This brings the materials to New Cross in Lewisham, a location of great ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity, and one of historic significance for the black British community after the suspected arson attack on a family home on 18 January 1981, in which thirteen young black people died and many more were injured—and for which two separate inquests have still not delivered a conclusive verdict. Other archival collections are organised by artform and sit outside of academia: for example, recordings of SuAndi’s work are held by the Live Art Development Agency (LADA).10 LADA is a testament to the personal commitment of two individuals, Lois Keidan and Catherine Ugwu. SuAndi met Keidan when the latter was an Arts Officer at ACGB. Encouraged by her support, SuAndi then applied for a commission when Keidan joined Ugwu as respective Director and Deputy Director of Live Arts at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London, in the mid-1990s. When Keidan and Ugwu then co-founded LADA in 1999, the recordings of SuAndi’s ICA shows were guaranteed preservation. Several online initiatives have recently made the history of black British theatre more widely accessible. Perhaps most directly relevant is the online

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Black Plays Archive (BPA), initiated by the National Theatre and Sustained Theatre.11 This valuable project records dates and venue details for productions, provides a selection of interpretative essays and practitioner interviews, and has also produced new audio recordings of selected play extracts. Also important is Unfinished Histories, a project to document alternative British theatre from the 1960s to 1980s, which gathers publicity materials, press reviews, and practitioner interviews. Selected items are digitised and made available on its website—including a rich collection of flyers and photographs for Theatre of Black Women—and its physical holdings can be accessed through the Bishopsgate Institute.12 Given that so much physical material is housed at archives in London, these online initiatives help to open the history of black British theatre to a wider audience, including internationally. Formal collections play a vital role in preservation, and are a gift to the scholar, student, or interested individual. But much material is still to be collected and catalogued. Productions that were mounted in community venues like women’s centres, schools, and libraries did not benefit from the preservation arrangements established by professional theatres. Personal holdings therefore prove invaluable, particularly for the earliest companies examined here: Theatre of Black Women (TBW) and Munirah Theatre Company. This book really became possible in 2011 when founding member of Theatre of Black Women Bernardine Evaristo retrieved from storage various playscripts, publicity materials, and production photographs that she had not viewed herself for more than 20 years. Then, in 2019, co-founder Patricia St. Hilaire recovered several more boxes of forgotten materials. Though not constituting an archive in the institutional sense, these ranging ephemera vividly preserve both TBW’s activities and their 1980s context. Similarly, speculative appeals to members of Munirah resulted in the generous sharing of unpublished texts, production programmes, and promotional photographs. When quoting these texts for analysis, typographical errors have been corrected, such as the mistransposition of letters on typewritten scripts, but no intervention is made to standardise grammar or syntax. The varied textures of the work thus remain, honouring the snapshot of the past that this newly recovered ‘archive’ affords. This book presents facsimile copies of selected archival documents, intended both as a celebration of existing collections and as a caution about the importance of preservation. Analysis of texts is predicated on access, and too much has already been lost. This is sometimes due to

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technological issues, such as the failure of cameras during the production of SuAndi’s In my Father’s House (Fuchs 2006, p. 216). Records can also be missing due to human oversight: it is not always obvious in the moment that one is making history. By foregrounding the fragmented texture of this history, this book seeks to impress on current and future practitioners the importance of planning for their works’ preservation. Of course, the nature of archival practice is changing with the development of technology and the new norm of born-digital media. But despite the apparent wealth of information now at our fingertips, students and scholars of contemporary theatre still cannot presume that the blogs we read and YouTube clips we watch will remain available indefinitely. We must plan for the preservation of works whose very format may soon be obsolete. The fragility and relative inaccessibility of the featured archival materials should caution readers not to read the formal and thematic commonalities identified in this book as a directly inherited lineage. The lack of publication and the limited programming of productions meant that early black British writers often found their literary influences in sources from ­elsewhere—such as African American texts—rather than in each other.13 It took events overseas and talks and readings by authors from across the Atlantic to assemble a black British audience and a sense of creative community, as is particularly evident in the chapter on Theatre of Black Women. So, this book does not promote what John McLeod has similarly dismissed as ‘a neat evolutionary model of Black British writing’ (McLeod 2010, p.  46), where forms and themes are thought to be directly transmitted between generations. Rather, given the dispersed condition of the source material, recurrent ways of representing identity can be read as an unknowing and asynchronous response to the shared experience of being black women in Britain. The subjects and aesthetics that persist across the decades are all the more meaningful for their spontaneity.

Aesthetics A call to focus on form was issued some time ago by black British theatre practitioners. In May 1995 the national umbrella organisation Black Theatre Forum (BTF) called for funders to replace their existing ‘sociological definitions of Black theatre’ with ‘one based on a continuously developing aesthetic’ (Brewster 1995). Appeals to sociology certainly have their uses: knowledge of relevant issues can illuminate a play’s relationship to its societal context and signpost possible avenues of interpretation. An

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excellent example of this scholarly methodology is Lynette Goddard’s monograph Contemporary Black British Playwrights: Margins to Mainstream (2015), which finds interpretive inroads through a range of socio-cultural studies. This approach works well for Goddard’s chosen plays: popular productions mounted on the nation’s main stages and read for their mimetic portrayal of the world. The resulting analysis maps how black British theatre has engaged with pressing subjects like youth violence, masculinity, and domestic and family abuse. Similarly, Michael Pearce has appealed to the sciences and social sciences to inform his readings of black British theatre in its transnational contexts (Pearce 2017, pp. 9–10, 98, 122, 136, 194). His study carefully traces how black British artists and activists were buoyed by the international successes of the American Civil Rights Movement (1950s–1960s) and African and Caribbean colonies’ campaigns for independence (1960s–1970s), and directly influenced through the circulation of their writings, artworks, and ideas. Such scholarship secures the societal significance of black British theatre, amplifying its efforts to hold both the state and the public to account. However, studies that adopt a sociological approach—and funders that value prospective work primarily for its societal engagement—have tended to prioritise naturalistic theatre. Such theatre has undoubtedly facilitated important material progress, placing black performers on the nation’s main stages and inscribing black playwrights as part of British theatre history and tradition. The conventions of realist theatre can also offer powerful critiques of racism and sexism. For example, a naturalistic mode directly contests the cultural assumption that black people are only ever purveyors of entertainment, be it comedy, song, or sport—a view formalised in minstrelsy but also visible in the reported expectations of some audiences and cultural gatekeepers, and indeed in the careers to which black children are popularly expected to aspire. But it would be mistaken to think that social justice is only or even best pursued through realist theatre. As the following chapters will show, more abstract theatre forms do not constitute a withdrawal from the ‘real’ but instead facilitate a productive critical perspective on it. This book therefore foregrounds drama and performance that make use of non-naturalistic aesthetics, denaturalising familiar actions and making the commonplace appear strange onstage. It finds that these formally innovative works are no less committed to the anti-racist and anti-sexist agendas recognised by previous critics in realist theatre.

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This focus identifies much material to be analysed for the first time, as well as some texts to be revisited with specific attention to their aesthetics. The chapters that follow tour through various non-naturalistic dramatic techniques. Some plays imaginatively compress time and space; others use symbolic music, movement, and song; changes of costume and accent sometimes rupture the continuity of a performer; at times, deviant grammar foregrounds the craft of language; in other plays, the arbitrary attribution of speech delinks voice from content; occasionally, intertextual allusion to other works implies an imagined audience; and in a number of cases, audience participation or post-show discussion explicitly engages spectators in the task of making meaning. But the work selected for this study also shares one particular feature: it all deliberately disassociates performer from character. Whereas naturalistic theatre presents the two figures as equivalent, investing in the correspondence of their corporeal markers, the selected plays all invite attention to the distance between body and being. Their tools include cast doubling, cross-casting, and caricature—techniques which all displace the ocular availability of the (black, female) actor and deflect the spectator’s gaze. Disavowing the body as a legible sign, this innovative theatre practice presents identity as a dynamic process, constituted in community, rather than as an essential quality of the individual. This confronts the perception of black British creativity as an identitarian cultural movement, concerned with firming the boundaries between identity categories and marking off distinct communities of people. Instead, the works studied in the following chapters show the ‘other’ and the self to be incarnated simultaneously: they—we—are mutually constituted. * * * Black British Women’s Theatre: Intersectionality, Archives, Aesthetics is far from the first book to discuss this creative coterie. Earlier studies (Croft 1993; Ponnuswami 2000; Starck 2006) have already laboured to demonstrate a critical mass of black British women’s theatre, and demanded its recognition in the national canon. Others have approached the work thematically, examining it for its feminist intent (Griffin 2003, 2006; Goddard 2007). Readers therefore should not expect here another survey of the field. As Susheila Nasta argued at the turn of the millennium, the time has come instead to mine the work in depth: ‘to move beyond what I call “apprenticeship criticism” […] pieces which celebrate the new voices of

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black writers’ and instead ‘to consolidate and excavate more fully’ (Nasta 2000, p. 75). Accordingly, this book conducts forensic analysis of both the text (where available) and recordings of  or plans for the performance (where accessible), bringing the tools of two scholarly disciplines—literary criticism and performance studies—to bear on these rich and varied plays. Equally, as Lynette Goddard has written, there is still a need to locate ‘black women’s work within traditions of black cultural production’ (Goddard 2007, p. 185); a decade later, Michael Pearce reminded us that such work still remains to be done (Pearce 2017, p. 192). This book models such a diachronic criticism. It seeks both to construct a chronology that spans several decades, insisting on the maturity of black women’s theatre, and to dig a little deeper—through a kind of archival archaeology—in order to identify and analyse a sustained practice of politically significant aesthetics. This book is organised into chapters on specific theatre companies and playwrights, chosen for their non-naturalistic techniques as well as the availability of unpublished materials. Each chapter opens by chronicling the company or playwright’s history and activities, and mapping the state and extent of the relevant archives. A broader national and international landscape inevitably emerges in the margins, but it is not necessary to repeat the rich history of the black presence in Britain; others have already articulated this with admirable detail and nuance (Owusu 1986; Procter 2000; McMillan 2006). Each chapter then proceeds to analyse the play(s) using whatever materials the archive preserves, interpreting these primary sources through horizontal reference to other artworks and writings of various kinds. If some of this theatre seems outdated now, it is because it was vitally connected to the moment of its production. As Winsome Pinnock writes, theatre has in mind an immediate audience: ‘[p]lays are intentionally ephemeral in that they are written for their time’ (Pinnock 2014, p. 7). In speaking so directly to its own present, such work performs the valuable task of preserving the past. This book honours that work as both the chronicles of and catalyst for substantial social and political change. The chapter on Theatre of Black Women (TBW) gives a full account of the history and varied cultural interventions of this pioneering company, co-founded in 1982 by Bernardine Evaristo, Patricia Hilaire, and Paulette Randall. It then offers extended analysis of their recently recovered manuscripts, generously shared from the artists’ personal collections. Evaristo’s early monologues and the company’s first full productions, Silhouette (1983) and Pyeyucca (1984), feature fascinating choreographic

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experiments in character. Their techniques are varied: performers mirror one another, or gesturally imply the presence and actions of others’ bodies; dialogue is fluidly re-assigned across characters in successive scripts; and actors’ connections with their characters are distorted. In Silhouette, cast doubling compresses historically and geographically distant lives into a single actor; in Pyeyucca, two performers incarnate the component parts of a single character. These techniques support the productions’ thematic concern with identity as a social phenomenon: all of TBW’s narratives describe the formative effects of relational encounters. The next chapter records the story of Munirah Theatre Company, a choreopoetry troupe active from 1983 to 1990, whose members included Maureen ‘Talibah’ Hawkins, Michelle Matherson, Sherma Springer, A-dZiko Simba, Hazel Williams, and administrator Marjorie James. Analysis is offered of component poems from Munirah’s three main productions: On the Inside (1986), thinkofariver (1987), and Our Bodies Are Our Maps (1990). The chapter draws on manuscripts and ephemera from the company members’ personal collections, as well as promotional materials from performance poetry organisation Apples and Snakes. In the process of telling Munirah’s story, this chapter also gives a glimpse of the vibrant creative networks of twentieth-century Black (sic) arts in Britain more broadly, showing cultural production to be collaborative in practice as well as interpersonal in subject matter. The chapter on Black Mime Theatre Women’s Troop (BMT) delves into the detail of two productions: Mothers (1990) and Drowning (1991). Led by Artistic Director Denise Wong, the company’s characteristic style of stark mime on unadorned stages works to denaturalise everyday actions and interactions. By making unremarkable encounters appear strange, BMT foregrounds the role of the relational in forming and performing subjectivity. Going beyond the cast-doubling used by Theatre of Black Women, Black Mime Theatre’s energetic multiple-role playing reconfigures the performers’ (black, female) bodies into a host of characters of varying age, gender, and ethnicity. This technique boldly delinks cast from character, again interrogating the semiotic legibility of the body. The next chapter turns to Zindika, and with it tells part of the story of her sponsoring company Black Theatre Co-operative. A biographical account of the playwright is followed by analysis of her unpublished play Paper and Stone (written in 1989, produced in 1990) and the unpublished and unproduced The Day Mother Took Us to the Seaside (1996). ­(Re)constructing their performance aesthetics from stage directions and—in the

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case of Paper and Stone—a performance recording shows how the cast gesturally implied others’ absent bodies, including lovers, mothers, and fathers. In Paper and Stone, Zindika stages a structural interaction between the specific and the universal by interweaving naturalistic and non-­ naturalistic scenes. In The Day, the unexplained departure of the mother offers an opportunity to explore the horizontal relationships between sisters, as well as to incarnate absent fathers. These negotiations between co-constituting subjects collapse the absolute divide between self and other. The chapter on SuAndi gives a comprehensive and at times corrective account of her professional development and affiliations—including The People’s Writing Group, latterly Identity; its offshoot BlackScribe; the writing development organisation Commonword and its subgroup Cultureword; and Black Arts Alliance—before centring on her auto/biographical performance piece The Story of M (1994). This production playfully answers to the assumption that the black female body is an index to the self, as it incarnates various constitutive others with a surprising twist. The closing scenes reveal the play’s non-naturalistic casting, announcing identity as produced in relationship rather than proceeding from the body. The Story of M was recently republished by Oberon, in 2017, and featured by the exam board Edexcel in a resource on contemporary black British writing for AS- and A-level teachers of English Literature. This is testament both to its continuing appeal and to the effects of scholarly effort— especially the tireless work of Deirdre Osborne (Osborne 2011a, b)—in securing its profile. The conclusion looks back over the preceding chapters, unifying the study of unpublished playscripts and production recordings by collating the recurring techniques. It argues that these represent an unknowing and asynchronous response to experiences and environments common across the decades: an intersectional aesthetic. This book does not pretend to an unbroken chain of inheritance between these generations of theatre-­ makers: such a claim would forget the fragility of the archives. Indeed, this archival fragility is then further explored in the conclusion with reference to celebrated contemporary playwright debbie tucker green, noting her relative visibility compared with her predecessors and reflecting on her relationship to the archive. Finally, the conclusion offers an audit of other relevant but as-yet unstudied plays, suggesting some possible directions for future research, as well as highlighting some company histories that are still apparently hidden and in need of archival preservation.

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Black British Women’s Theatre: Intersectionality, Archives, Aesthetics centres the work of black British women artists, exposing and exploring racialised and gendered gaps and silences in our national cultural story. Foundational to this book is a conviction that the creative industries are actively engaged in the critique and (re-)construction of the world, and that non-naturalistic aesthetics enhance rather than deviate from that task. The plays, poetry, and performances discussed in the coming chapters should be understood as continuous with the long history of anti-racist and anti-sexist activism in Britain. This book hopes to resource—and ultimately, in its own way, to participate in—the same, by bringing insight and inspiration to the generations of artists, archivists, students, and scholars to come.

Notes 1. Black Arts—titled Black Arts in London until issue 136 in June 1991—was a regular listings magazine, first published in 1982. It was produced by the Minority Arts Advisory Service (MAAS), an advisory body formed with the financial backing of the Arts Council of Great Britain, Gulbenkian Foundation, and the Community Relations Committee, in response to Naseem Khan’s 1976 report The Arts Britain Ignores (de Souza 2002). Black Arts was incorporated into another MAAS publication, the quarterly Artrage, in December 1992. Issues of Black Arts in London dating between 1986 and 1989 are held at the Bishopsgate Institute under catalogue reference UFH/7/28. A further partial collection of the magazine is held by the Stuart Hall Library of the Institute of International Visual Arts (Iniva) in London. 2. Unfinished Histories was co-founded by Susan Croft and Jessica Higgs to record the history of alternative theatre. See: http://www.unfinishedhistories.com. The project’s physical holdings were deposited at the Bishopsgate Institute  Special Collections and Archives in June 2016, making them available for public consultation. 3. On British Asian drama, see: Chambers 2011; Schlote 2006; Griffin 2003. A research project on British Asian Theatre at the University of Exeter, from 2004 until 2009, produced two publications: Ley and Dadswell, eds 2011, and 2012. 4. A rather unusual example of such errata on printed materials is the misrepresentation of Mustapha Mathura’s surname as ‘Matura’ on the programme for Black Pieces (ICA 1970); in this instance, the mistake reportedly prompted the playwright to permanently adopt the altered spelling (Rees 1992, p. 103).

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5. Theatre and Performance Collections (Victoria and Albert Museum), Blythe House, 23 Blythe Road, London, W14 0QX. 6. University of Bristol Theatre Collection, 21 Park Row, Bristol, BS1 5LY. 7. http://makinghistoriesvisible.com/. 8. British Library, 96 Euston Road, London, NW1 2DB. 9. Special Collections, Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, London, SE14 6NW. 10. Live Art Development Agency, Unit 7, Queen’s Yard, White Post Lane, London, E9 5EN. 11. http://www.blackplaysarchive.org.uk/. 12. Bishopsgate Institute, 230 Bishopsgate, London, EC2M 4QH. 13. African American women playwrights and artists are a recurring reference throughout the interviews with black British practitioners. Ntozake Shange is most often cited. The chapter on Theatre of Black Women discusses the specific influences of Alexis de Veaux and her company Flamboyant Ladies. Endesha Ida Mae Holland’s From Mississippi Delta was mounted by Talawa at the Cochrane Theatre in April 1993. Munirah Theatre Company presented poems by Gwendolyn Bennett, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Margaret Goss Burroughs as part of their productions. For a fuller discussion of the transatlantic influences on black British theatre, see Black British Drama: A Transnational Story by Michael Pearce (2017).

References Adebayo, Mojisola (2011). Plays: One. London: Oberon Books. Adebayo, Mojisola (2019). Plays: Two. London: Oberon Books. Ahmed, Sara (1997). ‘“It’s a sun tan, isn’t it?” Auto-biography as an Identificatory Practice’, in Heidi Safia Mirza (ed.) Black British Feminism: A Reader. London: Routledge, 153–167. Bailey, Moya (27 April 2014). ‘More on the origin of Misogynoir’. Moyazb. http://moyazb.tumblr.com/post/84048113369/more-on-the-origin-ofmisogynoir (accessed 17 July 2017). Black Mime Theatre Women’s Troop (1990). Mothers. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Commercial Video Collection, 054036/A. VHS production recording. Black Mime Theatre Women’s Troop (1991). Drowning. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Commercial Video Collection, 054033/A. VHS production recording. Brewster, Yvonne (1995). Black Theatre Review: Summary Report and Recommendations. University of London Goldsmiths. Future Histories— Black Performance and Carnival Archive, Records of Black Theatre Forum, BTF/A/M/4008.

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Butler, Judith (2004). Undoing Gender. London; New York: Routledge. Caplan, Betty (1994). ‘Interview with Paulette Randall’. Evening Standard. 15 December, 44. Chambers, Colin (2011). Black and Asian Theatre in Britain: A History. London: Routledge. Crenshaw, Kimberlé (1989). ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’. The University of Chicago Legal Forum. 140, 139–167. Croft, Susan (1993). ‘Black Women Playwrights in Britain’, in Trevor R. Griffiths and Margaret Llewellyn-Jones (eds.) British and Irish Women Dramatists Since 1958: A Critical Handbook. Buckingham: Open University Press, 84–98. de Souza, Pauline (2002). ‘Minorities’ Arts Advisory Service’, in Alison Donnell (ed.) Companion to Contemporary Black British Culture. London: Routledge, 201. Evaristo, Bernardine and Patricia Hilaire (1983). Silhouette. Evaristo personal collection, London. Typescript. Evaristo, Bernardine and Patricia Hilaire (1984). Pyeyucca. Evaristo personal collection, London. Typescript. Fuchs, Anne (2006). ‘“I’m a Very Northern, Mixed-race Woman”: An Interview with SuAndi’, in Geoffrey V. Davis and Anne Fuchs (eds.) Staging New Britain: Aspects of Black and South Asian British Theatre Practice. Brussels; New York: Peter Lang, 205–218. Gilroy, Paul (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso. Gilroy, Paul (2002). There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The cultural politics of race and nation. London: Routledge. Goddard, Lynette (2007). Staging Black Feminisms: Identity, Politics, Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Goddard, Lynette (2015). Contemporary Black British Playwrights: Margins to Mainstream. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Griffin, Gabriele (2003). Contemporary Black and Asian Women Playwrights in Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Griffin, Gabriele (2006). ‘Theatres of Difference: The Politics of “Redistribution” and “Recognition” in Contemporary Black and Asian Women Playwrights in Britain’. Feminist Review. 84, 10–28. hooks, bell (1992). Black Looks: Race and Representation. London: Turnaround. Jumbo, Cush (2013). Josephine and I. London: Bloomsbury. Ley, Graham and Sarah Dadswell, eds. (2011). British South Asian Theatres: A Documented History. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Ley, Graham and Sarah Dadswell, eds. (2012). Critical Essays on British South Asian Theatre. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. McLeod, John (2010). ‘Extra Dimensions, New Routines’. Wasafiri. 64, 45–52.

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McMillan, Michael (2006). ‘Texts of Cultural Practice: Black Theatre and Performance in the UK’, in Gail Low and Marion Wynne-Davies (eds.) A Black British Canon? Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 129–142. McMillan, Michael and SuAndi (2002). ‘Rebaptizing the World in Our Own Terms: Black Theatre and Live Arts in Britain’, in Paul Carter Harrison, Victor Leo Walker and Gus Edwards (eds.) Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 115–127. Mirza, Heidi Safia (1997). ‘Introduction: Mapping a genealogy of Black British feminism’, in Heidi Safia Mirza (ed.) Black British Feminism: A Reader. London: Routledge, 1–30. Nasta, Susheila (2000). ‘Beyond the Millennium: Black Women’s Writing’. Women: A Cultural Review. 11 (1–2), 71–76. Osborne, Deirdre (2008). ‘Review of Staging Black Feminisms by Lynette Goddard’. Contemporary Theatre Review 18 (1), 114–125. Osborne, Deirdre (2010). ‘debbie tucker green and Doña Daley: Two Neo-­ millennial Black British Women Playwrights’. Antares 4, 25–55. Osborne, Deirdre (2011a). ‘The Body of Text Meets the Body as Text: Staging (I) dentity in the work of SuAndi and Lemn Sissay’, in Charles I. Armstrong, Seán Crosson and Anne Karhio (eds.) Crisis and Contemporary Poetry. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 230–247. Osborne, Deirdre (2011b). ‘Set in Stone: SuAndi and Lemn Sissay’s Landmark Poetics’, in Arturo Cass and Cordelia Graebner (eds.) Performing Poetry: Body, Place and Rhythm in the Poetry Performance. Amsterdam; Atlanta: Rodopi, 197–217. Osborne, Deirdre (2014). ‘Resisting the Standard and Displaying her Colours: debbie tucker green at British Drama’s Vanguard’, in Mary F. Brewer, Lynette Goddard and Deirdre Osborne (eds.) Modern and Contemporary Black British Drama. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 161–177. Owusu, Kwesi (1986). The Struggle for Black Arts in Britain: What Can We Consider Better Than Freedom. London: Comedia. Pearce, Michael (2017). Black British Drama: A Transnational Story. London: Routledge. Pinnock, Winsome (2014). Celebrating 18 Years of The Alfred Fagon Award. http://www.youblisher.com/p/1054021-The-Alfred-Fagon-Award/, 7. Ponnuswami, Meenakshi (2000). ‘Small Island People: Black British Women Playwrights’, in Elaine Aston and Janelle G.  Reinelt (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 217–234. Procter, James, ed. (2000). Writing Black Britain, 1948–1998: An Interdisciplinary Anthology. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Rees, Roland (1992). Fringe first: Pioneers of fringe theatre on record. London: Oberon.

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Schlote, Christiane (2006). ‘Either for Tragedy, Comedy, History or Musical Unlimited: South Asian Women Playwrights in Britain’, in Geoffrey V. Davis and Anne Fuchs (eds.) Staging New Britain: Aspects of Black and South Asian British Theatre Practice. Brussels; New York: Peter Lang, 65–85. Sierz, Aleks (2001). In-yer-face theatre: British Drama Today. London: Faber. Smith, Barbara (1978). ‘Toward a Black Feminist Criticism’. The Radical Teacher. 7, 20–27. Spillers, Hortense J. (1987). ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book’. Diacritics. 17 (2), 65–81. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1987). In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York; London: Methuen. Starck, Kathleen (2006). ‘“Black and Female is Some of Who I Am and I Want to Explore It”: Black Women’s Plays of the 1980s and 1990s’, in Dimple Godiwala (ed.) Alternatives Within the Mainstream: British Black and Asian Theatres. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 229–248. SuAndi (1994). The Story of M. Live Art Development Agency, London. V0238. VHS production recording. SuAndi (2002). ‘Introduction’, in SuAndi (ed.) 4 for More. Manchester: artBlacklive, n.p. SuAndi (2010). ‘The Story of M’, in Maggie B. Gale and John F. Deeney (eds.) Routledge Drama Anthology and Sourcebook: From Modernism to Contemporary Performance. London: Routledge, 751–769. SuAndi (2017). The Story of M. London: Oberon. tucker green, debbie (2005). stoning mary. London: Nick Hern Books. tucker green, debbie (2008). random. London: Nick Hern Books. Zindika (1989). Paper and Stone. Goldsmiths University of London. Future Histories—Black Performance and Carnival Archive, Records of Nitro Theatre Company, NTC/P/T/1/21/3. Typescript. Zindika (1990). Paper and Stone. Goldsmiths University of London. Future Histories—Black Performance and Carnival Archive, Records of Nitro Theatre Company, NTC/P/T/1/21/5/001. VHS production recording. Zindika (1996). The Day Mother Took Us to the Seaside. Goldsmiths University of London. Future Histories—Black Performance and Carnival Archive, Records of Nitro Theatre Company, NTC/P/T/2/144. Typescript.

Theatre of Black Women

In the 1970s and early 1980s, as the children of the Windrush generation came of age, Britain experienced an electric convergence of anti-racist and anti-sexist activism. By the mid-1980s there were around fifty different organisations dedicated to black and/or Asian women in Britain (Anon 1985). These grassroots collectives shared knowledge and resources, campaigned on relevant issues, and nurtured community. Some of the most active included Brixton Black Women’s Group (1973–c.1989) and OWAAD, the Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent (1978–1982). Theatre of Black Women (TBW) were among the first to translate this political energy into a creative practice. The company was formed in 1982 by three women—Bernardine Evaristo, Patricia Hilaire, and Paulette Randall—and remained active until 1988. (Patricia Hilaire changed her last name to ‘St. Hilaire’ in 1990, honouring the formulation used by her grandfather; both versions appear in this chapter, reflecting the usage applicable at the time.) Various chroniclers of British theatre history acknowledge TBW’s significance (Goddard 2007, pp.  26, 42; Godiwala 2006, p. 76; Griffin 2003, p. 238; McMillan and SuAndi 2002, p. 119), but since the company’s playtexts have not been published and their manuscripts are not yet publicly available, scholarship on their work has inevitably been limited. For instance, despite emphatically lauding TBW as the ‘most important’ of various black women’s theatre groups in his expansive study of black and Asian theatre in Britain, Colin Chambers could go no further with his commentary (Chambers 2011, p. 178). This © The Author(s) 2020 N. Abram, Black British Women’s Theatre, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51459-4_2

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chapter reanimates the critical conversation. Drawing on Evaristo and St. Hilaire’s personal papers, generously shared by the artists themselves, and further informed by an illuminating interview (Abram 2011), it fills out existing accounts of early black British women’s theatre and offers the first sustained analysis of Theatre of Black Women’s self-authored plays.1 Further contextualising conversations with some of the artists’ peers affirm the significance of this pioneering company, and register the profound interconnectedness of black women’s creativity in 1980s Britain.

History, Activities, Archives Bernardine Evaristo and Patricia St. Hilaire both trace their involvement in theatre back to the extra-curricular activities they participated in as teenagers. They fondly recall how those groups encouraged participants to express themselves, building confidence as well as providing welcome respite from personal struggles. Evaristo—who is of English and Nigerian parentage—was involved in Greenwich Young People’s Theatre in Woolwich, London, from the age of twelve to sixteen (Bernard 2017). Hilaire attended a group at Hoxton Hall in Hackney, London, where she met and was mentored by actor and director David Sulkin. Sulkin’s support proved vital, and was to endure: not only did he prompt Hilaire’s application to drama school but he would go on to lead the Royal Court Young People’s Theatre Scheme (YPTS) from 1980 to 1985, where Hilaire, Evaristo, and Paulette Randall received their induction into professional theatre (Croft 1993, p. 85). Such supportive individuals notwithstanding, the young women were well aware of the industry’s exclusivity. Evaristo vividly remembers the first time she saw a black woman onstage: it was Cleo Sylvestre, in a production by participatory theatre company Bubble Theatre in the early 1970s. Recognising that she would likely find more opportunities in community theatre than in other areas of the industry, Evaristo targeted her drama school applications accordingly. Evaristo and Hilaire’s paths converged when they both entered the three-year Community Theatre Arts programme at Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama in 1979. That year saw an unprecedented intake of black women, including Paulette Randall, Joan Williams, and Barbara Robinson. According to lecturer Hazel Carey, this reflected the college’s contemporary policy of positive action, in which people of colour, women, and ex-offenders were actively recruited to the course (Abram 2019c). Rose Bruford College features prominently in the history of black and

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Asian theatre in Britain. Previous students included Anton Phillips, who enrolled in 1969 and later ran Carib Theatre Company and inaugurated the annual Black Theatre Seasons; Alton Kumalo, who went on to co-­ found Temba Theatre Company in 1972; Sierra Leone-born Yulisa ‘Pat’ Amadu Maddy, who served as director at Keskidee, Britain’s first black arts centre, and for productions by Dark and Light theatre company; Yvonne Brewster, who later co-founded Talawa Theatre Company with Carmen Munroe, Mona Hammond, and Inigo Espejel; and Denise Wong, who had studied in the first cohort of the innovative Community Theatre Arts programme, starting in 1976, and went on to become Artistic Director of Black Mime Theatre. Additionally, Trinidad-born Edric Connor, who founded the Negro Theatre Workshop with Pearl Connor (nee Nunez) in 1963, was awarded an honorary diploma (Chambers 2011, p. 126). Later graduates of the Community Theatre Arts course include Derrick Blackwood (now Amani Naphtali), who co-founded Double Edge theatre company in 1984. The Community Theatre Arts programme actively politicised its students: in interview Carey describes its socialist principles, coupled with a focus on body, mind, and spirit. The course also valued creativity, encouraging students to write their own material—indeed, fellow student Vanessa Revill (now Galvin) remembers that the first exercise on the course centred on finding a voice (Abram 2019e). This training confirmed for Evaristo and Hilaire that theatre was not just a form of entertainment but a powerful tool for social change. Their time at Rose Bruford College profoundly shaped the company they would go on to create. The college years were not a one-way education, though: Hilaire and Evaristo actively challenged the status quo. On one occasion in 1980 they complained about the use of blackface by a white student on the more traditional Theatre Arts course. After approaching the relevant programme director, they found themselves disciplined for not taking the matter to their own course leaders; their defence was that the white director of Community Theatre Arts did not have the personal experience necessary to comprehend and properly represent their concerns. The agitation Evaristo and Hilaire undertook eventually led to a daylong conference on black theatre, hosted with the support of their course leaders. This event engaged professional practitioners—including Yvonne Brewster, with whom Hilaire had connected while working at the Keskidee centre during the summer before she started her studies—and publicly established the women’s commitment to promoting black British creativity.

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Whilst studying, Evaristo and Hilaire grew acutely aware of how little stage-space was given to black women. A few years later, in interview, Evaristo lamented the continuing cultural invisibility of this intersectional subject: People talk about black people and they’re talking about black men; and they talk about women and they’re talking about white women. Where do black women fit in? Nowhere; hardly ever do we see our lives on stage. (Croft 1986, p. 4)

Evaristo’s understanding of the black woman’s double bind was informed by African American scholars and activists—Angela Davis and Audre Lorde, among others—whose work anticipated Kimberlé Crenshaw’s formal coinage of the term ‘intersectionality’ (Crenshaw 1989). In this early interview, Evaristo describes a lived experience of simultaneous racist and sexist exclusion, articulating the concept of intersectionality before it had a name. On the few occasions that the students found plays that did feature black female characters, the roles were invariably stereotypical or small. Hilaire’s mother had previously tried to dissuade her from pursuing a career in drama for this reason, knowing that professional opportunities would be problematic or few. Actress Cathy Tyson lamented the industry’s lack of a platform for black women performers in a Guardian article in 1986: ‘That’s all we ever are, prostitutes or princesses from Africa’ (Banner 1986). Such acts of misrepresentation catalysed the career of playwright Jacqueline Rudet (also working under the name Magdalene St. Luce) who began to write in 1983 ‘out of disgust at the caricatures of black life on stage and in the media’ (Lahr 1985, p. 116). Issues of representation also motivated the formation of Talawa Theatre Company in 1986, after co-founder Yvonne Brewster realised that ‘black actors were limited in the type of work that was offered to them in Britain’ (King-­ Dorset 2014, p. 16). This lack of opportunity could not be explained away by migrant status, as Joan-Ann Maynard observed: ‘second generation British blacks now have British accents and in theory should be getting less stereotyped roles’ (Kendall 1989). Even after the millennium, the continuing dearth of parts written for or available to black actors led Patricia Elcock to write her own material, beginning with the play Urban Afro Saxons, which was  co-authored with Kofi Agyemang and produced at Theatre Royal Stratford East in 2003 (Osborne 2012, p. 259). Evaristo remembers consciously refusing the restrictive roles that were offered to

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her during drama school: ‘I wasn’t interested in being someone else’s puppet, saying what someone else wanted me to say, being moved and directed in a certain way’ (Abram 2011). She also advised friends not to take on parts that would compromise their shared politics: for instance, an unpublished interview records Evaristo’s view that casting a black woman as Eliza Doolittle alongside a white Professor Henry Higgins in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion would inappropriately reproduce racialised class and power imbalances (Evaristo and Hilaire c. 1985, p. 14).2 Both fellow student Vanessa Revill and lecturer Hazel Carey remember Evaristo as motivated by a righteous anger about black women’s rights and representation. Revill recalls that this demand for a new politics was accompanied by and expressed through innovative aesthetics (Abram 2019e); Carey, similarly, reflects on Evaristo’s powerful imagination (Abram 2019c). Evaristo and Hilaire did perform in some canonical plays during their studies, appearing in versions of Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, Caryl Churchill’s Vinegar Tom, Federico García Lorca’s Blood Wedding, and Shakespeare’s Macbeth, among others. But in response to the lack of suitable roles for black actors on the British stage, they committed themselves to writing and performing their own plays. The young artists’ search for appropriate material and positive models was not wholly unrewarded, though: African American women’s writing offered more progressive influences than canonical theatre and contemporary Britain. Looking across the Atlantic, Evaristo found relevant forms and themes in works by Ntozake Shange, Adrienne Kennedy, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Alexis de Veaux, and Toni Morrison (Croft 1986). As observed by scholar Rhonda Cobham (Cobham and Collins 1987, p. 8), and confirmed by Scottish artist and poet Maud Sulter, the black British experience has long been informed by and interpreted through texts by ‘Black-sistahs from the US’ (Sulter 1988, p. 16). A transatlantic perspective certainly structures scholarship:  for example, Elaine Aston and Geraldine Harris position TBW alongside Native American theatre company Spiderwoman Theater, as deliberately rejecting the ‘heterosexual imperative’ (Aston and Harris 2007, p. 7), while Michael Pearce’s Black British Drama: A Transnational Story (2017) makes transnational comparison its structural logic. In a practical sense, public readings by Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, and Nigerian writer Buchi Emecheta and performances by African American a capella ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock served as opportunities for black British people to meet and connect, producing a sense of creative community: in an era before electronic communications and social media, this was the primary means through which

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common interest networks were formed. After their studies, Evaristo, Hilaire, and Randall saw de Veaux’s company Flamboyant Ladies perform at the Melkweg (‘Milky Way’) cultural centre in Amsterdam. Evaristo remembers how this encounter affirmed the young company, providing ‘the confidence and the […] context for creating our own theatre’ (Abram 2011). Experiencing themselves as part of a community, even one so geographically distant, proved powerful: ‘you knew that you weren’t writing in isolation’ (Abram 2011). But as well as being affirmed by their shared intentions and similar style, TBW were alerted to their difference from their African American counterparts when some members of Flamboyant Ladies expressed their surprise to meet black people who spoke with an English accent. Solidarity with African American women was important— indeed, formative—for Theatre of Black Women, but through this experience they recognised that the singularity of the black British cultural context and specificity of its historical lineage must not be forgotten. In 1980, as part of her college coursework, Hilaire devised and performed in a show titled Prejudice with fellow students Paulette Randall, Joan Williams, and Robert West (a white man), directed by Siobhan Lennon and mounted at Oval House. The 25-minute play exposed the discrimination against black women in education, council housing, by the police, and in the workplace. It was brought back to Oval House on request from 4 to 6 July of the same year, when it was reviewed for Performance Magazine as ‘highly amusing and sharply analytical’ (Bayley 1980). Later that same year—their second studying at Rose Bruford—the five black women in the Community Theatre Arts cohort collaboratively devised Coping (1980). They workshopped the play at Brixton Black Women’s Centre, a community hub in Stockwell Green. Suzanne Scafe, a member of the resident organisation Brixton Black Women’s Group, remembers the students as ‘talented’ and ‘confident’, and their work as ‘fresh’ (Abram 2019d). Coping used monologue and song to profile five different black women facing various challenges in life. It was visibly influenced by Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf, which had played at London’s Royalty Theatre in 1979 (Megson 2012, p. 58).3 More broadly, the format of Coping was characteristic of contemporary black feminist practice, which sought to validate the voice of the individual whilst also contextualising her as one among many, securing the political significance of her personal experiences. The same principle of collectivity structures Scafe’s later book, The Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain (1985), co-authored

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with Beverley Bryan and Stella Dadzie. Based on oral testimony, this was a vital publication correcting the erasure and silencing of black women in British history. Coping played at Brixton Black Women’s Centre on 22 November 1980, the Omnibus in Paddington on 26 November, and Oval House on 7 December, directed by Yvonne Brewster, and attracted a £500 award from the Minority Arts Advisory Service.4 These external shows apparently contravened a contract the students undertook with their college, although St. Hilaire remains defiant that she never signed it. St. Hilaire’s archive contains some documentation about the production, as well as handwritten notes for the character she played, Lucy Henderson.5 This was a time of flourishing creativity and growing political consciousness amidst increasing societal tension. Spending summers in London whilst at university in Stirling, a young Jackie Kay found her way into lively gatherings of black women with whom she shared political views and who nurtured her poetry (BBC Radio 4). Ade Solanke—who later joined the board for TBW—similarly remembers returning to London, after studying in Sheffield, to find the capital undergoing a ‘cultural renaissance’ (Abram 2019a), which she covered as Assistant Editor of Artrage magazine and Black Arts in London. This bubbling of the arts took on increased urgency in response to particular incidents. In January 1981 thirteen teenagers died in a fire at a house party in New Cross, in what was believed by many to be a racist arson attack. Poets responded, memorialising the event in the absence of a satisfactory investigation.6 April 1981 then saw the so-called ‘race riots’ in Brixton and elsewhere, acts of civil disobedience by black communities protesting against racist policing.7 Thatcherism had minority groups in Britain in a stranglehold, and far-right organisations like the National Front and the British Movement were gaining momentum. In May 1982 Hilaire participated in a production called A South African Experience, presented by Art Against Apartheid as part of the ‘Women Live’ series at Oval House. Promotional materials and the script for A South African Experience are held in Hilaire’s personal papers. Directed by Neil Henderson and Daphne Robinson, the play explored the divides between three women: one white, one black, one ‘coloured’—to use the language of the time, and the play’s paratext. Hilaire was cast as the character Ester, with Hazel Carey playing Kitty and Lyn Darnley as Erica. The production also included a poetic interlude by Daphne Robinson, accompanied by live drumming, and a dance piece by Hazel Carey titled ‘Revisiting South Africa’. (Similar acts of solidarity with those

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in racialised struggle across the world also characterised the work of another group of artists who followed shortly after TBW, Munirah Theatre Company, whose 1987 production thinkofariver explicitly championed anti-colonial activity on the African continent.) Hilaire was also actively writing her own playscripts at this time: by 1982 she had completed work on As Deep as the Ocean Sea (Choong et al. 1987, p. 137), a one-woman show exploring two generations of women, which  developed from a monologue titled ‘Her Blues’ written in June 1981 for the Community Theatre Arts course. Towards the end of their studies Evaristo, Hilaire, and Randall participated in ‘Talking Black’, a series of playwriting workshops at London’s Royal Court theatre organised by David Sulkin as part of the Young People’s Theatre Scheme.8 The workshopped scripts were then mounted at a showcase in the Theatre Upstairs in May 1982 as part of the Court’s ‘Women Live Season’, performed by the Activists, a mixed company drawn from the YPTS. Patricia Hilaire presented Just Another Day, Paulette Randall offered Fishing, and Bernardine Evaristo wrote Moving Through—a verse drama performed polyvocally, making it the only non-naturalistic piece in the showcase. Yazmine Judd, another black British writer, also had work featured; Judd would go on to participate in Sphinx theatre company (Croft and de Angelis 1993, p.  150), and see her play Unfinished Business produced at Oval House in 1999. Randall and Hilaire were then among eleven writers successful in the Royal Court’s 1982 Young Writers’ Competition, with Fishing and Just Another Day selected from 450 submissions (Woddis 1982a). Randall went on to have Fishing featured in the Black Theatre Season at the Arts Theatre in the West End the following year. Shortly after the Talking Black showcase, Ruth Tompsett wrote to Patricia Hilaire requesting a copy of the script for Just Another Day as a resource for her MA dissertation (Tompsett 1982). Tompsett would go on to organise the conference ‘Black Theatre in Higher Education’, held in April 1994, and to edit a collection of papers from the event (Tompsett 1996). Hilaire’s script was also requested two years after the Talking Black showcase by Kate Organ—director of Young Foundry at the training and development organisation Theatre Foundry—with a view to remounting it (Organ 1984). During the summer of 1982, having achieved the Diploma in Community Theatre Arts from Rose Bruford, Hilaire applied to her local authority, Hackney Council, for funding. She was awarded £920 (Evaristo and Hilaire 1988). With this Evaristo and Hilaire organised and ran theatre and writing workshops for young and unemployed black women at

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Centerprise, a community centre and arts venue in Dalston. Such public outreach activities became central to Theatre of Black Women, and throughout its lifespan the company continued to facilitate workshops in schools and community centres: the following summer they offered a drama workshop for girls as part of Hackney Girls Festival, and in 1985 TBW ran a workshop for International Women’s Day at the Workers’ Educational Association in Hackney. As a result of their success in the Young Writers’ Competition, Hilaire’s Just Another Day and Randall’s Fishing were given a professional production at the Royal Court’s Young Writers Festival on 8 October 1982, directed by Danny Boyle in the Theatre Upstairs. This platform brought the young playwrights into proximity with a more frequently recited British theatre history: the Royal Court production schedule reads ‘Sun 10 Oct. 9am: Unload YWF [Young Writers Festival] set/Load [Caryl Churchill’s] Top Girls set’ (Royal Court 1982). Observing the 1968 Theatres Act, which obliges that a copy of every new script performed in a licensed venue be deposited at the British Library, the scripts for the Young Writers Festival have been preserved. Several versions of Hilaire’s script are also retained in her personal collection. Randall’s Fishing—playing at thirteen minutes long—saw Yvonne Gidden and Ellen Thomas play teenage friends discussing the emotional complexities of their romantic relationships (Randall 1982). It was revived the following year under Yvonne Brewster’s direction for the 1983 Black Theatre Season run by the umbrella organisation Black Theatre Forum. Hilaire’s Just Another Day was a thirty-six-minute play in the ‘slice of life’ tradition (Woddis 1982b), quite unlike the non-naturalistic style that would characterise TBW’s later plays (Hilaire 1982). It delivered a frank discussion about the facts of life between a mother (played by Ellen Thomas) and daughter, Carol (Doreen Brown).9 Its YWF production was received positively, with critics describing it as one of the evening’s ‘major successes’ (Woddis 1982b)—specifically, commending its ‘spiky dialogue and considerable wisdom’ (Spencer 1982), its ‘wit and understanding’, and its ‘delightful authenticity’ (Nurse 1982). Success at the Royal Court proved to be an effective springboard into the international circuit. Evaristo, Hilaire, and Randall each developed further work: Evaristo evolved Moving Through into Tiger Teeth Clenched Not To Bite; Hilaire created Hey Brown Girl, exploring the conflicting allegiances demanded by black men and feminism; and Randall wrote Chameleon, featuring a schoolgirl protagonist whose soliloquies explore

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the tension between her familial heritage and her British present (Smartt 1982).10 All three pieces were staged as part of a dedicated ‘Day of the Black Women’ at the fourth International Women’s Festival at the Melkweg in Amsterdam in 1982. This formally inaugurated Theatre of Black Women as a company. The triptych was directed by Jude Alderson, who taught Evaristo, Hilaire, and Randall on the Community Theatre Arts programme at Rose Bruford and had co-founded theatre company Sadista Sisters (1974–1987) along with Teresa D’Abreu. Poet and live artist Dorothea Smartt reviewed the event in Amsterdam for the second-­ wave feminist magazine Spare Rib, writing of the triptych that ‘[e]ach piece had something very real to say about the experiences of growing up in, and coming to terms with, this society, as a Black woman’ (Smartt 1982, p. 42). Years later Smartt still remembers that first encounter with Theatre of Black Women as personally significant, recounting the excitement of ‘see[ing] one’s own experience and reality reflected back at you by your peers’—and observing the irony that despite living in London, she only became aware of Theatre of Black Women at an overseas show (Abram 2019b). Smartt later took on a formal role supporting TBW, joining the company’s advisory board. Not long after this international playwriting debut, Randall joined the Royal Court as Trainee Assistant Director, working alongside Danny Boyle in the Theatre Upstairs during Max Stafford-Clark’s tenure as Artistic Director. This ended Randall’s involvement with the newly formed Theatre of Black Women, and marked the start of a successful career as a theatre director and, later, a television producer. Decades later Boyle and Randall would again work together to collaborate on the opening ceremony for the 2012 London Olympics. Facilitated by a climate of relatively ready funding for the arts, TBW grew. In 1983–1984—TBW’s first professional season—the company received £3340 from the Greater London Council (GLC) and £2720 from the Greater London Arts Association (GLAA), supplemented by other smaller contributions from various sources (Evaristo and Hilaire 1988). The GLC had a specific mandate to invest in black audiences and support arts of interest to black communities (Jarrett 1996, pp. 121–123). But Evaristo and Hilaire observed in an unpublished interview originally intended for the anthology Charting the Journey (Grewal et  al. 1988) that  most funding tended to be directed towards plays that were ‘not political’ (Evaristo and Hilaire c. 1985, p. 4). A handwritten amendment to the interview transcript tempers this statement to refer instead to plays

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that are ‘not seen as “political”’. An explicit message or political agenda may deter investment, but—this amendment implies—it was possible to retain impact whilst escaping the gatekeepers’ surveillance. This was facilitated by formal innovation: an abstract or symbolic style could obscure any radical content and so court the funders’ support. Non-naturalistic plays should not, therefore, be thought to abstain from the political but to re-present it—as Theatre of Black Women’s next two works would affirm. Silhouette was written and performed by both Hilaire and Evaristo. Compressing two centuries of diasporic history, it brings together the spirit of a woman who died in slavery in Barbados, named Zenobia (played by Hilaire), with Anna (Evaristo), a young woman from contemporary London. After agreeing on the overall story Evaristo and Hilaire each wrote poetry for the character they would perform (Croft 1986). The resulting drafts were then spread out in physical form, and arranged and rearranged in consultation, forming an elaborate grid (see Fig. 1), which mapped the characters for each scene and the props that were needed. This kinaesthetic planning process was influenced by Leah Bartal, the movement tutor at Rose Bruford College and co-author with Nira Ne’eman of Movement Awareness and Creativity (1975). Bartal equipped Evaristo and Hilaire to write from their characters’ perspectives through the embodied expression of emotions. Such exploratory creative processes profoundly shaped the company’s non-linear and non-naturalistic aesthetic, which Evaristo has described as a counterpoint to ‘traditional European styles’ (Evaristo 1996, p. 133). A photograph by Similola Coker (Fig. 2) captures the dynamic interactions between the two performers in this first official production by TBW. Silhouette premiered on 13 October 1983 at Brondesbury and Kilburn School in north-west London. Further single dates followed at Hoxton Hall and Chats Palace in Hackney, and at Simba Black Women’s Group in Woolwich, before a short run at Oval House from 9 to 13 November 1983. In total Silhouette enjoyed a ten-month tour across England, with many of its twenty-nine dates held in schools, community venues, or ‘makeshift and fringe theatres’ (Tappin 1984). The play also featured in the GLC Conference at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith on 12 December 1983, at Brent Black Theatre Festival at Anson Hall on 16 February 1984, and as part of the Festival of Migrant Workers in Frankfurt on 14 and 15 June 1984 (Bernard 2017). Silhouette received a number of reviews in specialist and local publications. These are not routinely included in Theatre Record, the fortnightly

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Fig. 1  Theatre of Black Women, Silhouette (1983). Evaristo personal collection, London. Scene breakdown

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Fig. 2  Similola Coker, ‘Theatre of Black Women, Silhouette’ (1983). Evaristo personal collection, London. Production photograph. (Left to right: Patricia Hilaire, Bernardine Evaristo)

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compendium so beloved by researchers. Happily, though, Hilaire and Evaristo’s personal papers preserve the relevant clippings. Reviewing the March 1984 production at the Albany Centre in Bristol for West Country listings magazine Venue, Shirley Brown called Silhouette ‘one of the most dramatically effective and emotionally affecting fringe theatre pieces I’ve ever attended’, lauding it as ‘sensitively written and skilfully performed’ (Brown 1984). In a review for the women’s newspaper Outwrite, Maud Sulter documented the ways in which Silhouette activated its audience: ‘Perhaps the play raises too many issues with no real attempt to answer them, but the discussion after the show is almost as stimulating as the play itself’ (Sulter 1983).11 Sulter exhorted readers of Outwrite to ask their local community theatres to book the play, recognising then what is confirmed by hindsight: that Theatre of Black Women was already becoming ‘a valuable contribution to our heritage’ (Sulter 1983). And, writing for Spare Rib, Maxine called the play ‘comprehensive, absorbing and […] wryly funny’ (Maxine 1984), especially valuing how it awakened black women’s feminist consciousness by ‘reliving our history and current struggle in front of our eyes’ (Maxine 1984). This later review is instructive of the risks inherent in working with ephemera: its record of the play’s casting and characters is incorrect, misnaming the young Londoner Anna as ‘Pat’ and not naming the character actually played by Hilaire. Such instances caution the archival researcher always to seek corroboration across multiple sources. Elaine Aston reproduced part of Maxine’s review in her An Introduction to Feminism and Theatre (1995, p.  89, reprints Maxine 1984), wisely excluding the flawed summary. In various ways, Silhouette anticipated Bernardine Evaristo’s later writing. The name Zenobia titles a poem published by Evaristo in 1987, several years after the stage production (Evaristo 1990b). Whereas the play juxtaposes contemporary London life with the experiences of enslaved Africans in the Americas, Evaristo’s later poem anchors an exploration of black identity further back in history. She offers a prefatory discussion to educate her readers about this forgotten narrative: ‘The name Zenobia belonged to a legendary Black queen and warrior of the East, who died circa AD272’ (Evaristo 1990a, p. 75). The character in Evaristo’s poem also emerges from a more personal history, as the name Zenobia belonged to Evaristo’s Nigerian paternal grandmother. Another of Evaristo’s poems, ‘Grandmother’, resembles Silhouette by recovering a lost diasporic past hidden beneath the present: ‘through time you have struggled/perhaps you died a slave/thousands of miles from home/or maybe here in

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England/under my feet you may lie’ (Evaristo 1988, p.  111). These echoes between texts of different kinds show that TBW’s writing was an iterative process, which paid little heed to conventional boundaries between literary forms. Evaristo’s written experimentation continues today: examples include her semi-autobiographical novel-in-verse, Lara (2009 [1997]), and The Emperor’s Babe (2001), a novel which began as poetry (Niven 2004, p. 279) and won her the Arts Council of England Writers Award as well as a NESTA Fellowship.12 Having achieved a degree of public visibility through their long first tour and initial press reviews, Theatre of Black Women began to encounter some friction. Evaristo recalls the resistance they faced for their intersectional commitment: ‘Black and female? To many this was an alien concept and we were frequently asked to justify our existence’ (Evaristo 1993b, p.  16). The company clashed with members of Black Theatre Co-operative (BTC), in particular. BTC had been established in 1979 by Trinidadian playwright Mustapha Matura and white British director Charlie Hanson. It would later install Joan-Ann Maynard as Artistic Director (1992–1995), and champion the work of playwright Zindika, but BTC was not yet the incubator of black women’s perspectives that it would later become. Evaristo and Hilaire criticised BTC for marginalising women and depicting only unhealthy and destructive romantic couplings between black people. More than once Evaristo and Hilaire walked out of a BTC production in protest against its sexism, and on one memorable occasion at the Riverside theatre Hilaire expressed her views by pouring a drink over Hanson (Abram 2011). They were not alone in their critique. BTC’s production of Jacqueline Rudet’s Money to Live (staged at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in 1984, directed by Gordon Case), was unhappily received by the playwright; Rudet complained that ‘it was a mistake having a man direct the play’ (Rudet 1986, p. 180), and turned to TBW’s early affiliate Paulette Randall to direct her next piece, Basin (1985). Actor Norman Beaton, co-founder of the Black Theatre of Brixton, further complained that BTC perpetuated racist perspectives by ‘ghettoizing every social issue’ (Saunders 2015, p.  83). Similar accusations against black British theatre more broadly continue into the twenty-first century, as seen in Lindsey Johns’ divisive article in The Evening Standard (Johns 2010). As well as having different political priorities, TBW and BTC adopted opposing creative strategies: TBW favoured a poetic style, striving for artistic innovation as well as societal change, whereas BTC’s early productions tended towards kitchen sink realism.

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TBW did otherwise enjoy many productive partnerships with arts collectives who shared their political agenda and aesthetic preferences. Members of Black Audio Film Collective—a group formed in 1982 by John Akomfrah, Lina Gopaul, Reece Auguiste, and Trevor Mathison, among others—photographed TBW and provided technical support for their productions. TBW in turn supported and assisted Munirah Theatre Company, a women’s collective founded in 1983 who were similarly influenced by Ntozake Shange’s choreopoetry: Hilaire and Theatre of Black Women are named with thanks on the programme for On the Inside (Munirah 1986, p.  5), while Randall is personally credited on the programme for Our Bodies Are Our Maps (Munirah 1990, p.  7). The two companies also collaborated for a joint workshop facilitated by the Jamaican theatre company Sistren (Pollard 1990, p.  36). St. Hilaire remembers her relief when other black women’s voices emerged alongside and after TBW, alleviating the pressure to speak on behalf of the entire community—the ‘burden of representation’ produced by institutions, critics, and audiences alike (Mercer 1990; Mercer 1994). As well as directly assisting others in their practice, Theatre of Black Women were recognised by their contemporaries as a company to watch: in 1984 Temba Theatre Company enlisted clippings agency Durrants to collate press coverage and reviews of work by TBW, as well as other black artists and theatre companies in Britain. The results of this service are archived in Temba’s records in the Theatre and Performance Collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, providing a useful record of TBW’s reception at that time. TBW’s second major play, Pyeyucca, was also jointly written by Evaristo and Hilaire. After some time devising together they enlisted fellow Rose Bruford graduate Vanessa Revill as director. Revill (now Galvin) visited their rehearsal space in Hackney and facilitated creative exercises influenced by ideas of evolutionary memory and the work of American philosopher Jean Houston, prompting the two performers to explore visual imagery and movement. This animated the creative process, and Galvin recalls that Evaristo then wrote the majority of the script overnight (Abram 2019e). Hilaire provided additional written contributions, as credited on the production programme (Theatre of Black Women 1984), including repurposing fragments from the monologue ‘Her Blues’, which she had written in June 1981 whilst at Rose Bruford and then developed for the unstaged playscript As Deep As The Ocean Sea. The title ‘Pyeyucca’ was also Hilaire’s creation. Evaristo, Hilaire, and Galvin then worked together to give this composite written material a spatial dimension, ready for the

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stage. Looking back, Galvin considers Pyeyucca ‘a revolutionary piece […] ahead of its time’, and celebrates TBW for their commitment to black women’s self-expression coupled with a ‘modern’ approach to theatre (Abram 2019e). The final play presents Pyeyucca (played by Evaristo) as a free spirit—Galvin remembers the character living life on her own terms, refusing the constraints placed on her by others—in contrast with Laura (played by Hilaire), who suffers under societal expectations. In form, Pyeyucca matched this spirit of rebellion by refusing to conform to the verbose conventions of kitchen sink drama or the didactic qualities of agit-­ prop, instead creating a piece that was at once physical and poetic. TBW mounted an early incarnation of the play at Chats Palace on 22 October 1984, under the title ‘The Story of Black Women’. Renamed, Pyeyucca then opened on 16 November 1984 at Moonshine Community Centre in north-west London. There followed another long tour for TBW, mounting the show as part of Women’s Cultural Day events at Hackney Town Hall (17 November 1984); at International Women’s Week events at Jackson’s Lane (Anon 1985b) and in Camden (Anon 1985c); as part of Lewisham Anti-Racism Week at the Albany in Deptford (19 November); for a run at Oval House (28 November to 2 December); and in a slot at GLC’s ‘Arts in Danger’ festival at Riverside Studios on 5 March 1985, an event showcasing the importance of arts funding (Anon 1985a). Dorothea Smartt recalls seeing Pyeyucca performed at the South London Women’s Centre on Acre Lane in Brixton, and admires how TBW consciously took their shows to youth and community centres— including spaces centring women or Black women—rather than expecting their audiences to enter traditional theatres (Abram 2019b). As Smartt observes, the innovative and minimal staging of Pyeyucca made this mobility possible. Nearly thirty years after its first production, an extract from Pyeyucca would appear onstage again, as part of Unfinished Histories’ ‘Black Theatre in London’ event at Oval House on 6 December 2013, performed by Carol-Ann Walton (Unfinished Histories 2013). The year 1984 brought an historic moment in black British women’s theatre, with the first UK publication of a playscript written by black women. Motherland: West Indian Women to Britain in the 1950s had been devised by Elyse Dodgson and Marcia Smith with Vauxhall Manor School for Girls in London, based on the testimonies of twenty-three women, and was first performed at Oval House on 9 July 1982 before being published by Heinemann two years later. The script for Pyeyucca has not yet had the same treatment, though fragments of the play have been published

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without being announced as such: Hilaire’s poem of the same name was included in Maud Sulter’s 1990 anthology Passion: Discourses on Blackwomen’s Creativity, and includes a few phrases directly transposed from the play, such as the description of Laura’s ‘cool soft rounded body’ (Evaristo and Hilaire 1984, p. 15; Hilaire 1990, p. 176). In the same collection, Evaristo’s poem ‘Grandmother’ also captures several lines from Pyeyucca (Evaristo and Hilaire 1984, pp.  111–112; Evaristo in Sulter 1990, p. 75). Part of the play’s central text also features in Evaristo’s later poetry collection Island of Abraham, titled ‘Bedtime Story’ (1994b, pp. 50–59). By the 1984–1985 season TBW was steadily securing substantial amounts of funding, receiving a £10,000 contribution from the Gulbenkian Foundation as well as continuing support from the GLAA and GLC (Evaristo and Hilaire 1988). To manage and sustain this, the company sought to grow its administrative capacity. In December 1984 TBW appointed a Theatre Administrator and Publicity Manager, Zhana—who would later edit the anthology Sojourn (1988), which featured work by playwright Zindika and black British Jewish poet Isha McKenzie-Mavinga, among others.13 In April 1985 Hilaire attended a GLC course in Arts Administration at City University, taught partly by Yvonne Brewster; in June of the same year she took a publicity course for black and Asian arts groups run by GLAA; and the following year she participated in the Association of London Black Artists.14 Around this time TBW attracted the attention of national television: Channel Four approached the company asking to film its workshops and current production. TBW made their participation conditional on Channel Four employing the services of a black camerawoman and a black director; when Channel Four protested the lack of suitably trained black women Evaristo and Hilaire withdrew from the project, and the proposed programme was abandoned. Retaining the spirited attitude of their student years, Evaristo and Hilaire proved fierce advocates for black women having control of their own cultural representation. Evaristo recalls the experience with some regret that TBW turned down an opportunity to achieve greater visibility. Certainly, the company paid a high price to uphold their principles: the broadcast would have increased their audience and enhanced their legacy. However, St. Hilaire maintains that a black camerawoman would have been uniquely able to understand the company’s concerns and represent them appropriately. Similar battles continue in the creative industries today, with recent commentary noting the lack of opportunity

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for black women film directors on both sides of the Atlantic (Bello 2017; Kizito 2017). This uncompromising commitment to black women’s empowerment permeated all of TBW’s activities. Scholar Lizbeth Goodman celebrated them as ‘one of the most explicitly “feminist” of black women’s theatre companies’ (1993, p.  152). Management roles in the company were strictly reserved, as Evaristo explained: ‘As black women and black feminists, we were the driving force of Theatre of Black Women. We were at the steering wheel, in control of what we were doing, the images we created, and how they were presented’ (Goodman 1993, p. 155). Although the company was initially founded to correct the scarcity of black women onstage, it was also dedicated to giving black women control backstage— as technicians, designers, and directors. As Evaristo observed, ‘the power lies behind the scenes’ (Evaristo 1993a, p. 15). The company’s next steps were driven by this motivation to empower black women. They employed a full-time administrator, Jennifer Tyson, who was to remain with TBW until the following July.15 With an ACGB project grant of £20,500 awarded in October 1985 (Evaristo and Hilaire 1988), TBW advertised for submissions of scripts by black women playwrights. Though this call received just four responses, one was a perfect fit for TBW’s poetic style: Jackie Kay’s Chiaroscuro (Croft 1986). Kay had already had poetry published in various periodicals and anthologies, including Artrage (the magazine of the Minority Arts Advisory Service), Feminist Review, and A Dangerous Knowing (Sheba 1984), as well as a short story in Everyday Matters. She was affiliated with the Black Lesbian Group (Kay 2010, p.  200), a breakaway contingent from the Organisation of Woman of African and Asian Descent whose conference she had attended as a teenager (Kay 2016). Kay’s play Chiaroscuro, meaning ‘light and dark’, profiles four black women friends as they explore their personal identities and interpersonal relationships. It was given a rehearsed reading by Gay Sweatshop at the company’s tenth anniversary festival, ‘Gay Sweatshop ×10’, in 1985.16 At the time, British society was fracturing into distinct groups organised around ever-more specific identities; indeed, disagreement about how to engage with issues of sexuality had been part of the reason for OWAAD’s demise. By contrast, the alliance between TBW and Gay Sweatshop spoke positively of the creative and political potential of collaboration. As a company, Theatre of Black Women worked with heterosexual, bisexual, and lesbian women, and indeed Evaristo was at the time living as a lesbian. Dorothea Smartt remembers this solidarity

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across sexualities as unusual in its time, and all the more powerful for it (Abram 2019b). After the rehearsed reading of Chiaroscuro, TBW had Joan-Ann Maynard workshop the play for four weeks with four black women actors: Gabriela Pearse, Rif Shariff, Ella Wilder, and Bernardine Evaristo. Maynard was at the time undertaking an Arts Council Trainee Directorship at the Tricycle Theatre. Kay participated in this process of improvisation and wrote from recordings of the workshops, readying the play for its full production. During workshops, arts journalist and television researcher Ade Solanke made contact with TBW for the BBC2 programme Ebony, a magazine show that ran from 1982 to 1989 (Malik 2001, p. 62).17 This resulted in a two-minute feature, broadcast on 7 March 1986 (Anon 1986a), which included an interview with Maynard, clips from rehearsals, and a short excerpt to camera by Jacqueline de Peza. This excerpted section of the script portrayed the uncanny experience of seeing oneself in the mirror without recognition; it was revised in the final play and assigned to the character Opal.18 The final script continues themes common in Kay’s poetry. The character  Beth  refuses to be labelled ‘half-white’ because ‘when I walk down the street and some NF thug wants to beat me up— what does he see, white or black?’ (Kay 1987, p. 70); this repeats the clarity of vision in Kay’s 1984 poem ‘So You Think I am a Mule?’: ‘when they shout Nigger/and you shout “Shame”/ain’t nobody debating my blackness’ (Kay 2000, p. 203). Chiaroscuro opened on 19 February 1986 at London’s Soho Poly, directed by Joan-Ann Maynard (Goodman 1993, p. 254; Goddard 2011, p.  61) and performed by Jacqueline de Peza, Bernardine Evaristo, Ella Wilder, and Vinny Dhillon—another Rose Bruford graduate.19 The subsequent three-month tour travelled to arts centres, colleges, and community centres in Leicester, Preston, Sheffield, Manchester, Oxford, and across London. Chiaroscuro enjoyed a run from 8–19 April at the Drill Hall in Camden (Anon 1986c, p.  191, Anon 1986d, p.  248)—a venue known specifically for supporting gay and lesbian and alternative arts—and another from 7–11 May at Oval House (Theatre of Black Women 1986a). Press reviewers found the play ‘fast, funny’ (Bardsley 1986), ‘thoughtful’ and ‘refreshing’ (Horsford 1986), and commended its ‘wit and poetry’ (Rose 1986). In form it was visibly influenced by Ntozake Shange; Kay expressly admired the American writer’s ability to make ‘poetry work as theatre’ (Kay 1987, p. 82). The production was choreographed by Pamela

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Lofton, who went on to work with British musical group Soul II Soul and (as Pamela Maragh) on the film Flight of the Swan (1992). The script for Chiaroscuro was quickly included in Jill Davis’ edited collection Lesbian Plays, in 1987, and remains the only one of TBW’s productions to have been published in full. Thanks to this publication the play has been available for scholarly attention, and is studied in print by both Lizbeth Goodman and Lynette Goddard (Goodman 1993, pp.  151; Goddard 2007, p. 106). It was later included in The Methuen Drama Book of Plays by Black British Writers (2011), edited by Goddard. More than thirty years after its first production, Chiaroscuro was revived at the Bush Theatre from August to October 2019 by Artistic Director Lynette Linton as part of the theatre’s ‘Passing the Baton’ series. The accompanying playscript—published by Oberon—is lightly edited, excising some material that was explicitly politically confrontational and dealt with racial identification and homophobic views.20 More visible changes include the play’s  setting, adapted from a bare yard to a recording studio, and the characters’ dress. Reviews commended the revised production but queried its status, commenting that it was ‘more gig than theatre’ (Billington 2019). This echoes responses to debbie tucker green’s innovative work a few years earlier: reviewing random for the Daily Mail, Quentin Letts wrote ‘This short event is not a play, but it is certainly powerful theatre’ (Letts 2008). It is striking how often black British women’s theatre is refused permission to define itself as such. The Arts Council had received a negative show report on TBW’s 1986 production of Chiaroscuro from an internal reviewer, Jenny Topper—then Director of The Bush Theatre, and an active supporter of Black Theatre Co-operative. This rather contradicted the public appraisals and enthusiastic press response—and has since been discredited by the play’s remarkable afterlife, being published three times and mounted again three decades later. Despite the poor report, ACGB remained committed to TBW and awarded the company project funding of £26,200  in July 1986. This amount was increased from the previous year to compensate for the closure of the GLC in March 1986 (Evaristo and Hilaire 1988). That Autumn TBW collaborated with the organisation Women in Entertainment to run a conference for black women in the arts (Theatre of Black Women 1986c). Continuing to champion black women writers, the company then mounted several new artists’ work onstage. In 1987 TBW produced Miss Quashie and the Tiger’s Tail (Choong et al. 1987, p. 139), written by mother and daughter duo Gabriela and

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Jean Pearse. Though no script remains in Evaristo or Hilaire’s possession, the play reportedly drew on the traditional African Caribbean form of Anansi folk tales. The production featured Josephine Melville, who would later found the BiBi Crew, a music, dance, drama, and comedy troupe.21 Miss Quashie was advertised for an audience of ten- to thirteen-year-olds (Theatre of Black Women 1986b), and toured primarily around Inner London Education Authority venues. The year 1987 also brought two collaborations with a new writer, Ruth Harris. Harris’ The Cripple was a one-woman show about living with cerebral palsy, based on the life of Jamaica-born Londoner Pauline Wiltshire. Ever attentive to intersecting regimes of oppression, this play saw Theatre of Black Women address disability issues alongside racism and sexism. The production was enthusiastically reviewed by Jane Alexander for City Limits, writing that The Cripple ‘challenges us to consider not just our attitude to the disabled but […] our prejudice’ and pleading with readers to see it (Alexander 1987). A positive Greater London Arts Association report helped TBW to secure a further ACGB grant of £10,000 in February 1987 (Evaristo and Hilaire 1988). That same year Patricia Hilaire participated in the English National Opera’s Baylis programme, conducting workshops in schools to collect material for operatic libretti. She directed the resulting production at the Young Vic in June 1987. Evaristo was similarly involved in other initiatives at this time, including the Black Womantalk publishing collective: the anthology Black Women Talk Poetry was published in 1987, and included writings by Adjoa Andoh, Jackie Kay, Gabriela Pearse, and Dorothea Smartt. Over the summer of 1987 TBW held acting workshops with Afro Sax Theatre Company (Anon 1987), and in the autumn Harris’ second play for TBW, The Children—a drama of self-discovery, with a mythical dimension—became the tenth production since Theatre of Black Women began. A return to Evaristo and Hilaire’s own playwriting was planned for the 1987–1988 season. Evaristo promised Taiwo: a two-hander centred on twins born to a Nigerian seaman and a white Englishwoman early in the twentieth century. The same name would later be given to the father of the eponymous protagonist in Evaristo’s novel Lara. Hilaire planned to dramatise a friendship between two women united by experiences of childhood sexual abuse, in a piece called Father!. (This taboo topic would later be addressed in debbie tucker green’s 2003 play born bad.) Yet, sadly, neither Evaristo’s play nor Hilaire’s would be realised. September 1987 saw Hilaire resign from administrative and management duties at TBW. There followed a series of disappointments for the company.

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In February 1988 the Drama Advisory Group at the Greater London Arts Association decided not to continue TBW’s funding, having received a negative report from the London drama officer. The company queried the grounds for this decision, expressing concern that the committee of fifteen members—responsible for more than ten black and Asian companies in receipt of annual funding—comprised only one board member who was black and one of Asian descent. Evaristo and Ruth Harris sent a written complaint on the subject, but this was not circulated to the board despite their explicit request. Matters then escalated when they attended a Performing Arts Committee meeting later that month, and the dispute continued in written correspondence until June of that year. Ultimately the initial decision was upheld, and TBW’s GLAA funding ceased.22 An accusation of institutional racism might have been more readily received in another era, but in 1988 the Arts Council’s Eclipse Report (Brown et al. 2002)—prompted by the Macpherson report on the Metropolitan Police—was still over a decade away. TBW’s protests were not the first of such tensions at the Greater London Arts Association, though: on 6 November 1985, six staff had resigned alleging institutional racism (Sivanandan 1986). Patricia Hilaire had sat on the board of that earlier enquiry (Sivanandan 1986, p. 4). Despite this significant financial blow, Evaristo and Harris continued undeterred, retaining the hope of compensatory support. They had already submitted a speculative request to ACGB for £80,000 to mount Sandra’s Magical Adventures by Evaristo, a large-scale production with a proposed cast of fourteen. Although this specific bid was rejected, ACGB Drama Director Ian Brown approached Theatre of Black Women in March 1988 to invite them to apply for franchise funding—that is, funding to cover the company for a period of three years (Jones 1997, p. 370). They deferred their application to allow Ruth Harris to develop her next script, The Writers, which was given a rehearsed reading on 19 May 1988 as part of the second Camden Black Theatre Season. Then, in November 1988, TBW applied to the Arts Council for £28,000 per year of the franchise period (Evaristo and Hilaire 1988). The company’s plans for the following three years included a full production of The Writers and a Black British Writers’ Festival, followed by two black history plays in the 1990–1991 season: one depicting an African queen, and another exploring the black presence in London—a subject that was to recur in Evaristo’s later novel, The Emperor’s Babe (2001), which imaginatively tells of the African diaspora in Londinium in the third century AD.  TBW also stated in their

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franchise bid an intention to work with other dramatists, naming Winsome Pinnock, Maria Oshodi, and Peggy Bennette Hume as potential collaborators.23 Unfortunately, the Arts Council received mixed responses to Harris’ script for The Writers. Perhaps most notably, Yvonne Brewster found it to be compromised by ‘shallow’ characterisation and ‘unlikely dialogue’ (Brewster 1988). These apparently rather damning comments are characteristic of Brewster’s show reports of the time; Graham Saunders has interpreted this as part of the director’s efforts to ‘rais[e] ambitions and expectations’ rather than patronising black theatre with special dispensation (Saunders 2015, p. 88). But it was not Brewster’s reports alone that were dismissive of contemporary black theatre, and neither were these critiques unique to TBW. Many such reports register the distance between the established and relatively mainstream theatre-makers enlisted as reviewers and the innovative new companies and artists under review. TBW’s work was characterised by radical politics and experimental aesthetics, which was markedly different from the work of the previous generation and did not fit easily within the Arts Council’s evaluative framework. Indeed, the significance of music, movement, and symbolic staging to TBW’s plays makes the written scripts a weak indicator of their value; confirming the non-naturalism of this particular play, The Writers was described in contemporary publicity materials as presenting ‘a world seated in reality but wrapped in magic and history’ (Camden Arts & Entertainments 1988). Of course, TBW did not emerge fully formed, and was not beyond critique; the company needed space and support to develop. But the system of review implicitly accepts a limit to available resources and perpetuates a state of competition amongst ‘minority’ companies. So, whether this particular script report was part of an attempt to mature the critical infrastructure for black theatre or a result of generational differences or conflicting values, Brewster’s words had immediate and tangible consequences for Theatre of Black Women. The ambivalent response to The Writers came shortly after poor show reports for The Children in 1987, and ACGB was concerned that TBW had not yet appointed a director or a designer for its next production. While commenting blandly that it ‘remained sympathetic to the aims of the company’, ACGB rejected Theatre of Black Women’s 1988 franchise grant application (Evaristo and Hilaire 1988). Without this significant financial support, Theatre of Black Women was forced to disband.

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In this sad end to their story, TBW focalise a broader history of British arts funding in the 1980s.24 The company’s reliance on ad hoc project funding precluded them from planning productions far in advance, and made it impossible to retain regular technical and administrative staff. Evaristo recalls how precarious their practice was: ‘Often we would be in the middle of rehearsals before we knew if the production was to be funded’ (Evaristo 1996, p. 132). Such conditions also affected their access to venues: given their insecure financial status, the company needed to charge the venue to host the production rather than relying on income from box office sales. This, in turn, affected the kinds of audiences they were able to reach, as venues charged higher ticket prices to ensure they would recoup their costs. Grant applications require a significant investment of both time and money; too often, those companies who most warrant support are unable to access it. Evaristo remained active in the sector for some time after the closure of TBW. She penned articles championing black theatre for Everywoman magazine (1992) and Artrage (1994a), and continued to facilitate the development of other artists by organising playwriting workshops: one, taught by Winsome Pinnock, was the crucible for Blest Be The Tie by Doña Daley (later produced at the Royal Court, in 2004).25 Evaristo worked with both Gay Sweatshop and Black Theatre Forum (BTF), and in her role as BTF’s administrator she coordinated a conference reflecting on the decade since the organisation formed. Titled Future Histories: The First National Workshop Forum on Black Theatre, it took place at London’s Southbank Centre on 29 and 30 November 1995, and was funded by the London Arts Board, Arts Council England, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts. It also served as a launch event for BTF’s quarterly magazine Frontseat, which Evaristo edited. More than 200 delegates attended the conference, including some who would later become scholars of black British cultural production: Lynette Goddard, Ruth Tompsett, and Stephen Bourne (Terracciano n.d.). Documentation relating to the Future Histories conference resulted in a rich archive, collected as part of a project of the same name led by Alda Terracciano and now housed at Goldsmiths, University of London. Evaristo’s own creative practice diversified after the closure of TBW. Her first poetry collection, Island of Abraham, was published in 1994. Her debut novel, Lara (1997), defied literary convention by taking verse form, building on the poetic monologues she wrote in her college years. Describing its genesis, Evaristo recalls the link between that early onstage expression of her creativity and the book that followed: ‘when I wrote for

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theatre I always wrote choreopoems, dramatic poems […] the [novel-in-­ verse] form has chosen me’ (Niven 2004, p. 284). Her latest novel, Girl, Woman, Other (Evaristo 2019a), takes another form again: Evaristo has described it as ‘fusion fiction’ (Sethi 2019). Returning occasionally to her performance background, Evaristo contributed to Mapping the Edge (2002), a site-specific reworking of the Medea myth for theatre company wilson+wilson involving a walking tour of Sheffield. She has also written a play for BBC Radio 4, Madame Bitterfly and The Stockwell Diva (2003). Several of her books have been adapted for radio: the novella Hello Mum for BBC Radio 4 in 2012, and the verse novel The Emperor’s Babe in 2013. Evaristo is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London, and Vice Chair of the Royal Society of Literature.26 Over the years she has established herself as a successful and much enjoyed novelist, receiving an MBE in 2009 for her role as ‘a major voice in the multicultural panorama of British literature’. Wide-ranging in theme and form, Evaristo’s books recover the histories and imagine the possibilities of the African diaspora, ‘exploding the myth of Britain as monocultural and “racially” pure’ (Niven 2004, p. 291). In a powerful statement that the telling of history is never finished, Evaristo revised and expanded her 1997 novel Lara by a third in 2009, reaching further into the multiple branches of her own global family tree. Soul Tourists (2005) is a mixed-genre novel that embeds centuries of African diasporic history within the narrative of a contemporary road trip. Blonde Roots (2008) creatively satirises the history of slavery by inverting its logic and locations; it won the 2009 Big Red Read Award, and saw Evaristo nominated for the Orange Prize for Fiction and a finalist in the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award (United States). Mr Loverman (2013) won her the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT fiction at the Publishing Triangle Awards, United States, and the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize in the UK; the novel hints at the hidden lives of Britain’s older Caribbean population through the character Barrington Jedediah Walker, a septuagenarian Antiguan-Londoner whose homosexual relationship with his childhood friend is a long-kept secret from everyone, including his wife. Girl, Woman, Other (2019a) was a joint winner of the 2019 Booker Prize with Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments (2019), winner of the 2020 British Book Awards Fiction Book of the Year, was shortlisted for the 2020 Orwell prize for Political Fiction  and the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction (United States), and longlisted for the International Book of the Year at the Australian Book Industry Awards and (at the time of writing) the Women’s Prize for Fiction (UK).

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The novel follows the lives of twelve distinct characters, including Amma: a lesbian socialist playwright, whom Evaristo has described as ‘a more extreme version of my younger self’ (Donnell 2019, p. 102). As well as ensuring the representation of black communities in print, Evaristo has actively supported the development and recognition of black writers. In 1995 she and Ruth Borthwick co-founded Spread the Word, a writers’ development agency in London; out of this, Evaristo created The Complete Works (2008–2010), an Arts Council-funded mentoring programme for black and Asian poets. In 2010 she co-edited with Daljit Nagra the poetry anthology Ten (Evaristo and Nagra eds 2010), giving a platform to new voices in contemporary British poetry; the collection received a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. In 2012 she founded the African Poetry Prize; winners include Warsan Shire (2013), who went on to become the first Poet Laureate of London. Looking back, Evaristo does not regret the end of her theatre career. She acknowledges that still, nearly three decades after Theatre of Black Women first formed in order to take control of the representation of black women on the British stage, ‘[a]ctors have it so tough and unless they generate their own productions, they are constantly at the mercy of others—waiting to be chosen’ (Evaristo 2019b). Neither was Theatre of Black Women the only foray into the arts for Patricia St. Hilaire. In the decade that followed the company’s closure she twice wrote poetic narratives for Adzido Pan-African Dance Ensemble, giving voice to the hidden meanings of the traditional dances in African Skies (1994) and The Spirit of Okin (1998).27 Though she no longer works in the arts sector she avidly attends exhibitions and black cultural events in the capital and beyond. Paulette Randall’s participation in TBW was limited to its earliest activities, but her contribution to the cultural industries has been sustained. She served as Artistic Director of Talawa after Yvonne Brewster, and was the first black female director at a West End venue, for August Wilson’s Fences (produced at the Duchess Theatre, 2013, transferred from Theatre Royal, Bath). She also produced the television programmes Desmond’s and The Real McCoy, and has directed episodes of Holby City and Casualty for the BBC. She was awarded an MBE in 2015 for services to drama, and an honorary degree from Brunel University in the same year. Though Theatre of Black Women lasted just six years, its members’ impact on British culture has been profound—and is ongoing.

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Come to Mama, Moving Through, and Tiger Teeth Clenched Not to Bite (1982) Evaristo’s three pieces from 1982, Come to Mama, Moving Through, and Tiger Teeth Clenched Not to Bite, survive in typescript in her personal collection—although the last is missing two pages, such is the precarious nature of the paper archive. Like TBW’s later plays, this early work prioritises poetry over didacticism and symbolism over social realism. Key themes also recur in the company’s subsequent plays. Of course, these works were more complex and layered in performance than can be seen from their textual remains. Understanding writing as a process as much as a product, this section of the chapter traces the development of Evaristo’s ideas and expression across a single year’s work. Evaristo’s Come to Mama—a monologue written for her final assessment on the Community Theatre Arts programme at Rose Bruford College—amounts to just 146 short lines. It examines the theme of growing up, evolving in both subject and style from the wild liberty of childhood to the slower pace and more cynical perspective of adulthood. Opening in the first person, Come to Mama speaks of the lifelong quest to anchor the grammatical assertion of a singular and unified self: How far back Do I have to look To find out From where I come […] … the me you see The I of today (Evaristo 1982a, p. 1)

This searching ‘I’ then gives way to a soothing third-person perspective: ‘Let her be/Let her be’ (Evaristo 1982a, p. 1). This reads at first as a retrospective address, as if the mature subject is speaking back to her distressed younger self. Yet what seems initially to be the enactment of an intrapsychic split emerges by the end of the poem as a separate entity: the speaker’s mother. Though her words are written without attribution, they contain their own identity markers: ‘I love you daughter/Love you always’ (Evaristo 1982a, p.  3). Finally, issuing the appeal that titles the poem, mother implores daughter to find refuge in her. Here, ‘Mama’ is named from without, identified by her caring role. The perspectival slippage

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between these two speaking subjects, self and m/other, formally enacts the theme of relationship. Each character ultimately achieves a distinct status, but is identified only through interaction with the other: they are constituted as interdependent. The backwards gaze of the lines ‘To find out/From where I come’ would seem to suggest that individual identity is to be found in a geographical ‘somewhere’ that is other than ‘here’, aligning with the histories of diaspora. But the poem then turns towards an intimate domestic scene to locate its subject. It describes filial relationships in enigmatic, clipped images: ‘Daddy stabbing/Mummy soothing/Leaving scars/Leaving themselves’ (Evaristo 1982a, p. 2). The final lines of the play return to the original speaker in a cyclical loop suggestive of resolution. Responding to her mother’s call, the speaker declares her parents to be a constitutive presence within herself: ‘Mama, Papa/In me/Here’. Crucially, her identity is located within rather than on her body. As such, Evaristo refuses to essentialise black women. Instead, she posits a relational model of subjectivity, where the self emerges through encounter with her (imperfect) parents. The scripted slippage between speakers in Come to Mama is confirmed in the play’s planned staging: a single actor incarnates the whole chorus of characters. Admittedly the text was written as an individual assignment for a drama course, but the cast of one is more than a contextual accident. Rather, it is a vital and political act in a nation that was not yet alert to intersectionality or committed to inclusion: alone on a bare stage, the black female body is insistently visible; yet, that body does not determine the parameters of identity, as the actor’s skill brings several different characters to life. This technique was to recur across the next three decades of black British women’s theatre: SuAndi’s The Story of M (1994) has the lone performer play her own mother, while debbie tucker green’s random (2008) has one black actress incarnate a family of four as well as other auxiliary characters. The cast of one serves to explore—and, indeed, to emphasise—the importance of the relational. Whereas Come to Mama compressed several voices into a one-woman performance, Moving Through was staged by the Royal Court’s entire youth company—a group mixed in terms of gender and ethnicity (Bernard 2017). This differs starkly from the naturalistically named characters and corresponding cast lists given for the other plays on the bill for the May 1982 Talking Black showcase. It shows the influence of Ntozake Shange, whose choreopoems mobilise substantial casts to demonstrate the diversity

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of black women (Croft 1986). Having multiple actors deliver the inner monologue of a single female character visually and vocally illustrates her psychic complexity, showing the protagonist to be formed from many conflicting facets. It also addresses its audience, asking that different people learn to imaginatively inhabit each others’ perspectives, and proposing common experience as a rallying point. The casting of Moving Through enacts the black feminist mantra ‘many voices, one chant’, which titled a special issue of the British journal Feminist Review in 1984 (Amos et al. 1984) and underpinned much contemporary creative and scholarly practice, such as the pioneering book The Heart of the Race (Bryan et al. 1985). In both of Evaristo’s early plays the language used to describe the setting responds to the lived experiences of the human population therein. In Moving Through the speaker mourns social constraints by making them concrete, imaging her disenchantment in a claustrophobic urban environment: ‘tower prisons blocking my vision/Car fumes constipating the air’ (Evaristo 1982a, p. 3). By contrast Come to Mama describes open spaces and natural greenery: ‘Running wild, running free/Follow her heart/ Hear her beat/Climbing trees/Scouring woods/Darting high/Crawling low’ (1982a, p. 1). Both pieces borrow functions of the body to represent the relationship between people and the environment; whereas Moving Through laments visual and digestive blockages, Come to Mama celebrates the unimpeded rhythm of the heartbeat. Moving Through expands on themes first presented in Come to Mama, such as childhood, adolescence, and convent schooling. But while Come to Mama is structured primarily by the manifestation of gendered constraints, Moving Through adds explicit description of racial injustice. The speaker dejectedly describes ‘Open doors that closed/When my natural colouring peered round the corner’ (Evaristo 1982b, p. 2). This strategy of synecdoche—where skin colour stands in for the person as a whole— shows how physical appearance becomes fetishised, replacing subjecthood. Similar episodes can be found in the earliest of post-war black British writing, such as Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, where the character Galahad personifies the colour of his skin in order to distance himself from it, blaming ‘Black’ for the hostility he experiences (Selvon 2009 [1956], p. 77). Moving Through shows how racial inequality adds to and complicates gender-based violence:

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As woman I walk home at night In fear of those that break the law. As black woman I walk home at night In fear of those that police the law. (1982b, p. 3)

The first line of each verse makes the speaker an archetype; she is not an individual but an exemplar, an embodiment of the categories ‘woman’ and ‘black woman’. Evaristo here anticipates the work of Audre Lorde, whose striking words similarly register the chasm between white feminist politics and black women’s experiences: Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you; we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs upon the reasons they are dying. (Lorde 1995, p. 288)

Similar statements of social inequality recur in black British women’s theatre. SuAndi repeats Evaristo’s concerns about the police in The Story of M. Having raised her mixed-race son and daughter in mid-twentieth-­ century Manchester, the protagonist curses those who are supposed to safeguard her and her family: ‘I hate the police every last man of them./ And don’t tell me they are here for my/protection./I could tell you some stories about the/police’ (SuAndi 2002, p. 10). debbie tucker green, too, hints at the antagonistic history between law enforcers and black communities, in random (2008). Evaristo’s script for the Talking Black showcase ends on a question: ‘Tell me—what is the black woman?’ (Evaristo 1982b, p. 4). In this, the speaker appears unable or unwilling to determine her own identity and ascribe meaning to her own body; instead, she invites inscriptions from without. Framing the ‘black woman’ as ‘what’ rather than ‘who’ exaggerates the reductive logic of the singular ‘the’. In fact, this rhetorical question has already been decisively answered in the casting of the play: Moving Through affirms that ‘the black woman’ is in fact multitudes, as manifested by the large and diverse cast of the Royal Court’s youth company. That the play never names its speaker allows for this expansive, inclusive portrayal.

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Moving Through features a line that would title the next text in the genetic sequence, describing the speaker’s ‘large appetite/with/tiger teeth clenched not to bite’ (Evaristo 1982b, p.  1). Sadly, several pages appear to be missing from the central action in the only preserved script of Tiger Teeth. However, the remainder of the document clearly shows that the play’s thematic concerns and aesthetic approach continue from Evaristo’s previous writing. There was no direct transposition of lines between Come to Mama and Moving Through, but Tiger Teeth borrows explicitly from both earlier pieces. Its protagonist, again, is an unnamed woman. She explores her identity by looking variously to her parents’ circumstances, to cultural constructions of blackness and femininity, and to her own childhood experiences. Evaristo excerpts large swathes from Come to Mama for Tiger Teeth, repeating its depiction of childhood freedom and uninhibited movement. She also repurposes the landscapes from that earlier piece: Tiger Teeth shifts from the trees and woods of a playful childhood to the destruction of nature by a rigid social order. The urban environment of Moving Through recurs in Tiger Teeth, too, in ‘towers of despair’ (1982c, p. 7). Tiger Teeth is highly stylised: like Evaristo’s previous pieces, it takes an experimental and fragmented form, using song, music, and movement to convey meaning. Percussion powerfully supplements voice: the desperate question ‘Where’s her heart?/Where’s her beat?’ is answered by ten drumbeats, aurally announcing the protagonist’s continuing corporeality (Evaristo 1982c, p. 3). But the approach to casting Tiger Teeth was markedly different from that for Evaristo’s prior play, Moving Through. The typescript signals for two mysterious guards to appear alongside the unnamed protagonist: they circumscribe the physical space around her, and constrain her words with their interruptions. The guards enter the stage first, marking out the shape of an octagon using red tape and placing symbolic objects at each of its points, which the protagonist later uses in turn. Curiously, however, on Evaristo’s manuscript, the stage direction specifying the appearance of the guards is crossed through in two hands. It seems likely that the Amsterdam production of Tiger Teeth saw Paulette Randall and Patricia Hilaire play the guards, and Bernardine Evaristo the woman, since a diagram sketched on the script arranges ‘B’ towards the front of the stage, flanked to the rear by ‘P’ and ‘P’, forming a triangle facing the audience. So whereas Moving Through staged a single character using a large cast, Tiger Teeth yields to the more traditional equivalence of actor to character. Moving Through was, then, more

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formally innovative than its successor. The casting of individual actors to play each character in Tiger Teeth corrects existing accounts where Evaristo’s piece has been listed (alongside Hilaire and Randall’s concurrent productions) as a one-woman performance (Aston 1995, p. 89). In some ways Moving Through was a more psychologically nuanced play than its successor, too. Tiger Teeth borrows from the speech that earlier play attributed to its central character, redistributing it across the three individuals: guard i

Commonwealth Comprehensive Convent girl guard i Unprepared woman Jesus loves me guard i Not enough guard ii Wrong credentials (Evaristo 1982c, p. 2) woman

These staccato statements are addressed to and are about the woman, forming an oppositional interpersonal exchange. By contrast, attributing this sequence of abusive judgements to a single—albeit mass-cast—character in Moving Through vividly demonstrates her self-criticism and inner conflict, revealing the insidious internalisation of oppression and the way in which it fragments the self. In Tiger Teeth the guards function as gatekeepers of a hostile society; in Moving Through, the woman has been socialised to speak others’ judgement on herself. The typescript for Tiger Teeth has been annotated and amended by hand, offering an insight into Evaristo’s writing process: she typically moves through successive phases of paring down and deletions, excising phrases of direct explication and exposition. This moves the final play away from a didactic mode and towards the poetic. For instance, several lines historicising the black presence in Britain are annotated with a question mark and struck through—though the sequencing of these emendations is not clear. One such section refers to the recruitment campaign that summoned men and women from the Commonwealth to work in the ‘motherland’:     Invitation Soon forgotten Mother used to wipe the floor Father works heavy on sites Sons rejected year by year Daughters paying the price (Evaristo 1982c, p. 6)

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Further handwritten amendments variously redact the expectant arrival of migrant men and women in ‘their land of hope and glory’ (p. 6), silence direct mention of Enoch Powell’s incendiary ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech of April 1968, obscure the activities of the National Front, and choose not to accuse citizens and politicians of being culpable by their inertia. Removing these details loosens the resulting play’s connection to the specific historical and cultural context of post-war Britain. Nonetheless, the script retains its emotional resonance—and, without these specific references, arguably becomes more accessible to a demographically distant audience. In Tiger Teeth Clenched Not to Bite, Evaristo thus fosters interpretive relationships between the stage and spectators, inviting the audience to engage imaginatively and empathically with the characters portrayed.

Silhouette (1983) For Theatre of Black Women’s first full production, Silhouette, Evaristo drew again from her own early writing. She retains typescripts for both this and the company’s following play, Pyeyucca. Although it is unclear whether these texts are final or complete, the scripts provide substantial detail about staging and choreography. The central character in Silhouette rehearses the inner turmoil of the female protagonist in Moving Through and Tiger Teeth. Now named, as Anna, she is of mixed English and African heritage, in her early twenties, and living in London. In a return to the format of Moving Through, Anna takes back some of the statements that were redistributed to the guards in Tiger Teeth Clenched Not to Bite: ‘Nigger! Too black! Not black enough! Too white—Not white enough!’ (Evaristo and Hilaire 1983, p. 13). Alongside this central role, played by Evaristo, Silhouette adds another character: Zenobia (played by Hilaire). Zenobia is the spirit of a woman who died at forty years of age whilst enslaved in Barbados two centuries prior to the playtime. The production thereby brings together aspects of all three preceding scripts: the internalised oppression voiced in Moving Through; the embodiment of multiple characters that featured in Tiger Teeth; and the experiences of girls and women prioritised in Come to Mama. The play’s intersectional consciousness was recognised in an anonymous review for Artrage, reporting that its ‘very pronounced, strong and unapologetic’ black politics was equalled by its ‘strong feminist element’ (Anon 1984b). The reviewer for City Limits, Barney Bardsley, found Silhouette a ‘convincing and moving piece of theatre’ (Bardsley 1984).

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Costume was simple in the forty-minute performance (Sulter 1983). As Zenobia, Hilaire was clothed in a long dark skirt, a light blouse worn untucked, and an apron, with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders and a dark cloth covering her hair (see Fig. 3). As Anna, Evaristo wore utilitarian overalls with a belt. The stage was equally plainly dressed, featuring just two wooden stools, a length of vivid red material, and a few symbolic props—such as long white evening gloves, signalling Anna’s refusal to accept herself as black. The cover image for this book reproduces a contact sheet of a series of photographs of Silhouette taken by Ingrid Pollard, showing the play’s simple setting. Since the production had no scenery or stage dressing to moor it to a recognisable reality, the characters’ voices served to suggest their geographical locations: Anna speaks with a south London accent, while Zenobia is given a Bajan accent as well as being scripted to have ‘strongly African features’ (Evaristo and Hilaire 1983, p. 2). Between them, then, the two women embody the three apexes of the triangulated ‘black Atlantic’ (Gilroy 1993). Silhouette comprises a series of flashbacks, resulting in an episodic structure one reviewer found ‘labouring’ (Tappin 1984). These flashbacks are performed and commented upon alternately by the two protagonists, making their personal pasts available for retrospective evaluation. Through Anna and Zenobia the play compresses two centuries and two continents, placing global histories alongside scenes from contemporary London. The play thus creates an aesthetic of juxtaposition, reliant on the relationship between past and present, there and here. Specifically, the irruption of Zenobia’s narrative destabilises Anna’s mundane rituals and routines, and the slave-woman’s presence produces a comparison between ancestral exploitation and the pressures of contemporary urban life, exemplifying what Deirdre Heddon terms ‘postmemory’: a remembered connection between generations (Heddon 2008, p.  69). A similar technique structures Kwame Kwei-Armah’s later play Fix Up (first produced at the National Theatre in 2004), in which the contemporary character Alice speaks the narrative of a Grenadian slave-woman named Mary Gould (Kwei-Armah 2009, p. 133). Michael Pearce has registered this technique as reminiscent of ancestral spirit possession (Pearce 2017, pp.  61–62). The distorted chronology might also be compared with the work of debbie tucker green, whose early unpublished play Two Women (2000) prevents its characters from occupying the same stage-time (Osborne 2010, p. 38), and whose generations (2005) Lynette Goddard describes as uniting ‘past and present South African generations that are not all existing in the same moment’

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Fig. 3  Theatre of Black Women, Pyeyucca (1984). Evaristo personal collection, London. Programme designed by Ingrid Pollard; printed at Lenthall Road Workshop

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(Goddard 2007, p. 183). In Fix Up, Silhouette, and tucker green’s plays the characters’ disparate lives become legible through their relation to one another. We might also read a further comment on the performers themselves, whose gendered and racialised bodies are the conduit for the layered performance: as black women in Britain, they share the histories they depict, yet yield their bodies to give voice and movement to those who are otherwise absent. Silhouette opens with Zenobia and Anna independently sharing their stories. There is no direct interaction between the two characters, but the continuity of their lines stresses the persistence of sexist oppression across time and around the world: The glance that woman holds is a thousand years away anna The pain her heart feels is a thousand years deep zenobia The tears she once held are a thousand years past anna Her cries are from those times past zenobia Her time is lost to the night anna The night in her eyes. (Evaristo and Hilaire 1983, p. 3) zenobia

As in Evaristo’s Come to Mama, both Anna and Zenobia anonymise their speech by using third-person pronouns, producing an archetypal female position—‘woman’—that is true to both the past and the present, to Africa and its diaspora. Anna then withdraws from this shared scene, while Zenobia goes on to describe a woman being pursued by a negative presence that is figured as a shadow. This symbol is little developed in the text, appearing mainly as a series of suggestive ellipses: ‘following as a big cloud/looming near and always/on the verge of’ (1983, p. 3). Such textual silence presents the threat as unknown and unknowable. Onstage, though, it is made tangibly present. According to the stage directions, a shadow is formed from the physical positioning of the women whilst performing this section: Zenobia stands close to the audience, while Anna stands directly behind her, with lighting used to silhouette Anna against the cream gauze backdrop. The two women are thus arranged ‘as one shape’ (Evaristo and Hilaire 1983, p. 3). This visually repeats the format of their speech, where each character echoes the other’s phrasing. By appearing as Zenobia’s shadow and repeating the slave-woman’s movements, Anna is emptied of her own specificity. At the same time, her body

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is grotesquely enlarged and distorted by its silhouetted projection. This makes her mundane movements seem strange, inviting the audience’s scrutiny. As Lib Taylor observes, the use of shadows onstage often signifies the iterative and ritualised performance of identity (Taylor 2003, p. 178). By positioning one actor as the mimic of another, Silhouette shows that individuals are not independent entities but interdependent, bound by the same (gendered, racialised) social scripts. After this symbolic scene Anna takes over the narration. She describes the abduction of a young girl into slavery, narrating Zenobia’s experiences without naming her: the child is ‘taken’, her limbs are ‘dipped in boiling water’ then ‘shackled’ (Evaristo and Hilaire 1983, p. 4). The use of the passive tense renders the slave traders grammatically absent from the trauma they inflict; even the intimate violence of lashings is rendered by an invisible subject, as the ‘snake with nine tails’ appears to strike of its own volition (1983, p. 4). The narrator’s inability to name the traders reflects the socio-cultural imperative that she must not (be seen to) see them, as it would constitute an affront to the racialised social order. bell hooks records how minimising the presence of the self has been a necessary survival strategy for the enslaved and their descendants: ‘black people learned to appear before whites as though they were zombies, cultivating the habit of casting the gaze downward so as not to appear uppity’ (hooks 1992, p. 168). Yet, despite the slavers being bodily absent from the stage and grammatically absent from Anna’s speech, their identity is implied by their described behaviours. This anticipates the stage aesthetic of Black Mime Theatre, where absent characters take shape through other performers’ gestures and bodily responses. Anna’s monologue ends by revealing that the slave-­ woman she speaks of is eventually raped, and a child is conceived. Zenobia then interrupts by singing a spiritual song, positioning her as the protagonist in Anna’s tale. Later, she speaks of the experience in her own voice, describing the birth of and subsequent battles with her daughter, Lucy. Silhouette then shifts from delivering these distinct perspectives in parallel to having Anna and Zenobia interact directly. Stage directions designate an area downstage right as a ‘neutral time slot’ (Evaristo and Hilaire 1983, p. 5). There, Anna and Zenobia discuss the flashback scenes they have observed. The lights are raised fully on this space, indicating through the sign system of the stage that these moments together provide clarity and insight to their respective experiences. Anna criticises Zenobia’s reliance on religion, perceiving it as keeping her powerless:

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zenobia anna

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Why do you sing those Jesus songs? He’s all I have to depend on. If I didn’t have him for support I would not survive. You might learn to fight back! (1983, p. 5)

This intergenerational conflict over religion anticipates—and, by extending the temporal gap to two centuries, exaggerates—the theme of Zindika’s unpublished play Paper and Stone (1989): Betty, the elder sister of protagonist Brenda, is estranged from their mother for choosing a life away from the church. In Silhouette, Zenobia responds to this criticism by inviting Anna to reflect on her own childhood attendance at church. At least one press reviewer recognised ‘the similarities that […] exist in their separate but almost identical lives’ (Tappin 1984). That Zenobia and Anna share so much despite their many differences is striking as an indictment of enduring socio-cultural inequalities. The next scene is set in a fast-food outlet, conveyed through simple props like a stool and a branded cup. Anna describes a male patron’s unwanted and increasingly aggressive sexual advances towards her. Paralleling this experience alongside reference to Zenobia’s rape recognises the spectrum of violence against women. Anna speaks in the restrictive constraints of rhyming verse, formally enacting her loss of freedom. Alone onstage, she implies the man’s actions with her own responses: anna

If I had no arms sure pull in my seat/ as I have/ thanks all the same/ now I’d like to eat/ alone I mean/ it is possible and my choice/ so go away please/ before my appetite’s at a loss (Evaristo and Hilaire 1983, p. 9, lineation original)

The fast-food restaurant appears here—and in debbie tucker green’s Two Women (2000)—as a particularly gendered public site, patrolled by men who wilfully invade the privacy and personal space of women dining alone. Both plays create an analogy between alimentary and sexual appetites; the cheap food and throwaway culture image the societal view that women, too, are objects for consumption.28 When Anna dares to resist the unnamed man in Silhouette, he plays victim, accusing her of racism. Again, we see his words and actions only through her responses:

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anna

Aha I knew it was coming/ so I’m ashamed of my race/ I don’t want you cos of your black face/ […]/ say I’m a turncoat sister/ take white men to bed (1983, p. 10)

The non-naturalistic staging, with the male antagonist absent, allows Theatre of Black Women to reconfigure everyday realities. Anna is able to speak back without fear of escalating danger; she has a voice, while the man is silenced. The play’s juxtaposition of historical periods allows Anna’s actions to be read as a dialogic counterpart to Zenobia’s experiences. In this staging Anna emphatically recuperates the space, voice, and agency that Zenobia was denied. Anna’s connection with Zenobia takes on a further dimension when she doubles as the enslaved woman’s daughter: ‘Anna enters as Lucy’ (1983, p.  10). A similar layering of performance occurs in Jackie Kay’s Chiaroscuro, where the character Yomi doubles as Aisha’s grandmother (Kay 1987, p. 60). In Silhouette, doubling Anna as Lucy conflates their biographies and biology. Zenobia makes the connection explicit: ‘She was mulatto … like you’ (1983, p. 13). Lucy was fathered by Zenobia’s white slave-master, and is unable to endure the resultant racial mixedness. She identifies with her father, as white, and rejects her maternal heritage: ‘black mother, don’t touch me!!’ (1983, p. 12). Lucy has internalised colonial colourism, valuing lighter skin and denigrating darker. Although the play does not explicitly state how far this might also describe Anna’s experiences, the strategy of cast doubling powerfully contains the two histories and geographies in one performer’s body. Zenobia concludes her historical narrative by telling of her own death: she was beaten by her master, Lucy’s father, as punishment for running away to be with her daughter. Stage directions show she steps away from the centre of the stage and a blackout falls in the auditorium, enacting her death as a sensory shutdown that also affects the audience. The same strategy concludes SuAndi’s The Story of M, similarly engaging the audience. For the final sequence of Silhouette, a spotlight is then raised on Anna, who stands centre-stage holding two dolls: one black, one white. Given her mixed ethnic heritage, she is unable to locate herself within the binary they represent, and eventually she discards the dolls and collapses on the floor. The typescript ends with Zenobia speaking healing words to Anna: in this poignant tableau, the past ministers to the present. However, the

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fragility of the archive forecloses further analysis: the final fragment in the manuscript for Silhouette was borrowed from Evaristo’s Tiger Teeth, and that earlier script continues to a further line, suggesting that additional material may be missing.

Pyeyucca (1984) Whereas Silhouette brings together two distinct characters, Pyeyucca has the two performers incarnate and then reintegrate the split self. Protagonist Laura (played by Patricia Hilaire) has internalised white hegemonic ideals of beauty. Her inner struggle is made explicit by incarnating her alter ego, the carefree Pyeyucca (played by Bernardine Evaristo). A short summary prefaces the typescript for Pyeyucca, listing the two characters as both twenty-six years old (Evaristo and Hilaire 1984, p. 2). Production photographs (Fig. 4) show that costume was simple, with both performers barefoot in lightweight loose-fitting vests and plain trousers: this uniform connects the two characters, visually asserting their constitutive co-­ dependence—and anticipating the colour-coded clothing in Black Mime Theatre’s Drowning (1991), as while Pyeyucca’s outfit is brightly coloured, Laura’s is blandly blue. Adhering to the demanding and damaging ideals of white beauty, stage directions specify Laura’s hair as chemically straightened and tied into a restrictive bun, and her face as concealed behind excessive make-up. By contrast, Pyeyucca has ‘a nappy head’ and is bare-­ faced (1984, p. 2). Further polarising the two characters, Laura’s movements are described as ‘rigid, sharp and controlled’ (1984, p. 2), whereas Pyeyucca’s speech is flowing, almost poetic, and she moves freely. In appearance, movement, and manner the two characters are fundamentally connected but visibly different. The splitting of Pyeyucca from Laura enacts a dissociated identity, which might usefully be understood through the theoretical framework of ‘double consciousness’ articulated by W.E.B.  Du Bois. Pyeyucca uses unconventional casting to manifest the damaging psychosocial division that Du Bois describes: ‘one ever feels his twoness’ (2008 [1909], p. 12). Of course, Du Bois’ study focuses on a disempowered masculine subject, and there is a risk of eclipsing the black British context with the more thoroughly theorised African American one—as both Delia Jarrett-­ Macauley (1996, p. xii) and Lola Young (2000, p.  48) have cautioned. But black British women’s theatre has visibly transplanted this ‘twoness’ from the context of transatlantic slavery in order to capture the

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Fig. 4  Ingrid Pollard, ‘Theatre of Black Women, Pyeyucca’ (1984). Evaristo personal collection, London. Production photograph. (Left-right: Patricia Hilaire, Bernardine Evaristo)

contemporary experiences of young black women in Britain. A similar psychic disorder also structures Bonnie Greer’s play Munda Negra (1994), in which a woman is fractured into her adult and childhood selves, Anna and little Anna.29 In both this and Pyeyucca, the protagonists have been socialised at an early age to covet whiteness (Goddard 2008, p. 105): the adult’s mental ill-health is rooted in the child’s self-loathing. Reviewer Barney Bardsley sensitively acknowledges that ‘[t]he point of Pyeyucca lies not in pragmatic details but in the wanting—the trapped black desire for liberation’ (Bardsley 1985). By demonstrating the psychic destruction wreaked by white supremacy, the play equips its audience to better care for themselves and each other. In an interview conducted around the same time as TBW were developing Pyeyucca, Evaristo described the play as drawing on personal material. However, she later made some handwritten edits to the interview transcript that de-emphasise the play’s self-expressive qualities. These

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altered the statement that Pyeyucca is ‘mostly autobiographical’ to ‘partly autobiographical’, and deleted a summary saying the play shows a mixed-­ race girl denying her paternal black heritage—a section she had prefaced as ‘based on my experience’ (Evaristo and Hilaire c. 1985, p.  5). The resulting, rather more distanced framing of Pyeyucca moves decisively away from the personal content of Evaristo’s earlier work. Yet the subjects covered in the play clearly remained significant to Evaristo, as she later revised material from Pyeyucca for her poetry collection Island of Abraham (1994b). Director Vanessa Revill recalls how important choreography was to the sign system of Pyeyucca (Abram 2019e). The play reportedly positioned its performers in symbolic ways, recalling the shadow sequence in Silhouette. Previewing the production for City Limits, Maud Sulter affirmed that the play’s message was powerfully conveyed through ‘movement and poetic language’ (Sulter 1984a). The textual archive is unable to preserve this aspect of the performance in its fullness, and the script offers a tantalising apology for its inevitable silence: ‘Most of the play was choreographed with movements that I am unable to notate’ (Evaristo and Hilaire 1984, p. 2). There are a few stage directions embedded in the script, and further information can be gleaned from photographs that illustrate some of the performed sequences. Evaristo remembers that the company’s refusal to conform to the established realist dramatic tradition was not always welcomed by their audience. Some spectators dismissed Pyeyucca’s imagistic style as inaccessible and ‘self-indulgent’ (Evaristo and Hilaire c. 1985, pp. 10, 6), and it was just after Pyeyucca that Evaristo commented: ‘We have in the past alienated a lot of audiences because of the language that we used’ (c. 1985, p.  6). Delegates attending a black women’s day in Leicester even reported mistaken expectations that the company was going to sing, dance, and perform comedy (c. 1985, p. 16). In fact there was music and song written for and included in Pyeyucca, though perhaps not of the style expected: Laura’s Yoruba mother plays Bach and her father, a migrant from the Caribbean island Nevis, plays jazz; the production programme lists original compositions by Carmen Williams and Olivette Cole-Wilson using African percussive instruments and piano. This music was meant to manifest meaning: ‘to underline, heighten, and move the play from section to section’ (Evaristo and Hilaire 1984, p. 2). One reviewer reported this music as a highlight, noting the play’s use of ‘old tunes played in different styles and some great new ones’ (Anon 1984a). Sadly, this audio content is lost from the archive.

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Production photographs show that the actors were lit from low angles from the front of the stage, producing several large shadows against a backdrop strung with multi-coloured strips of fabric. There was no naturalistic scenery for Pyeyucca; the only prop was an old wheeled hospital frame without curtains (see Fig. 4), which Laura occupies, upends, spins, and tilts. This frame makes literal her captivity to cultural mandates on how she should live, look, and love, and—by association with the hospital environment of its original use—implies her pathology. The frame also gestures towards the long history of the maltreatment of black bodies: the abduction of African people into slavery, transported in inhumane conditions across the Atlantic and sold as chattel; the nineteenth-century display of captives as exotic artefacts; the mid-twentieth-century Windrush arrivals who were given emergency accommodation in Clapham deep-shelter, and decades later denied citizenship; and the current over-representation of the black population in prisons and psychiatric institutions in both the United Kingdom and United States. The concept of physical constraint is emphasised in the play through the placement of lighting, as the bars of the hospital frame are made to cast shadows on the caged body within. The first of Pyeyucca’s long monologues is spoken by Laura. She laments her unfulfilled aspirations to become a ballet dancer—a trope that was to be repeated in Ngozi Onwurah’s short film Flight of the Swan (1992), Zindika’s play Leonora’s Dance (1993), and SuAndi’s The Story of M (1994). Laura also grieves how her childhood freedom was crushed by socialising forces. As Maud Sulter comments in review, ‘the weapons of [Laura’s] subjection are psychiatry and education’ (Sulter 1984b). Specifically, we hear that Laura’s family and psychiatrist forced her to give up her imaginary friend: ‘They told me to cut it out. They told me to behave myself’ (Evaristo and Hilaire 1984, p. 4). The scene pauses on Pyeyucca and Laura tightly holding hands, before the script directs Laura to move away. As the only agents onstage, the two actors must gesturally imply the actions of those who seek to separate them whilst at the same time performing their own characters’ resistance. Using their own bodily postures they incarnate antagonistic yet absent others, anticipating physical theatre techniques later used by Black Mime Theatre, Black Theatre Co-operative, and in debbie tucker green’s random (2008). After Laura is forcibly and traumatically separated from Pyeyucca she bitterly distances herself from the adult community that issued the mandate, leaving her isolated. The play then shows Laura as an adult. Her social isolation has made her oblivious to her parents’ lives and their own messy histories; she reacts

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to the news that her father’s mother has died with the question ‘Did he have a mother?’ (Evaristo and Hilaire 1984, p. 5). In interview, St. Hilaire remembers this as a vital moment in the narrative, showing just how alienating Laura’s home environment was. Laura’s mother is, similarly, a stranger to her; their interaction is expressed in stark, staccato words: I watched the snow falling on my mother’s head. I watched her head. I watched her face, old now and tired. I looked at her eyes. I looked into her eyes. We met. I took her hand. She was cold. I remembered that someone was in love with me. I took her inside. I held her hand. I tried to warm her. (1984, p. 5)

The emphatic repetition of the subject, the ‘I’, asserts Laura’s individuation from her mother. After her mother dies, Laura returns to the woods of her childhood and recites the rhythmic words that years earlier expressed her freedom: ‘Oh run Laura, run Laura, run run run’ (1984, p. 9). This is no longer a playful moment shared with her imaginary friend, though; she runs in an attempt to escape herself. The childhood rupture between Laura and Pyeyucca now manifests as an intrapersonal dissociation. The rigid and repetitive first-person perspective of the long preceding monologue yields to an urgent third-person imperative: ‘run Laura, run for your life’ (1984, p. 9). The only stage directions that attend this pivotal section of the script state that Laura is lit alone onstage while Pyeyucca stays hidden in the shadows, concealed from sight. The next scene sees Pyeyucca step into the light to report on Laura’s encounter with her psychiatrist. Without comment, Laura illustrates Pyeyucca’s words by slowly eating one of two conjoined female figures formed from edible rice paper. She cannibalistically represses the wild and free element of her personality, internalising that which others perceive as a problem. The damage done to the young Laura is described by Pyeyucca in eight chanted verses, reciting the various ways in which black women are trained to conform to Eurocentric beauty ideals through painful rituals: pyeyucca

This is the way you clean yourself/ scrub it out/ bleach it off/ This is the way you comb your hair/ iron your curls/ ouch! It’s hot! (1984, p. 12)

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The rhythm of Pyeyucca’s words resembles that of childhood nursery rhymes, producing a startling clash between the violent content of these socialising interventions and their innocuous sing-song form. The insidious refrain ‘This is the way’ gives momentum to the subsequent commands, while the absence of a speaking subject makes the second-person address sound incontrovertible: rather than an incidental statement, it is given the force of a social script. Pyeyucca and Laura then manifest these social constraints in physical form: Laura binds Pyeyucca using a long gold rope. Pyeyucca continues to chant, but her words become stilted as her freedom to move is restricted. Laura’s movement changes, too: the stage directions describe her ‘walking as an automaton’ (1984, p.  12). Pyeyucca then predicts Laura’s pitiful fate: ‘their pattern will become your prison’ (1984, p.  13). Laura has become alienated from others, and has made an ‘other’ of that which was once a happily constitutive part of herself. Pyeyucca is not contained by Laura’s attempts to bind her, however. She releases herself from the rope and moves closer to the frame, standing directly behind Laura. Their positioning resembles the sequence in Silhouette where Zenobia faces the audience and Anna appears as her living shadow. This bodily twinning is echoed aurally, as Pyeyucca and Laura speak simultaneously. While Laura describes her laborious beauty regime— the two hours she takes to create a ‘natural’ look—Pyeyucca parodies her with a repetitive chant. Pyeyucca then addresses Laura directly. Contesting the unhealthy association of beauty with whiteness, she appeals to an ancient black femininity as an alternative model: pyeyucca

Hey! Let’s get up and walk, Laura, barefoot and nappyheaded, African princesses strolling along the ivory coast [sic]. Head held high and feeling the sun beat upon the purple red that is our back. As the wind caresses our body, our inner thighs meet and part, meet and part. (1984, p. 16)

A barefoot exploration like the one Pyeyucca imagines here in sensory detail also occurs in Winsome Pinnock’s play Talking in Tongues (produced at the Royal Court in 1991): its protagonist, the black British Leela, enjoys long shoeless walks around Jamaica that entail both a rediscovery of a lost heritage and a new connection with her own body. Towards the end of

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Pyeyucca’s entreating speech, Laura falteringly releases the cage door— although for now she remains inside. She then begins to speak of going home to her mother at Christmas. This descriptive recovery of a filial relationship is mirrored onstage as Pyeyucca slips inside the frame. Pyeyucca responds to Laura’s narrative in kind, telling of a Yoruba woman travelling to England from Nigeria and a West Indian man journeying from the island of Nevis: Laura’s mother and father. Pyeyucca here layers a longer familial record on top of Laura’s more recent recollections, locating Laura within diasporic global history and proudly connecting her to her various roots. This is a defiant answer to white British cultural homogeneity. As well as documenting Laura’s parents’ origins Pyeyucca tells of their troubled experiences of arrival. This remembered history contextualises their own spoken emphasis on assimilation: ‘He says they should keep a low profile/he tells her to cover her body/he says they must not rock the boat’ (Evaristo and Hilaire 1984, p. 19). The image of the boat, that vessel of innumerable transatlantic crossings, signals that the father’s warning is a consequence of his migration experience. His statement replaces the literal ship that carried its cargo towards these inhospitable conditions with a figure of speech that is idiomatically English, both practicing linguistic assimilation and conforming to the figured principle of quietly preserving the status quo. Pyeyucca continues her task of restoring Laura to a functional relationship with her family by doubling as Laura’s mother. She sings wistfully of an impossible utopia: ‘a tranquil place and harmony/ that I’ve never known’ (1984, p. 20). Although she refuses to relate to the unfamiliar geographical location her mother describes, Laura does express empathy with her mother’s experience by re-telling her personal story of origin: she responds to her mother’s song with a remembered account of her own childhood. These exchanges personalise Laura’s parental heritage, though wisely stop short of romanticising migrant experience or diasporic histories. Exemplifying TBW’s non-naturalistic style, the penultimate scene is a wordless exchange between Laura and Pyeyucca. Only Pyeyucca is illuminated, as a roving spotlight tracks her dynamic movements. She takes a grey cloth and weaves it around herself and between the bars of the hospital frame until its movement gently eases open the door. The stage directions then detail a final restorative equilibrium, as Laura and Pyeyucca hold the cloth taught between them. The balance indicates their mutual dependence: each is realised through her encounter with the other. As the

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lights fade on this tableau, Pyeyucca and Laura begin to sing. Their voices converge in the final verse: laura

& pyeyucca for we dance at the water’s edge/ for we move alone at night/ for we move as one possessed/ with the pull of life/ with the lull of death (1984, p. 21)

As they raise their voices together, Laura and Pyeyucca finally inhabit the united first-person plural: the twin characters are aurally and grammatically restored to a healthy, integrated self. * * * In anticipation of mounting Ntozake Shange’s Spell No. 7 at the Donmar Warehouse in London in 1985, director Sue Parrish commented that ‘much has happened in the years since for colored girls was first staged’ in London (McKenley and Scafe 1985) at the Royalty Theatre in 1979 (Megson 2012, p. 58). Significant among those happenings was the formation and flourishing of Britain’s first black women’s theatre company. Theatre of Black Women were visibly influenced by Shange’s plays, as well as being shaped by fiction and theory from other African American writers. But they were pioneers in black British theatre, both in material terms—by taking up space, putting black women onstage and telling their stories, and so changing what Stuart Hall has called the ‘relations of representation’ (Hall 1996 [1989], p. 442)—and in aesthetic terms, by countering the prevailing naturalism and its attendant politics. TBW were a direct influence for many that followed. They supported Munirah Theatre Company (see Chap. 3) and Evaristo publicly championed Black Mime Theatre (see Chap. 4), writing that mime ‘is much energised and modernised by [BMT’s] use of text, music, sounds, movement and dance’ (Evaristo 1992, p. 23). Adjoa Andoh remembers being inspired by seeing Theatre of Black Women perform whilst she was at university. Andoh went on to act professionally, first appearing at the Drill Hall in 1984 in Akimbo Theatre Company’s production of Where Do I Go from Here by Deb’bora John-Wilson, and for ten years she ran Wild Iris theatre company with Polly Irvin, whom she met whilst working for the Women’s Theatre Group. In 2019 Andoh co-directed (with Lynette Linton) and starred in

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Richard II at the Globe Theatre in London, the first ever production of a Shakespeare play on a major British stage by a company exclusively comprising women of colour. Ingrid Pollard, who photographed TBW’s early plays, documented the development and final production of Richard II. Similarly, Dorothea Smartt considers TBW to have been role models. Her live art practice was inspired by the experimental simplicity of their staging; she recalls the company as ‘bodacious’, ‘bold’, ‘ground-breaking’, and ‘determined to get their voices heard’ (Abram 2019b). Smartt herself has since been recognised as a leading artist and literary activist: she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2019. As this chapter has mapped, TBW’s themes and techniques also echo further across the decades to SuAndi in the 1990s (Chap. 5) and debbie tucker green after the millennium. This is not a sign of direct influence: TBW’s reach was limited to local audiences in community venues, only one of the plays they staged was ever published, and their archive is not yet publicly accessible. Neither was the company ever afforded the press coverage that might have made a difference, as Evaristo has herself observed: ‘We ran the company for six years but were never once reviewed in the mainstream media. That’s how marginalised we were’ (Donnell 2019, p. 102). But by fighting for a platform TBW made space for black British experiences to be voiced and staged, and helped to establish an audience for black theatre, readying the public for the work that was to come. Though they may not realise it, twenty-first-century writers and audiences enjoy the fruits of what Ade Solanke calls TBW’s ‘confident articulation of identity’, which was characterised by ‘seizing and celebrating the value and uniqueness that being both black and female gave them’ (Abram 2019a). As such, the company’s significance continues long beyond its few active years. As one-­time director Vanessa Revill remembers, Theatre of Black Women were ‘visionary’ (Abram 2019e). Their legacy has changed the theatre landscape of today.

Notes 1. Croft (1993), Ponnuswami (2000), and Starck (2006) have all published short histories of Theatre of Black Women. Bernardine Evaristo has written a first-hand account of the company’s activities for The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage (2020) edited by Jan Sewell and Clare Smout. 2. The interview was originally intended to feature in the collection Charting the Journey. However, the collection was eventually published in 1988 with

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the interview omitted. Evaristo’s poetry is included, though: see Grewal et al., eds (1988), pp. 111–112. 3. Ntozake Shange’s work has had a significant influence on black British theatre. Her play Spell No. 7 was mounted by the Women’s Playhouse Trust at Donmar Warehouse in April 1985, and for colored girls was revived by Siren Theatre Company at Battersea Arts Centre in 1990. The Love Space Demands was Talawa’s first production by a female writer, as well as its first written by an American: it was staged at the Cochrane Theatre, London in October 1992, with a cast that included performance poet Jean Binta Breeze. Bernardine Evaristo has spoken of the influence of for colored girls in the programme ‘The Essay’ for BBC Radio 3, broadcast on 16 March 2011. 4. The Minority Arts Advisory Service was officially incorporated in January 1977 after the publication of Naseem Khan’s The Arts Britain Ignores (1976), a groundbreaking report on the creative practices of ethnic minority communities. MAAS was founded by Khan, and its original managing committee further comprised Taiwo Ajai, actor Norman Beaton, activist and poet Peter Blackman, Ravinder Jain, and Shantu Maher. Patricia Hilaire sat on the MAAS Board of Directors from 1985 to 1987. 5. According to uncatalogued documents in Patricia Hilaire’s papers, Bernardine Evaristo played a character called Mobolaji Sackwood, Paulette Randall played Norma Baker, Barbara Robinson played Una Bastable, and Joan Williams played Ivy Kelly. 6. Memorial events continue: ‘Remembering the New Cross Fire: 30 Years On’, an evening of spoken word, film, discussion, and music, was held at the Albany theatre on 14 January 2011, involving playwright and director Kwame Kwei-Armah, writer Courttia Newland, and filmmaker Menelik Shabazz. 7. Other uprisings that year included Chapeltown (Leeds), Toxteth (Liverpool), Handsworth (Birmingham), and Moss Side (Manchester). 8. All information on the ‘Talking Black’ showcase and the subsequent Young Writers Festival is taken from the Production management file for the Young Writers’ Festival and Primary Sauce, English Stage Company/Royal Court Theatre archive, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. THM/273/4/2/151. 9. Patricia Hilaire’s coverage of the subject of teenage pregnancy in Just Another Day anticipated a number of later plays by black British women, including Grace Dayley’s Rose’s Story (1985), Zindika’s Paper and Stone (1989), Trish Cooke’s Back Street Mammy (1990), and J.B. Rose’s Darker the Berry (1998).

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10. Randall’s Chameleon (1982) is not to be confused with the play of the same name authored by Michael Ellis, a production of which Paulette Randall directed for Temba Theatre Company at Oval House in 1985. 11. As well as exhibiting her own art, Maud Sulter was a key champion of other black women’s creativity: in 1985 she programmed Check It, a series of events at the Drill Hall (Dimitrakaki and Perry, eds 2013, p. 209), and she would later publish poems by both Evaristo and Hilaire in her edited collection Passion: Discourses on Blackwomen’s Creativity (1990). 12. Archival materials relating to Evaristo’s Lara are held as part of the Bloodaxe Books archive, acquired by Newcastle University Special Collections in 2013 (Philip Robinson Library, Jesmond Road West, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE2 4HQ). 13. Zhana continues to write as part of her work promoting personal and spiritual development, most recently self-publishing Black Success Stories (2006). 14. The Association of London Black Artists was founded by Karin Woodley, Chief Executive of MAAS from 1983 to 1989, Chair of Trustees for the Black-Art Gallery, and founder and Chair of Arts Media Group, which facilitated the publication of bi-monthly listings magazine Black Arts in London. 15. TBW were introduced to Tyson by Dorothea Smartt: the two had attended secondary school together. 16. Gay Sweatshop theatre company was founded by Drew Griffiths and Gerald Chapman in 1975. 17. Soon after, Ade Solanke set up Tama Communications, an enterprise promoting black arts and other organisations. She has since founded award-­ winning theatre and film company Spora Stories, and written three stage plays: Pandora’s Box (given a rehearsed reading at the Almeida Theatre in 2008, and a full production at the Arcola Theatre in 2012, followed by a sixteen-venue UK tour); East End Boys, West End Girls (Arcola, 2015), which she also directed; and The Court Must Have a Queen (Hampton Court Palace, 2018), which was commissioned and produced by Historic Royal Palaces. Solanke has also had radio plays produced by the BBC, and wrote the screenplay for the feature film Dazzling Mirage (2014). 18. Helen Oyeyemi’s novel Boy, Snow, Bird literalises this racialised trope of not recognising oneself in the mirror, as white-passing character Bird reports not appearing in mirrors (Oyeyemi 2014, p. 190). 19. Some publications have given 19 March 1986 as the opening date for Chiaroscuro at Soho Poly, including Davis (1987), p.  58; Goodman (1993), p. 254; Goddard, ed. (2011), p. 61; and the Oberon edition of the playscript, Kay (2019 [1986]), n.p. The archive speaks otherwise: the date 19 February 1986 is given on a contemporaneous publicity poster collected in the ‘Speak Out London’ community archive (Theatre of Black

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Women 1986b) and prefaces the reviews collated in London Theatre Record (Anon 1986b, p. 381). The Time Out review reprinted there is dated to 6 March, confirming the earlier opening (Rose 1986). 20. Aleks Sierz has commented that Linton ‘abbreviated the original two-act play into a 90-minute gig […] with most of the 1980s references cut’ (Sierz 2019). In fact, the separation of the play into two acts is retained in the 2019 script, albeit unannounced onstage. Cultural references from the 1980s—such as to the 1985 film Desert Hearts (Kay 2019 [1986], p. 12)— are retained, but material that participates directly in contemporary political debates is slimmed. These changes to the 2019 script include the removal of Beth’s statement ‘My mother’s English’ (Kay 2011, p.  78), later understood to mean she is white; excision of Yomi’s protestations about being told not to use the term ‘half-caste’ (Kay (2011), p. 89); several amendments to an exchange about political blackness, including removal of Aisha’s comment about her self-identification as such being policed by those of African Caribbean descent (Kay 2011, p.  91); and removal of a comment by Yomi implying that she would not want her daughter interacting with a lesbian (Kay 2011, pp. 105–106). 21. The BiBi Crew was formed in 1991 by Joanne Campbell, Judith Jacob, Janet Kay, Suzette Llewellyn, Josephine Melville, Beverley Michaels, and Suzanne Packer. The all-women group devised and produced work with an African Caribbean perspective. 22. It has been incorrectly reported that TBW closed because their Arts Council funding was not renewed and their remaining Greater London Arts Association and London Borough Grant Scheme monies were insufficient (Goodman 1993, p. 153). Rather, archival records show that it was the GLAA funding that was first withdrawn. 23. Peggy Bennette Hume, one of the potential collaborators named on TBW’s 1988 ACGB funding application, had a play mounted at the Tricycle in 1985: The Girl Who Wished. The script was later published by New Millennium (Bennette Hume, 1997). 24. For a contemporaneous discussion of arts funding in Britain, see Owusu (1986). For an assessment of ACGB funding strategies since 1986, focused on regional touring companies, see Brown et al. (2000). 25. This genesis of Doña Daley’s play was reported by Winsome Pinnock at the ‘Black Women Playwrights’ workshop convened by the National Theatre, London, on 27 October 2012. 26. See Evaristo’s artist website: https://bevaristo.com/. 27. The Spirit of Okin, dir. Olusola Oyeleye. Oyeleye coordinated the Youth Opera Festival at the English National Opera (ENO) in 1987 before becoming a staff producer for the ENO; see Oyeleye (1990).

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28. Other authors have made the connection between feminism and food ethics. See, for example, Adams (1990) and Avakian and Haber, eds (2005). 29. Munda Negra (1994), like Pyeyucca (1984), deals with the topic of being black outside the metropolis. Greer’s female protagonist Anna attempts to adopt the mixed-race daughter, Nicole, of her dead ex-lover, Neville, before Nicole’s white mother moves the girl to Shropshire from London. Munda Negra was published in Yvonne Brewster’s Black Plays: 3 (1995).

References Abram, Nicola (2011). Interview with Bernardine Evaristo and Patricia Hilaire, 16 June, Ruislip, London. Abram, Nicola (2019a). Interview with Ade Solanke, 4 July, Telephone. Abram, Nicola (2019b). Interview with Dorothea Smartt, 11 July, Telephone. Abram, Nicola (2019c). Interview with Hazel Carey, 21 June, Telephone. Abram, Nicola (2019d). Interview with Suzanne Scafe, 12 July, Telephone. Abram, Nicola (2019e). Interview with Vanessa Galvin nee Revill, 4 July, Telephone. Adams, Carol J. (1990). The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. New York: Continuum. Alexander, Jane (1987). Review of The Cripple, City Limits. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Temba Theatre Company, Press cuttings about Theatre of Black Women, THM/77/4/4. Newspaper clipping. Amos, Valerie, Gail Lewis, et al. (1984). ‘Many Voices, One Chant: Black Feminist Perspectives’. Feminist Review. 17 (Autumn). Anon. (1986a). ‘The Black Arts Movement’. 7 March. BBC2 television series Ebony. Anon. (1984a). ‘Review of Pyeyucca’. Outwrite. 31 (December). Anon. (1984b). ‘Review of Silhouette’. Artrage. 6, 42–43. Anon. (1985). ‘Black Women’s Groups and Organisations’. GEN: An Anti-Sexist Educational Magazine. 6, 70–71. Anon. (1985a). ‘Big Cash’, City Limits. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Temba Theatre Company, Press cuttings about Theatre of Black Women, THM/77/4/4. Newspaper clipping. Anon. (1985b). ‘Up at the Lane’, Hornsey Journal. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Temba Theatre Company, Press cuttings about Theatre of Black Women, THM/77/4/4. Newspaper clipping. Anon. (1985c). ‘Women Celebrate Gala Week’, The Standard. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Temba Theatre Company, Press cuttings about Theatre of Black Women, THM/77/4/4. Newspaper clipping. Anon. (1986b). ‘Reviews of Chiaroscuro.’ Reprinted in London Theatre Record, 6 (7), 381.

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Anon. (1986c). ‘Scheduled London Openings.’ Reprinted in London Theatre Record, 6 (4), 191. Anon. (1986d). ‘A-Z of Productions Running in London at 14 April 1986.’ Reprinted in London Theatre Record, 6 (6), 248. Anon. (1987). Workshops, City Limits. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Temba Theatre Company, Press cuttings about Theatre of Black Women, THM/77/4/4. Newspaper clipping. Aston, Elaine (1995). An Introduction to Feminism and Theatre. London: Routledge. Aston, Elaine and Geraldine Harris, eds. (2007). Feminist Futures?: Theatre, Performance, Theory. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillian. Avakian, Arlene Voski and Barbara Haber, eds. (2005). From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Banner, Simon (1986). ‘Interview with Cathy Tyson’, Guardian. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Temba Theatre Company, Press cuttings about black women in theatre, THM/77/5/18. Newspaper clipping. Bardsley, Barney (1984). ‘Review of Silhouette’. City Limits. January. Bardsley, Barney (1985). ‘Review of Pyeyucca’. Tribune. January. Bardsley, Barney (1986). ‘Review of Chiaroscuro.’ Tribune. 28 March. Reprinted in London Theatre Record, 6 (7), 381. Bartal, Leah and Nira Ne’Eman (1975). Movement Awareness and Creativity. London: Souvenir Press. Bayley, Bruce (1980). Review of Prejudice, Performance Magazine. Evaristo personal collection, London. Magazine clipping. Bello, Mary Florence (31 July 2017). ‘The US is making movies led by black women. Why isn’t Britain?’. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/31/usa-movies-black-women-britain-girls-film-tv-trip-diversity (accessed 2 August 2017). Bennette Hume, Peggy (1997). The Girl Who Wished. London: New Millennium. Bernard, Jay (2017). ‘Interview with Bernardine Evaristo’. The GLC Story Oral History Project. https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&sour ce=web&cd=29&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjnyoGzy5XVAhXkCsAKH T T r D k 0 4 F B A W C D w w C A & u r l = h t t p % 3 A % 2 F % 2 F g l c s t o r y. co.uk%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2017%2F03%2FBernadineEvaristotransc ript.pdf&usg=AFQjCNHP3nHCg6fd5QcFaNQ2cwx3OuPvRA (accessed 19 July 2017). Billington, Michael (2019). ‘Review of Chiaroscuro’. Guardian. Black Mime Theatre Women’s Troop (1991). Drowning. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Commercial Video Collection, 054033/A. VHS production recording.

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Brewster, Yvonne (1988). Reader’s report on The Writers. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Arts Council of Great Britain, Theatre of Black Women company file. Brewster, Yvonne, ed. (1995). Black Plays: 3. London: Methuen. Brown, Ian, Robert Brannen, et al. (2000). ‘The Arts Council Touring Franchise and English Political Theatre after 1986’. New Theatre Quarterly. 16 (4), 379–387. Brown, Shirley (1984). ‘Review of Silhouette’. Venue. n.p. Brown, Stuart, Isobel Hawson, et  al. (2002). Eclipse: Developing Strategies to Combat Racism in Theatre. London: Arts Council England. Bryan, Beverley, Stella Dadzie, et al. (1985). The heart of the race: Black women’s lives in Britain. London: Virago. Camden Arts & Entertainments (1988). Black Theatre Season 2. Unfinished Histories, https://www.unfinishedhistories.com/history/companies/theatreof-black-women/. Leaflet. Chambers, Colin (2011). Black and Asian Theatre in Britain: A History. London: Routledge. Choong, Da, Olivette Cole-Wilson, et al., eds. (1987). Black Women Talk Poetry. London: Black Womantalk. Cobham, Rhonda and Merle Collins (1987). Watchers and Seekers: Creative Writing by Black Women. London: Women’s Press. Coker, Similola (1983). Silhouette. Evaristo personal collection, London. Production photograph. Cooke, Trish (1990). ‘Back Street Mammy’, in Kate Harwood (ed.) First Run 2: New Plays by New Writers. London: Nick Hern Books, 38–95. Crenshaw, Kimberlé (1989). ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’. The University of Chicago Legal Forum. 140, 139–167. Croft, Susan (1986). ‘Interview: Theatre of Black Women’. The Plot. 1 (2), 4. Croft, Susan (1993). ‘Black Women Playwrights in Britain’, in Trevor R. Griffiths and Margaret Llewellyn-Jones (eds.) British and Irish Women Dramatists Since 1958: A Critical Handbook. Buckingham: Open University Press, 84–98. Croft, Susan and April de Angelis (1993). ‘An alphabet of apocrypha: Collaborations and explorations in women’s theatre’, in Trevor R.  Griffiths and Margaret Llewellyn-Jones (eds.) British and Irish Women Dramatists Since 1958: A Critical Handbook. Buckingham: Open University Press, 135–151. Daley, Doña (2004). Blest Be The Tie. London: Royal Court Theatre. Davis, Jill (1987). Lesbian plays. London: Methuen. Dayley, Grace (1985). ‘Rose’s Story’, in Michelene Wandor (ed.) Plays by Women: 4. London: Methuen, 55–80.

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Dimitrakaki, Angela and Lara Perry, eds. (2013). Politics in a Glass Case: Feminism, exhibition cultures and curatorial transgressions. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Donnell, Alison (2019). ‘Writing of and for our time: Bernardine Evaristo talks to Alison Donnell’. Wasafiri. 34 (4), 99–104. Du Bois, W. E. B. (2008 [1909]). The Souls of Black Folk. Rockville: Arc Manor. Evaristo, Bernardine (1982a). Come to Mama. Evaristo personal collection, London. Typescript. Evaristo, Bernardine (1982b). Moving Through. Evaristo personal collection, London. Typescript. Evaristo, Bernardine (1982c). Tiger Teeth Clenched Not to Bite. Evaristo personal collection, London. Typescript. Evaristo, Bernardine (1988). ‘Grandmother’, in Shabnam Grewal, Jackie Kay, Liliane Landor, Gail Lewis and Pratibha Parmar (eds.) Charting the Journey: Writings by Black and Third World Women: Sheba, 111–112. Evaristo, Bernardine (1990a). ‘Thinking Around the Poems’, in Maud Sulter (ed.) Passion: Discourses on Blackwomen’s Creativity. Hebden Bridge: Urban Fox Press, 73–76. Evaristo, Bernardine (1990b). ‘Zenobia’, in Maud Sulter (ed.) Passion: Discourses on Blackwomen’s Creativity. Hebden Bridge: Urban Fox Press, 77–78. Evaristo, Bernardine (1992). ‘Affair of the Heart’. Everywoman. 87 (November), 23. Evaristo, Bernardine (1993a). ‘Black Women in Theatre’, in Kadija George (ed.) Six Plays by Black and Asian Women Writers. London: Aurora Metro Press, 14–15. Evaristo, Bernardine (1993b). ‘Theatre of Black Women’, in Kadija George (ed.) Six Plays by Black and Asian Women Writers. London: Aurora Metro Press, 16–17. Evaristo, Bernardine (1994a). ‘Going It Alone: Solo Performers—the Art and the Ache’. Artrage. November, 14–15. Evaristo, Bernardine (1994b). Island of Abraham. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Evaristo, Bernardine (1996). ‘Bernardine Evaristo on Theatre of Black Women’, in Lizbeth Goodman and Jane de Gay (eds.) Feminist Stages: Interviews with Women in Contemporary British Theatre. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 132–136. Evaristo, Bernardine (1997). Lara. Tunbridge Wells: Angela Royal Publishing. Evaristo, Bernardine (2001). The Emperor’s Babe. London: Hamish Hamilton. Evaristo, Bernardine (2005). Soul tourists. London: Hamish Hamilton. Evaristo, Bernardine (2008). Blonde Roots. London: Hamish Hamilton. Evaristo, Bernardine (2009). Lara. Tarset: Bloodaxe. Evaristo, Bernardine (2013). Mr Loverman. London: Penguin. Evaristo, Bernardine (2019a). Girl, Woman, Other.

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Evaristo, Bernardine (12 December 2019b). ‘The road not taken: Bernardine Evaristo on her career in theatre’. New Statesman. https://www.newstatesman. com/culture/music-theatre/2019/12/road-not-taken-bernardineevaristo-her-career-theatre. Evaristo, Bernardine and Patricia Hilaire (1983). Silhouette. Evaristo personal collection, London. Typescript. Evaristo, Bernardine and Patricia Hilaire (1984). Pyeyucca. Evaristo personal collection, London. Typescript. Evaristo, Bernardine and Patricia Hilaire (1988). Application for franchise funding. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Arts Council of Great Britain, ACGB/34/287. Evaristo, Bernardine and Patricia Hilaire (c.1985). Interview for Charting the Journey. Evaristo personal collection, London. Typescript with manuscript corrections. Evaristo, Bernardine and Daljit Nagra, eds. (2010). Ten: New Poets. London: Bloodaxe Books. Gilroy, Paul (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso. Goddard, Lynette (2007). Staging Black Feminisms: Identity, Politics, Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Goddard, Lynette (2008). ‘Middle-class Aspirations and Black Women’s Mental (Ill) Health in Zindika’s Leonora’s Dance and Bonnie Greer’s Munda Negra and Dancing on Blackwater’, in Rebecca D’Monté and Graham Saunders (eds.) Cool Britannia?: British Political Drama in the 1990s. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 96–113. Goddard, Lynette, ed. (2011). The Methuen Drama Book of Plays by Black British Writers. London: Methuen. Godiwala, Dimple, ed. (2006). Alternatives Within the Mainstream: British Black and Asian Theatre. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press. Goodman, Lizbeth (1993). Contemporary Feminist Theatres: To Each Her Own. London: Routledge. Grewal, Shabnam, Jackie Kay, et al., eds. (1988). Charting the Journey: Writings by Black and Third World Women. London: Sheba Feminist Press. Griffin, Gabriele (2003). Contemporary Black and Asian Women Playwrights in Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hall, Stuart (1996 [1989]). ‘New ethnicities’, in David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (eds.) Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. New  York: Routledge, 441–449. Heddon, Deirdre (2008). Autobiography and Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hilaire, Patricia (1982). Just Another Day. British Library, London. MS 1655. Typescript.

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Hilaire, Patricia (1990). ‘Pyeyucca’, in Maud Sulter (ed.) Passion: Discourses on Blackwomen’s Creativity. Hebden Bridge: Urban Fox Press, 175–176. hooks, bell (1992). Black Looks: Race and Representation. London: Turnaround. Horsford, Norma (1986). ‘Review of Chiaroscuro.’ City Limits. 28 March. Reprinted in Theatre Record, 6 (7), 381. Jarrett-Macauley, Delia (1996). Reconstructing Womanhood, Reconstructing Feminism: Writings on Black Women. London: Routledge. Jarrett, Julia (1996). ‘Creative Space?: The Experience of British Women in British Art Schools’, in Delia Jarrett-Macauley (ed.) Reconstructing Womanhood, Reconstructing Feminism: Writings on Black Women. London; New  York: Routledge, 121–135. Johns, Lindsay (9 February 2010). ‘Black theatre is blighted by its ghetto mentality’. London Evening Standard. http://www.standard.co.uk/news/black-theatre-is-blighted-by-its-ghetto-mentality-6709941.html (accessed 22 March 2010). Jones, Matthew (1997). ‘Funding a ‘Company of Identity”. New Theatre Quarterly. 13 (52), 370. Kay, Jackie (1987). ‘Chiaroscuro’, in Jill Davis (ed.) Lesbian Plays. London: Methuen, 58–83. Kay, Jackie (2000). ‘So You Think I Am a Mule? [1984]’, in James Procter (ed.) Writing Black Britain, 1948–1998: An Interdisciplinary Anthology. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 202–204. Kay, Jackie (2010). Red dust road. London: Picador. Kay, Jackie (2011). ‘Chiaroscuro’, in Lynette Goddard (ed.) The Methuen Drama Book of Plays by Black British Writers. London: Methuen, 59–118. Kay, Jackie (2016). My Teenage Diary. 3 December. BBC Radio 4. Kay, Jackie (2019 [1986]). Chiaroscuro. London: Oberon. Kendall, Ena (1989). ‘Room of My Own: Joan-Ann Mayndard’, Guardian. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Temba Theatre Company, Press cuttings about black women in theatre, THM/77/5/18. Newspaper clipping. Khan, Naseem (1976). The Arts Britain Ignores. London: Community Relations Commission. King-Dorset, Rodreguez (2014). Black British Theatre Pioneers: Yvonne Brewster and the First Generation of Actors, Playwrights and Other Practitioners Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. Kizito, Tiffany (28 February 2017). ‘Why The UK Needs More Black Female Film Directors’. http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/tiffany-kizito/why-theuk-needs-more-bla_b_13895758.html (accessed 2 August 2017). Kwei-Armah, Kwame (2009). Plays 1. London: Methuen Drama.

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Lahr, John (1985). ‘The experience of blackness’, New Society. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Temba Theatre Company, Press cuttings about black women in theatre, THM/77/5/18. Newspaper clipping. Letts, Quentin (2008). ‘Review of random.’ 11 March. Reprinted in Theatre Record, 28 (6), 284. Lorde, Audre (1995). ‘Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference’, in Beverly Guy-Sheftall (ed.) Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought. New York: The New Press, 284–292. Malik, Sarita (2001). Representing black Britain : a history of black and Asian images on British television. London: SAGE. Maxine (1984). ‘Review of Silhouette’. Spare Rib. January (138), 47. McKenley, Jan and Suzanne Scafe (1985). ‘Cooling Out’, City Limits. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Temba Theatre Company, Press cuttings about black women in theatre, THM/77/5/18. Newspaper clipping. McMillan, Michael and SuAndi (2002). ‘Rebaptizing the World in Our Own Terms: Black Theatre and Live Arts in Britain’, in Paul Carter Harrison, Victor Leo Walker and Gus Edwards (eds.) Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 115–127. Megson, Chris (2012). Modern British Playwriting: The 1970s: Voices, Documents, New Interpretations. London: Methuen. Mercer, Kobena (1990). ‘Black Art and the Burden of Representation’. Third Text: Third World Perspectives on Contemporary Art & Culture. 10 (4), 61–78. Mercer, Kobena (1994). Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies. London; New York: Routledge. Munirah (1986). On the Inside. Simba personal collection, St. Thomas, Jamaica. Programme. Munirah (1990). Our Bodies Are Our Maps. Simba personal collection, St. Thomas, Jamaica. Programme. Niven, Alastair (2004). ‘Interview: Bernardine Evaristo’, in Susheila Nasta (ed.) Writing Across Worlds: Contemporary Writers Talk. London: Routledge, 279–291. Nurse, Keith (1982). ‘Review of Young Writers Festival 1982.’ Daily Telegraph. 8 October. Reprinted in London Theatre Record, 2 (21), 586. Onwurah, Ngozi (1992). Flight of the Swan. Channel Four. 12 mins. Organ, Kate (1984). Letter to Patricia Hilaire. St Hilaire personal collection, London. Osborne, Deirdre (2010). ‘debbie tucker green and Doña Daley: Two Neo-­ millennial Black British Women Playwrights’. Antares. 4, 25–55. Osborne, Deirdre, ed. (2012). Hidden Gems, vol 2. London: Oberon. Owusu, Kwesi (1986). The Struggle for Black Arts in Britain: What Can We Consider Better Than Freedom. London: Comedia.

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Oyeleye, Olusola (1990). ‘“In Music’s Tattered Hand I Lay my Heart”: A Short Overview of Working in Opera at ENO’, in Maud Sulter (ed.) Passion: Discourses on Blackwomen’s Creativity. Hebden Bridge: Urban Fox Press, 109–113. Oyeyemi, Helen (2014). Boy, Snow, Bird. London: Picador. Pearce, Michael (2017). Black British Drama: A Transnational Story. London: Routledge. Pollard, Ingrid (1990). ‘Blackwomen’s Creativity Project 4: Photographs’, in Maud Sulter (ed.) Passion: Discourses on Blackwomen’s Creativity. Hebden Bridge: Urban Fox Press, 19–43. Ponnuswami, Meenakshi (2000). ‘Small Island People: Black British Women Playwrights’, in Elaine Aston and Janelle G.  Reinelt (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 217–234. Randall, Paulette (1982). Fishing. British Library, London. MS 1654. Rose, Helen (1986). ‘Review of Chiaroscuro.’ Time Out. 28 March. Reprinted in Theatre Record, 6 (7), 381. Rose, J.B. (1998). ‘Darker the Berry’, in Sally Goldsworthy (ed.) Young Blood: Plays for Young Performers. London: Aurora Metro, 123–202. Royal Court (1982). Production Schedule for Royal Court Young Writers’ Festival. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of English Stage Company/Royal Court Theatre, THM/273/4/2/151. Rudet, Jacqueline (1986). ‘Money to Live’, in Mary Remnant (ed.) Plays by Women. London: Methuen. 5, 145–181. Saunders, Graham (2015). British Theatre Companies 1980–1994. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. Selvon, Sam (2009 [1956]). The Lonely Londoners. London: Penguin. Sethi, Anita (2019). ‘Interview with Bernardine Evaristo: ‘I want to put presence into absence”. Guardian. Sewell, Jan and Clare Smout, eds. (2020). The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage: Palgrave Macmillan. Sierz, Aleks (2019). ‘Review of Chiaroscuro.’ 6 September. Reprinted in. Sivanandan, A. (1986). In the Eye of the Needle: Report of the Independent Enquiry into Greater London Arts. London: Greater London Arts Association. Smartt, Dorothea (1982). ‘Review of Chameleon, Hey Brown Girl, and Tiger Teeth Clenched Not to Bite’. Spare Rib. December (125), 42–44. Spencer, Charles (1982). ‘Review of Young Writers Festival 1982.’ 8 October. Reprinted in London Theatre Record, 2 (21), 586. Starck, Kathleen (2006). ‘“Black and Female is Some of Who I Am and I Want to Explore It”: Black Women’s Plays of the 1980s and 1990s’, in Dimple Godiwala (ed.) Alternatives Within the Mainstream: British Black and Asian Theatres. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 229–248.

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SuAndi (1994). The Story of M. Live Art Development Agency, London. V0238. VHS production recording. SuAndi (2002). ‘The Story of M’, in SuAndi (ed.) 4 for More. Manchester: artBlacklive, 1–19. Sulter, Maud (1983). ‘Review of Silhouette’. Outwrite.(19). Sulter, Maud (1984a). ‘Review of Pyeyucca’. City Limits. November. Sulter, Maud (1984b). Review of Pyeyucca, City Limits. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Temba Theatre Company, Press cuttings about Theatre of Black Women, THM/77/4/4. Newspaper clipping. Sulter, Maud (1988). ‘Call and response’. Feminist Arts News. 2 (8), 15–17. Sulter, Maud (1990). Passion: Discourses on Blackwomen’s Creativity. Hebden Bridge: Urban Fox Press. Tappin, J. (1984). ‘Review of Silhouette ’. Caribbean Times. 11 May. Taylor, Lib (2003). ‘Shape-shifting and Role-splitting: Theatre, Body and Identity’, in Lib Taylor (ed.) Indeterminate Bodies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 164–180. Terracciano, Alda (n.d.). ‘The Activities of the Black Theatre Forum’. Future Histories—Black Performance and Carnival Archive. http://www.futurehistories.org.uk/extra/btf.htm (accessed 14 November 2012). Theatre of Black Women (1984). Pyeyucca. Evaristo personal collection, London. Programme. Theatre of Black Women (1986a). Chiaroscuro. Speak Out London, http://www. speakoutlondon.org.uk/gallery/chiaroscuro-poster-0. Poster. Theatre of Black Women (1986b). Miss Quashie and the Tiger’s Tail. Unfinished Histories, http://www.unfinishedhistories.com/history/companies/theatreof-black-women/. Flyer. Theatre of Black Women (1986c). Women in the Arts conference: Call for participants. Unfinished Histories, http://www.unfinishedhistories.com/history/ companies/theatre-of-black-women/. Flyer. Tompsett, Ruth (1982). Letter to Patricia Hilaire. St Hilaire personal collection, London. Tompsett, Ruth, ed. (1996). Black Theatre in Britain. Performing Arts International I:2. tucker green, debbie (2003). born bad. London: Nick Hern Books. tucker green, debbie (2005). trade & generations. London: Nick Hern Books. tucker green, debbie (2008). random. London: Nick Hern Books. tucker green, debbie [Debbie Green] (2000). Two Women. British Library, London. MPS 9391. Typescript. Unfinished Histories (2013). ‘Black Theatre event’. https://www.unfinishedhistories.com/black-theatre-event/ (accessed 16 August 2019). Woddis, Carole (1982a). ‘Patricia, Paulette & Yazmine’. City Limits. 11.

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Woddis, Carole (1982b). ‘Review of Young Writers Festival.’ City Limits. 8 October. Reprinted in London Theatre Record, 2 (21), 585. Young, Lola (2000). ‘What is black British feminism?’. Women: A Cultural Review. 11 (1/2), 45–60. Zhana (2006). Black Success Stories: Celebrating People of African Heritage, vol. 1. London: Zhana Books. Zindika (1989). Paper and Stone. Goldsmiths University of London. Future Histories—Black Performance and Carnival Archive, Records of Nitro Theatre Company, NTC/P/T/1/21/3. Typescript. Zindika (1993). ‘Leonora’s Dance’, in Kadija George (ed.) Six Plays by Black and Asian Women Writers. London: Aurora Metro Press, 76–110.

Munirah Theatre Company

Munirah Theatre Company was a dynamic collective of women writers and performers, named with an Arabic word meaning ‘one who enlightens’. The company has often been referenced in published histories of black British theatre, from a chapter by Susan Croft in 1993 to Colin Chambers’ 2011 book, but their work has not before now been documented in detail.1 This scholarly silence is at least partly attributable to the lack of relevant materials in public archives. A few of the poems that featured in their performances were published—though without mention of their life prior to the page—and the company are named on some promotional ephemera (event posters and flyers) in the archives of performance poetry organisation Apples and Snakes.2 But, for the most part, Munirah’s material record—like that of their contemporaries Theatre of Black Women—is dispersed across the personal collections of the people involved. Several company members and associates generously shared their holdings for this chapter, including typescripts, audio recordings, photographs, press documents, and publicity materials, as well as giving rich accounts of the company’s history in interview and subsequent communications.3 The energy and warmth of those conversations speak of formative years and vital experiences shared together, and company members’ efforts to unearth and circulate materials demonstrate a continuing desire to see their activities recognised and recorded. Munirah’s history interweaves with the lives and work of other collectives and individuals, such that this chapter gestures beyond the company towards some of the © The Author(s) 2020 N. Abram, Black British Women’s Theatre, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51459-4_3

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lively creative networks of twentieth-century black British theatre and black arts in Britain more broadly.4 Members of Munirah have welcomed this opportunity to formally acknowledge the support they received and to credit the communities they were part of. Many of these connections were made and sustained under the inclusive political signifier ‘Black’; to reflect contemporaneous usage, members of Munirah have requested that the term be capitalised in this chapter whenever it refers directly to them or their work. The content of this chapter is also shaped by the company’s archival status: since the materials documenting Munirah’s history and creativity are not publicly available, analysis is preceded by sufficient description of the material records to orientate the reader, and illustrated by selected facsimile reproductions. This scholarly methodology at once highlights the lack of an archive and makes some—inevitably partial— attempts to compensate for it.

History, Activities, Archives Munirah evolved into a professional theatre company from organic beginnings. Maureen ‘Talibah’ Hawkins and Hazel Williams had both previously been involved with the company Staunch Poets and Players, which was formed in 1979 by Barbados-born playwright and director Don Kinch to self-publish a magazine for the black community (Sesay 2002, p. 252). Hawkins worked as the magazine’s first children’s editor. It continued to publish into the early 1980s, after which Staunch went on to mount stage productions comprising poetry, music, dance, and drama. One such production, In Transit (1981), played at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival as well as Oval House, and was televised by BBC2 the following year (Reckford 1993). This ‘reggae musical’ addressed the subject of migration from the Caribbean to London (Anon 1981, p. 35). As well working with Staunch, Hawkins toured in a performance by Trinidadian theatre company Baku Productions, and undertook training with Jenako Arts—a minority arts education charity based in Dalston, London (Munirah 1986). Before performing with Staunch, Williams had trained at London Contemporary Dance School and performed with Momentum Dance Company and MAAS Movers—a black dance company founded in 1977 by the Minority Arts Advisory Service.5 In 1983 both Hawkins and Williams left Staunch, seeking opportunities to contribute more directly to the creative process. They came into contact with Sherma Springer— who was active in community theatre, performing with North Hertfordshire

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Youth Theatre and Images Theatre Group, and working as an administrator at the YMCA Centre in Finsbury Park—and Charmaine Raison.6 Raison introduced the three to the poet A-dZiko Simba, and, in 1983, the first incarnation of Munirah was formed. Hawkins, Simba, Springer, and Williams gathered at the YMCA Centre for a weekly exchange of writing and critique, along with Gloria Baptiste— another performer, albeit one whose involvement with the company was to be fleeting. The YMCA Centre gave them space to develop their ideas (James 1990, p. 10), and ensured a ready audience for the company’s early performances. The significance of this venue to Munirah’s story emphasises the need for public places in which like-minded people can gather and create. The company’s founders also fondly remember the radical cultural centre and bookshop Centerprise, in Dalston, where they enjoyed rehearsal and workshop space. Such venues served to create community and foment their collective political consciousness. Munirah’s first ‘cabaret’ show was mounted on 1 March 1985 at the YMCA Centre, featuring Liza Roberts alongside Baptiste, Hawkins, Simba, Springer, and Williams. The cabaret shows took the form of a thirty-minute set comprising selected poems from the participants’ collections, themed on a particular subject such as ‘sisterhood’ or ‘racism’. These shows first established the company’s public presence and aesthetic: later promotional materials describe their work as ‘fusion art’ (Munirah c.1990b, n.p.), a happy outcome of the members’ varied creative backgrounds. Later in 1985 A-dZiko Simba’s poem ‘Black Coffee and Cigarette Blues’ was awarded the Sarojini Naidu Prize for unpublished poems at the Greater London Council (GLC) Literature Competition.7 The poem threads together a series of vignettes showing the socio-economic decline and resulting political dissent of a disenfranchised underclass. The competition category was named after the Indian independence activist and poet, and ran in parallel with the Malcolm X Prize for fiction—won that year by Caryl Phillips. The prizes were awarded by African American author James Baldwin at an event held on 10 July 1985 at the Royal Festival Hall. According to a biography printed in the programme for a production the following year (Munirah 1986), Simba was also working towards a poetry collection titled Afrikan Women Talk around this time, due to be published by Akira Press in London. Unfortunately, though, this collection never materialised.8 Munirah then received a particularly significant performance opportunity thanks to Grenadian poet and short story writer Merle Collins. Collins

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was active on the contemporary British performance poetry circuit, reciting her work to music as part of the collective African Dawn, an ensemble of musicians from the African continent. Her continuing support of Munirah would result in the later publication of its members’ poems in her edited anthology Watchers and Seekers: Creative Writing by Black Women in Britain, in 1987. Collins facilitated Munirah’s inclusion in an event called Women’s Poetry Focus held at the Africa Centre in Covent Garden on 25 March 1986, funded by the Greater London Council and headlined by the African American poet and performance artist Jayne Cortez. This event also gave a platform to the Scottish poet, playwright, and novelist Jackie Kay, whose play Chiaroscuro had been mounted by Theatre of Black Women at Soho Poly earlier the same year. Also on the bill at Women’s Poetry Focus were the performance poetry troupe Lioness Chant, comprising Fyna Dowe and Nefertiti Gayle, and a duo named Akimbo, consisting of playwright and performer Deb’bora and musician Andy Wilson, who were described as ‘fusing music and theatre’ (Apples and Snakes 1986). Reviewing Cortez’s tour for The Voice, Caroline Lashley commented on the poet’s commitment to global justice, ranging from American civil rights to the fight against South African apartheid (Lashley 1986, p.  16). For Cortez, art must engage with political struggle, not simply seek to entertain. Members of Munirah shared the same commitment; their printed publicity materials announce their work as a corrective to stereotypical media representations of Black women (Munirah 1986). Women’s Poetry Focus was attended by a GLC representative, who encouraged Munirah to apply for funding after seeing their performance. In order to pursue this the company appointed a part-time administrator. Marjorie James was alerted to this opportunity by her sister, Jennifer James, who was then working in Drama and Education for Haringey London Borough Council. Marjorie’s love of theatre was also influenced by her brother, Alby James, who had been appointed Artistic Director of Temba Theatre Company in 1984. With the help of Marjorie James’ administrative acumen, Munirah successfully secured funding from the GLC Women’s Committee—not long before the GLC was disbanded by Margaret Thatcher’s administration at the end of March 1986. Thanks to this financial support Munirah mounted their first major production, On the Inside, later that year (James 1990, p. 10). James continued to serve as Munirah’s administrator, as well as providing significant creative input, for the company’s duration.

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On the Inside (1986) saw founding members Springer, Williams, Simba, and Hawkins again joined onstage by performer Liza Roberts, while Alan ‘Mandela’ Springer—founder of Images Theatre Group, and Sherma Springer’s then-husband—served as director. The production engaged explicitly with the events triggering the so-called riots in Brixton and Broadwater Farm the previous year. It comprised twenty-five poems, some selected from the members’ existing work and others written specifically for the production. On the Inside opened at The Black-Art [sic] Gallery in Finsbury Park, where Simba worked, and toured until 1988. The Black-­ Art Gallery had been founded in 1983 as one of the initiatives of the Organisation for Black Art Advancement and Leisure/Learning Activities (OBAALA).9 This lively London community was an important part of Munirah’s context, and the company also received practical support from certain men associated with the organisation: for example, it was through OBAALA that Simba met poet and illustrator Anum Iyapo (now Anum Abeng) of Arts Media Group, who designed the publicity materials for On the Inside (see Fig. 1). The production programme for On the Inside also records the company’s thanks to Patricia Hilaire and Theatre of Black Women, Merle Collins, and others (Munirah 1986), inscribing the sense of a well-connected and mutually supportive Black arts community. Munirah were explicit in their aim to raise public consciousness, though the demographic of their audiences and consequently the nature of this task  varied according to venue. Some London theatres gathered mainly white, middle-class audiences, while community venues such as The Black-­ Art Gallery and Oval House and regional venues in Birmingham, Derby, and Manchester drew more black spectators. In all cases—and in line with the experience of Black Mime Theatre Women’s Troop, to follow—they recall that their audiences were mainly female. Munirah’s sense of public responsibility shaped their activities offstage as well as in performance. One of the company’s founding principles was ‘to encourage others, in particular Black women, to explore their own creativity and develop positive selfimages’ (Munirah c.1990, n.p.). To this end they ran public workshops addressing the needs of different constituencies: storytelling sessions for children; workshops for teenagers exploring prejudice, aspirations, and the media; adult workshops facilitating creative expression and promoting relaxation and wellbeing; workshops dedicated to Black people over 50 years of age, for fitness or reminiscence; and a series of sessions specifically aimed at women and girls of African heritage. These various activities make use of theatre and performance as vehicles for community education. Munirah

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Fig. 1  Munirah, On the Inside (1986). Simba personal collection, St. Thomas, Jamaica. Programme. Designed by Anum Iyapo

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shared this practice with their contemporaries Theatre of Black Women— who ran writing workshops in various community venues, and Black Mime Theatre—who ran residential training events encouraging participants to explore and express their own personal stories. A similar mission motivated the work of contemporary visual artists. In interview and in subsequent correspondence, Simba stressed the particular influence of Shakka Dedi, an American-born graphic artist, dub poet, and publisher, and Eve-I Kadeena: co-founders of OBAALA and The Black-­ Art Gallery. Not only did Dedi and Kadeena give Munirah a platform for their work, they also offered a language with which to name themselves. Dedi declared that ‘We believe that Black art is born of a consciousness based upon experience of what it means to be an Afrikan descendant wherever in the world we are’.10 The term ‘Afrikan’ was used inclusively to designate all people of African heritage, whether born on the continent or as part of its diaspora. It signalled an anti-colonial critique of European language dominance and Eurocentric perspectives, and affirmed a practice of self-determination. Munirah eventually adopted this term in their publicity materials (Apples and Snakes 1989b), in place of their earlier use of ‘Black British’ (Apples and Snakes 1988), before adapting it to the idiosyncratic ‘AfriKan’ (Apples and Snakes 1990b)—typographically emphasising the term as political rather than purely descriptive, and specifically as positively orientated. In 1987 Munirah were awarded three-year revenue funding from their local arts development agency, Haringey Arts Council (HAC).11 They recall with particular thanks the support of arts officer Charles Small, who would go on to run Birmingham’s intercultural arts centre The Drum. Following this investment Munirah formally registered as a charitable company, establishing a board of directors that included June Reid, who also sat on the boards for Apples and Snakes and The Black-Art Gallery; Paula Efua Grant, a schoolteacher and sister of MP Bernie Grant (Field 2012, p. 100); Sarah Ebanja, who has since chaired the Board of Trustees at the Bernie Grant Arts Centre; Eve-I Kadeena of The Black-Art Gallery; June Dennis; Masani Moshesh; and Patricia Parkin. As a condition of the funding, Munirah also acquired office and rehearsal space at the Triangle community centre on St Ann’s Road in Haringey. Munirah supplemented their HAC grant with project funding from London Arts Board and the London Borough Grants Scheme (LBGS). That same year, several members of Munirah had poems published in the anthology Watchers and Seekers, edited by Merle Collins with

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Trinidad-­born scholar Rhonda Cobham and published by The Women’s Press. The anthology preserves a number of the pieces that had featured in Munirah’s first full-length production. It opens with A-dZiko Simba’s ‘Woman Talk’ (Cobham and Collins 1987, p. 13)—a moving call for emotional literacy as a personal and collective survival strategy, which was performed under the title ‘Afrikan Woman Talk’ as part of On the Inside—and further features ‘The Inheritance’ by Hawkins (p. 85), ‘Ms. Understood’ by Springer (p. 54), and ‘Beware of the Poison’ by Williams (p. 115).12 The performance history of these poems was not reported in the publication, artificially separating page from stage. Watchers and Seekers also preserves Simba’s ‘25.40pm (past mourning)’ (p.  50), which went on to win the poetry section of the 1987 London Writers’ Competition, administrated by Wandsworth Borough Council; Hawkins’ ‘The Miracle’ (p. 100), which would be performed in the revised version of Munirah’s second major production, thinkofariver; and Williams’ poem ‘Old Age Come to Us All’ (p. 120), which was not included in any of Munirah’s main productions but often appeared in the company’s cabaret performances. Some of these poems are discussed in detail below in relation to the relevant production. In 1987 Munirah mounted thinkofariver, formed from twenty-five poems. It enjoyed a successful tour; members of the company credit Lester Haines of Tribesman Community Arts Workshop for his practical assistance with this. Actor and director Vernon Shabaka Thompson served as creative consultant for the production, and the set was designed by Ana Jebens— who continues to work in costume design, most recently on Madama Butterfly for Opera North (2018). The programme for thinkofariver (Fig. 2) featured artwork by mixed-media artist Sonia Boyce, with whom Simba had connected through OBAALA and The Black-Art Gallery. The illustration, which features a woman kneeling to trail her hand in a vibrant blue stream, is composed such that only the woman’s body is visible. Without facial identification she takes on the function of an archetype or everywoman, inviting the viewer to imagine themselves in her position. Here, again, we see Munirah reaching out to engage their audiences. Keen to incorporate new material and a changing cast, Munirah then decided to revise thinkofariver. They removed some of the original poems and added others, resulting in a revised total of twenty-six. Acting as a consultant in this process was Elizabeth Clarke, then Associate Director and dramaturg of Temba Theatre Company.13 Clarke was to publish an article reflecting on the marginalisation of black playwrights in the British theatre industry the following year in Banja: A Magazine of Barbadian

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Fig. 2  Munirah, thinkofariver (1987). Simba personal collection, St. Thomas, Jamaica. Programme. Artwork by Sonia Boyce

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Life and Culture. The article pays particular attention to the British funding model, where provincial repertory theatres receive substantial support while the majority of black theatre companies can be seen ‘struggling […] on small project grants, which may or may not stretch to providing minimum Equity fees for actors and stage management’ (Clarke 1988, p. 62). Clarke’s article is illustrated with a reproduction of the cover of the programme for thinkofariver, giving Munirah international visibility and representative status in contemporary black British theatre. Munirah were scheduled to perform at the second Camden Black Theatre Season in 1988 with a production called Women in Rhythm.14 It was reported that they withdrew ‘due to substantial cuts in annual revenue funding’.15 However, members of Munirah maintain that their Haringey Arts Council funding continued for the promised three years, until 1990. Munirah’s administrator Marjorie James recalls that the company chose in its latter years to focus on delivering workshops rather than touring productions, as a result of shifting priorities and a changing team, which may explain the decision not to complete Women in Rhythm. This intriguing discrepancy in the historical record is instructive both of the vagaries of memory and of the need for documentary accounts to be written promptly and preserved carefully, with full input from their protagonists. In 1988 Munirah became the subject of a short (twenty-two-minute) documentary titled Polishing Black Diamonds, directed and produced by Susannah Lopez with funding from the Arts Council of Great Britain. The film weaves clips of Munirah’s performed poems together with commentary delivered to camera by the core members of the company, and footage of their community workshops. Black female elders participating in a reminiscence workshop discuss their nostalgia for their country of origin, having migrated to Britain in their youth, and share their advice for the next generation; young black women taking a creative writing workshop on the subject of ‘home’ speak of the distance they experience from their parents’ cultural origins. Interviews with Hazel Williams, A-dZiko Simba, Maureen ‘Talibah’ Hawkins, and Marjorie James detail Munirah’s history. James reports that the company was formed explicitly to provide opportunities for women in theatre, and describes the collaborative nature of their composition process: poems would be written by individual members and then edited and arranged by the company as a whole. As examples, Hawkins discusses her poem ‘The Return of the Kink’ and Simba reflects on ‘Funeral for the Dead’ and ‘The Trap Rap’. Clips of staged performances usefully demonstrate the company’s characteristic techniques of synchronised

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movement and layered speech; this performative dimension is otherwise lost to the archive, since  most pieces are preserved only as printed text (albeit occasionally annotated). The film foregrounds the group’s performative dexterity, demonstrated in their ranging use of voice and accent and reflected in their various costumes—by turns brightly tie-died jumpsuits; denim jackets, baseball caps, and sunglasses; and tunics and headwraps made of traditional African cloth. Over the final credits a voiceover spoken by Simba fondly records that ‘There’s a very close love and comfort that exists among us […] It’s more than just a performance company’.16 On 17 October 1988 members of Munirah shared a stage with African American poet and playwright Ntozake Shange and Jamaican dub poet Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze at North Peckham Civic Centre, as part of the ‘Women of the Word’ national tour co-organised by Apples and Snakes and the Brixton-based Black cultural organisation Creation for Liberation (Apples and Snakes 1988).17 Shange was already a vivid influence on Munirah: several of the company’s members had seen for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf when it played in London’s West End in 1979 (Megson 2012, p. 58), and the programme for On the Inside referenced Shange’s work with an epigraph drawn from her 1982 novel Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo, reading ‘Where there is a woman there is magic’ (Munirah 1986, n.p.). Munirah’s eclectic aesthetic has often been characterised by critics as ‘choreopoetry’, a term most commonly associated with Shange (Pearce 2017, pp.  41–42)—though this aspect of their practice should also be understood as a result of the company members’ varied backgrounds: Simba in poetry, Williams in dance, and Hawkins and Springer in theatre. Munirah’s influences were many. They ranged across art forms, from music to fiction, including the African American a capella ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock, and authors Audre Lorde and Maya Angelou. Simba further credits African American music group The Last Poets and jazz poet Gil Scott-Heron as personal influences, along with Jamaican dub poets Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze and Mutabaruka, poet and folklorist Louise BennettCoverley (‘Miss Lou’), and Anthony St. Helene, a drummer with the British jazz-reggae band Tribesman. Members of Munirah also recall the impact of seeing other women on the British performance poetry circuit, such as Lioness Chant and Merle Collins’ African Dawn, and they benefitted from the pioneering work of Theatre of Black Women, who combined poetic monologues, dance, music, movement, song, and symbolic staging. Their creative networks were especially nourished through The Black-Art

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Gallery, where Shakka Dedi and Eve-I Kadeena facilitated connections with others active in the community, such as the poet Frederick Williams (later known as Oma Ra), and artists Horace ‘Opio’ Donovan (later known as Opio Yaw Asante), Ken McCalla, Keith Piper, and Eddie Chambers. In turn, Munirah became an influence on others: poet and performer SuAndi names and acknowledges the company in her chapter ‘Africa Lives On in We: Histories and Futures of Black Women Artists’, alongside Theatre of Black Women and playwright, poet, and author Barbara Burford (SuAndi 2007, p. 119). By 1989 Munirah were working on their third substantive production. Our Bodies Are Our Maps was showcased at the Photographers Gallery on 3 August 1989, with choreography by Nick Nuttgens. From this showcase the company received a number of bookings for the full production, which then toured from February 1990 (Munirah c.1990) to various venues, including Jacksons Lane arts centre (James 1990, p. 11), under the direction of African American writer Bonnie Greer. Our Bodies Are Our Maps was delivered in two parts: Part One, ‘The Weight’, consisted of nine poems; Part Two, ‘The Changing Room’, comprised six. The production is described in Munirah’s publicity materials as ‘bring[ing] to life the humorous, sad and often poignant stories our bodies have to tell’ (Munirah c.1990). Company co-founder Hazel Williams contributed poems but did not perform due to the recent birth of her daughter, so A-dZiko Simba was joined onstage by new members Michelle Matherson and Neema Kambona. Kambona had trained at London’s Tricycle theatre, where her plays Rainbow Ending and The Right Thing (1988) were staged, and had previously performed with Carib Theatre. Matherson had trained at Central School of Speech and Drama, and worked as both a performer and teacher of drama. Her love of the stage was influenced by her mother, Gloria Matherson, who had performed in Jamal Ali’s Black By Night, staged at Oval House in 1972 by the Black Theatre of Brixton.18 Michelle Matherson recalls in interview that by the time she joined Munirah the company was firmly established and impressively professional, taking seriously its responsibilities to both its members and its audiences. Concurrent with Our Bodies Are Our Maps Munirah continued their regular cabaret performances. These included shows as part of International Women’s Week on 10 March 1989 (Apples and Snakes 1989a); alongside Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze at Covent Garden Community Centre on 10 November 1989 (Apples and Snakes 1989b); with Merle Collins, Marsha Prescod, and Patience Agbabi on 2 March 1990 (Apples and Snakes

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1990b); supporting Jayne Cortez for the second time, at Lilian Baylis Theatre on 6 October 1990 (Apples and Snakes 1990a); and as part of the Apples and Snakes ‘Mother Tongue’ UK tour for International Women’s Week 1991, joining the bill on 6 March at the Golden Lion Hotel in Ipswich (Apples and Snakes 1991). Despite this regular activity there are few published accounts of Munirah’s work. In 1990 administrator Marjorie James penned a double-­ page spread on the company’s history and activities for Feedback, the magazine of Haringey Arts Council. Munirah were also surveyed for Lizbeth Goodman’s 1987–1990 study of feminist theatre companies (Goodman 1993b, p. 71), but Goodman chose not to discuss them at length in her subsequent book Contemporary Feminist Theatres, reasoning that it was a ‘mixed gender group’ (Goodman 1993a, p. 146). Presumably Goodman was here referring to the involvement of Alan Springer and Vernon Shabaka Thompson as artistic directors or Nick Nuttgens as choreographer. The exclusion of Munirah from this study is unfortunate: their work was undoubtedly concerned with (Black) women’s rights and the creative representation of (Black) women’s lives, and was facilitated rather than compromised by their strategic allegiances with men. While Goodman’s decision was no doubt necessary to manage the scope of her project, it sadly curtails the historical documentation of Munirah’s activities. Unfortunately Munirah’s third major production was to be the last. The funding climate was not advantageous: Marjorie James’ 1990 article for Feedback notes the burden on companies in receipt of funding to complete onerous administrative processes and produce a certain volume of work, and when Munirah’s revenue-funded period ended in 1990, Haringey Arts Council suggested that the company should seek corporate funding. This attitude to arts organisations was symptomatic of wider societal shifts (Saunders 2015, p.  232). Some theatre companies had success with this route: IRIE! dance theatre partnered with the retailer W.H.  Smith, for example. However, for Munirah, the end of the funding arrangement presented a juncture that prompted several members to move on to new opportunities. With characteristic thoughtfulness and with all members in agreement, Munirah Theatre Company formally closed in 1991. Since then members of Munirah have made significant contributions to social and cultural life in Britain and abroad. Marjorie James went on to work for the Arts Council from 1991 to 2008, drawing on her first-hand experience of Black arts administration to promote access to the arts for women, ethnic minorities, and people with disabilities. A-dZiko Simba

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migrated to Montserrat in 1992, where she built on her work with Munirah to co-found innovative theatre company Plenty Plenty Yac Ya Ya with poet and visual artist Chadd Cumberbatch and poet and dramatist Yvonne Weekes. In 1998 Simba moved on to Jamaica, the country of her mother’s origin, and has since authored a number of award-winning short stories, novels, screenplays, and radio drama, as well as producing an album of her spoken word poetry titled Crazi Ladi Dayz (released by Jump and Fly Jamaica in 2004). Simba’s most recent publication, the novel All Over Again (published in 2013 by Blouse and Skirt Books, an imprint of the  Caribbean  press Blue Moon Publishing), won the inaugural Burt Award for Caribbean Literature. Since performing in Our Bodies Are Our Maps Neema Kambona set up Andika Afrika Publishers in Tanzania, founded the online magazine Diversity Business, and directed the short films Wosia/The Will (2006) and The Business Trip (2008). Performer and writer Michelle Matherson now works as a Talent Executive for the television production companies Shiver (part of ITV studios) and Label 1. Performer Deborah Badoo continues to present original choreography and music through the dance company State of Emergency, which she co-­ founded in 1986, as well as advocating for black dance and choreography both in the UK and internationally; in 2010 she received an MBE for her services to British dance. Charmaine Raison (now Horvath) now lives in the United States, where she works as a speech-language pathologist. Founding member Sherma Springer (nee Batson) went on to work in the UK charity sector and for the Labour Party, and held elected posts for her local county and borough councils. In 2008 she was awarded an MBE for her services to Hertfordshire, and in 2014–2015 she served as Mayor of Stevenage (Rooke 2017). Sadly, Springer died on 8 January 2017 (Stevenage Borough Council 2017). At her funeral—held in Stevenage on 3 February 2017—Hawkins, James, Matherson, and Williams reunited to perform a poem co-written with A-dZiko Simba titled ‘In Remembrance of Sherma’ (Cudjoe 2017). Despite the decades that have passed since Munirah disbanded, the company clearly remains profoundly important to its members. This chapter seeks to inscribe the importance of the company to (black) British theatre history, too.

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On the Inside (1986) Munirah’s first major production, On the Inside, responded directly to recent events affecting the black community in London. A promotional pamphlet for the production, fronted with a simple line illustration by A-dZiko Simba, specifies the narrative as set on 28 September 1985 (Munirah 1986, n.p.): the day of the shooting of Dorothy ‘Cherry’ Groce by the Metropolitan Police, during a search for her 21 year old son Michael in relation to a suspected firearms offence. Groce lived in Brixton, having moved to Britain from Jamaica in her teens. She was left paralysed by the injury. The shooting catalysed two days of violent confrontation between the community and the police, in which many were injured, one man— photojournalist David Hodge—fatally. A week later there followed a similar period of unrest on the Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham in response to the death of Cynthia Jarrett: an African Caribbean woman who suffered heart failure during a police search of her home on 5 October. The printed programme (Fig.  1) for On the Inside, designed by Anum Iyapo, features a dedication to Groce and Jarrett along with ‘our mothers and all Africans in struggle’ (Munirah 1986, n.p.). This inscription remembers the causal detail of the 1985 London uprisings. Its historicising impulse was an important corrective to the narratives of black pathology— such as innate violence and familial dysfunction—circulating in mainstream media and authorised by government responses (O’Brien Castro 2017, p. 178). On the Inside reframed the so-called ‘race riots’ by centring Groce and Jarett; as Elaine Aston has written, On the Inside ‘stressed the social and cultural invisibility of [B]lack women’s experience’ (Aston 2002, p. 326). The dedication further connects these particular instances of racial injustice in Britain with a wider struggle that is both domestic (‘our mothers’) and diasporic (‘all Africans’). Even in this first production, Munirah’s political literacy and commitments were already visible. The promotional pamphlet for On the Inside also gives the production a spatial setting: inside a launderette (Munirah 1986, n.p.). Here, members of the community come together, sharing stories and observing their neighbours’ activities whilst their children play outside. The scenery for the production was designed by Ken McCalla, who continues to work as an artist and printmaker.19 McCalla created large cardboard cut-outs of washing machine frontages, which cast members would open to retrieve their next costume. The performers changed costume onstage, making the transition between different identities explicit. Munirah shared this

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practice of multi-role playing with Black Mime Theatre (BMT); but whereas BMT used a corporeal sign system of posture and interpersonal positioning to create each character, Munirah emphasised the production of identity through aspects of voice—such as dialect, perspective, accent, and wordplay—as well as costume. A-dZiko Simba’s archive materials reveal that On the Inside opened in darkness, with the poem ‘Just Black Women’—written by Simba and Charmaine Raison—spoken as a voiceover. There followed twenty-four further poems written variously by Hawkins, Roberts, Simba, Springer, and Williams. Five of these were published in the anthology Watchers and Seekers: Hawkins’ ‘The Inheritance’ (Cobham and Collins 1987, p. 85), Simba’s ‘Woman Talk’ (p. 13) and ‘25.40pm (past mourning)’ (p. 50), Springer’s ‘Ms. Understood’ (p. 54), and Williams’ ‘Beware of the Poison’ (p. 115). A further ten are preserved in typescript in Simba’s and Hawkins’ personal collections: Hawkins’ ‘Return of the Kink’ and ‘Dear Mother’, and Simba’s ‘Comic Heroes’, ‘Yuh an’ yuh frien”, ‘Black Coffee and Cigarette Blues’, ‘Rejoice (African Woman)’, and a collection of four poems from different perspectives titled ‘The Cherry Groce Suite’. Ten other poems are not known to have been preserved. These are named in the production programme as ‘Just Black Women’, ‘Body Fashion’, ‘Emotions’, ‘She Plays the Fool’, ‘Old Age’, ‘To My Daughter’, ‘Body Poppin”, ‘The Return’, ‘Death of an Afro-West-Indian Wog’, and ‘The Tele’. Simba’s ‘Comic Heroes’—which would also feature in the company’s subsequent production, thinkofariver—observes with characteristic wit the relationships between women and men. It speaks directly to the audience with its second-person address, and is a text of two halves, emphasising the gender divide. The poem begins by commenting on the uneven division of domestic labour, which—it suggests—is sustained by women’s complicity: ‘A mop in one hand, saucepan in the other/Hoovering the carpet while on the phone to mother’ (Simba c. 1986b). The second part of the poem turns its gaze towards men, condemning military action as a masculine obsession: ‘if questions are asked then just start a war’. Some phrases are repeated and repurposed from the first part to the second, making it clear that both parties are culpable. In particular, the refrains ‘Superwoman yuh hard, yuh hard’ and ‘Macho man yuh hard, yuh hard’ recall Michelle Wallace’s 1978 book Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, which brought attention to the damaging persistence of patriarchal structures within progressive black politics. Further references

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to mundane acts and popular branded products give a playful quality to the poetic voice, and an audio recording captures how backing rappers accentuated this humour using non-lexical vocals (‘shoo-be-dowah’). The poem concludes its critique by entreating its audience to self-reflect: ‘look at yourself as hard as you can/Make sure you’re not superwoman or macho man’ (Simba c. 1986b). Gender roles are the primary site of difference in ‘Comic Heroes’; racial issues emerge only through allusion to Wallace’s book. Crucially, the poem’s critique of patriarchal social structures does not present women simply as victims, nor absolve women from their responsibilities to themselves and each other. On the Inside continued with two poems by Hawkins and Roberts, respectively titled ‘Body Fashion’ and ‘Emotions’, which are unpreserved in the company members’ collections. Then followed Simba’s ‘Yuh an’ yuh frien”: written in 1982, this poem adopts a creolised voice rendered on the page in phonetic form, suggesting a speaker from the Caribbean. The first six stanzas are fronted with an extension of the title that identifies the titular ‘friend’: ‘Yuh an yuh friend Ego’ (Simba c. 1986c). Each stanza articulates a different complaint against the addressee, painting a composite picture of a self-serving misogynist who avoids domestic duties but aggressively asserts his social rights. The demotic voice facilitates the final pun, which plays on the sustained image of the ‘ego’ to issue an ultimatum: ‘Eider E go or I go’. This witty finish demonstrates Caribbean creole as a self-aware and intelligent linguistic practice: an affirmation of the migrant population, and an implicit lesson for a white British audience. A similar technique structures Jimi Rand’s 1984 poem ‘Nock Nock Oo Nock E Nock’, which puns on the name of Conservative politician Enoch Powell (Procter 2000, p. 98). The next poem, Simba’s ‘25.40pm [past mourning]’, continues the theme of women wasting time on unhealthy relationships. It traces the experience of a 25-year-old woman whose partner neglects their relationship and endlessly defers his responsibilities. This poem was visibly crafted for the page as the repeated line ‘and she waited’ is typographically emphasised: firstly with the words run together (Cobham and Collins 1987, p. 50), then with capitalisation (p. 51), and finally by taking up excessive space. This formal technique enacts the protagonist’s need for acknowledgement by textually demanding the reader’s attention; there is no recording preserved for this poem, but no doubt a performative equivalent for this typographic emphasis would have been found for the stage. The final stanza of the poem shows the protagonist aged forty, decisively

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walking away from the relationship rather than continuing to wait. This expression of personal responsibility recurs in Munirah’s work and typifies the company members’ collective ethic. Two poems by Hawkins followed in the running order of On the Inside: ‘She Plays the Fool’ and ‘Return of the Kink’. Though the former is not known to be preserved, the latter was featured in the 1988 documentary film Polishing Black Diamonds: clips of the performance bookend Hawkins’ commentary on the relationship between her appearance and political identity, and are spliced with clips of women discussing hairstyles. The poem describes the violence entailed in the pursuit of white ideals of female beauty, with particular reference to bleaching and chemical perming, and ends with the speaker rejecting such rituals and embracing her natural ‘kink’. It makes use of creole vocabulary and is delivered with a strong Caribbean accent, aurally confirming the message of celebrating Black heritage. The filmed performance of the poem shows that it was primarily voiced by its author, Hawkins, who introduces herself as the ‘DJ’. Simba and Williams provided support, miming musical instruments and using vocal scat techniques; Hawkins credits them as a ‘backing band’ consisting of keyboard and ‘riddym guitar’. In an alteration from the printed text, the imagined external intervention of ‘a Rasta’ (Hawkins c. 1986) is transformed in the recorded performance to an internal voice, ‘me soul’. This change again attributes to women themselves the agency and ability to make positive choices. The topic of hair is common in black British women’s theatre—and, indeed, in African diaspora culture more widely. Similar scenes appear in Theatre of Black Women’s play Pyeyucca, Bernardine Evaristo’s novel Lara, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, and Selina Thompson’s solo performance Dark and Lovely (staged at Oval House in 2015). Two unpreserved poems followed in the sequence for On the Inside, Williams’ ‘Old age’ and Springer’s ‘To my daughter’, before Hawkins’ ‘The Inheritance’. Its teenage female speaker reflects on her mother’s experiences of maternity, before confessing her own pregnancy. Like several of the earlier poems in the production, ‘The Inheritance’ uses the  second-­ person address to dramatise a conversation and so depict a relationship: ‘On the day I was conceived/what were your thoughts,/Mother?’ (Cobham and Collins 1987, p.  85). A set rhyme scheme and repeated refrains give the poem structure and stress the revelation in the final stanza. Springer’s poem ‘Ms. Understood’—listed in the production programme with the variant title ‘Ms. Understand’ (Munirah 1986, n.p.)— registers the experience and effects of emotional abuse:

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She may not understand why it is that her opinion is found to be irrational her point of view insignificant her feelings ignored her logic illogical her facts inaccurate why her actions are inclined to be of no importance. She may not understand why it is that her suspicions are unfounded her reasoning unreasonable her beliefs unbelievable her intelligence underestimated her authority undermined why her meaning is never understood. She cannot understand why it is that he can do no wrong But she can understand why it is that she is unhappy. (Cobham and Collins 1987, p. 54)

The two seven-line stanzas report the multiple ways in which the speaker is undermined, with the repeated prefixes ‘un-’ and ‘i-’ stressing her negation. The tight syntax of subject-noun-adjective in lines three to six of each stanza creates a dense wall of negativity, and the omission of the verb absents the interlocutor, suggesting the speaker’s internalisation of his damaging perspective. Yet the repetition of ‘she’ and ‘her’ forms a visible backbone to the poem on the page, quietly inscribing the speaker’s continuing strength. On the Inside continued with Simba’s poem ‘Afrikan Woman Talk’, which issues a call for emotional literacy and personal responsibility: ‘sisterwoman know yourself/and sisterwoman feel yourself/and sisterwoman be yourself’ (Cobham and Collins 1987, p. 14). The use of the second-person address is fitting for the company’s self-consciously didactic practice, inscribing an audience. The poem answers back to the emotional repression and psychological abuse depicted in Springer’s ‘Ms. Understood’ by imagining a female community bonded by the free expression of feelings. This ideal society is symbolically enacted in the Watchers and Seekers anthology, which

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opens with Simba’s poem; generically retitled ‘Woman Talk’, this powerful piece casts the other contributors to the collection as example citizens, and frames their texts as modelling a range of emotions and experiences. Next in the sequence of On the Inside were Simba’s ‘Body Poppin’ and ‘Black Coffee and Cigarette Blues’, before a sequence of four poems by Simba gathered under the collective title ‘The Cherry Groce Suite’. At this point, the production turned explicitly to recent events in London. These linked poems deal with the shooting of Dorothy ‘Cherry’ Groce by adopting different personas and perspectives that cohere around a shared final stanza. The first component poem, ‘The Friend’, inscribes in the vernacular voice a narrative of post-war migration from the Caribbean to the UK. After responding to the invitation from Winston Churchill (Prime Minister from 1940 to 1945 and 1951 to 1955) to serve the ‘mudda lan’ (motherland) as part of the ‘come-an-wealth’ (Commonwealth), the speaker reports the hostility and disillusionment experienced in England. This diaspora narrative serves to contextualise the shooting of Groce, presenting contemporary police brutality as part of a longer history of colonial exploitation. Each poem in the suite of four ends with news of the shooting, delivering a repeated phrase through different voices. In ‘The Friend’ we are told ‘Miss Cherry dung a Brixton/Get one bullet in har back’ (Simba c. 1986a). The next poem, ‘The Rioters’, speaks with the unified voice of the firstperson plural and so inscribes a collective memory, aligning it with contemporary texts like Valerie Bloom’s ‘Yuh Hear Bout’ (1983) and Benjamin Zephaniah’s ‘Call It What Yu Like’ (1992), which also use poetry as a medium to remember and document racial injustice. ‘The Rioters’ uses Standard English, insisting on the linguistic habits and national identity of the titular group, while the poem also signals its speakers’ African Caribbean cultural heritage by making reference to the proverb ‘who feels it knows it’ (which also lent lyrics to songs by Bunny Wailer and Bob Marley). This poem stresses the actions of the Brixton community as an angry and grieving reaction to the history of mistreatment of Britain’s non-white populations, disallowing any idea of intrinsic or spontaneous violence by pointing to the triggering event, ‘that damn bullet in her back’. ‘The Police’ is a longer poem, answering the collective voice of ‘The Rioters’ by speaking with a state-sponsored ‘we’. Placing them side-by-­ side in the production re-enacts on the stage the antagonism on the streets. ‘The Police’ details the aftermath of the shooting for the officer who fired the shot, Douglas Lovelock. It provocatively appropriates Groce’s injury to provide a metaphor for his response: ‘she may be paralysed in pain/but

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Police Inspector Lovelock/is paralysed with shame’ (Simba c. 1986a). The final poem in the suite, ‘The Media’, adopts the persona of a journalist in search of a headline. It shows how the media constructed a narrative of black pathology by obscuring the context and the catalysing events of the Brixton uprisings. As well as describing how facts can be misconstrued, the poem craftily demonstrates through internal wordplay the iterative revision of textual content. Again, form serves theme in Munirah’s political poetry. Poems from ‘The Cherry Groce Suite’ were interspersed by Hawkins’ ‘The Return’ and Simba’s ‘Death of an Afro-West Indian Wog’, and followed by Williams’ ‘Beware of the Poison’, Simba’s ‘Rejoice (Afrikan Woman)’, and Hawkins’ ‘The Tele’ and ‘Dear Mother’. ‘Beware of the Poison’ continues the message of ‘The Rioters’ by further flagging the continuing legacy of the colonial past, asserting that the judgement and condemnation exercised by people in authority ‘had its seeds in the crevices/of your history’ (Cobham and Collins 1987, p. 115). The final poem of On the Inside, ‘Dear Mother’, poignantly addresses the subject of maternal loss; this text was to recur in both versions of thinkofariver. This first major production set the tone for Munirah’s work: it is accessible in theme, both comedic and intricately crafted in form, and expects action from its audiences. Munirah focussed On the Inside on declaring Britain’s racist history as a determining context for the 1985 disturbances. This position was considered by some to be radical, even inflammatory, and others’ creative efforts to convey the same message were subverted. Ceddo Film and Video Workshop, formed in the 1980s by Menelik Shabazz, was commissioned by Channel 4 to examine the ‘riots’ in Broadwater Farm; the resulting film, The People’s Account (1986), was directed by Milton Bryan and funded by Channel 4 and the British Film Institute as well as the Greater London Authority, LBGS, and Haringey Arts Council. The film features interviews with and commentary from representatives of various community associations, professionals involved in the subsequent inquiry, academics, and activists (British Film Institute n.d.). However, the Independent Broadcasting Authority objected to the film’s depiction of the police as racist and the riots as self-defence. Since Ceddo refused to make the changes demanded of them, The People’s Account never received its planned television broadcast (Ogidi n.d.). What was censored on screen Munirah made possible onstage.

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thinkofariver

(1987)

Munirah promoted their second full-length production as ‘explor[ing] the way in which our thoughts and aspirations are moulded by the passage of time, revealing how past experiences colour our present and future’ (Munirah 1987, n.p.). The production programme addresses spectators directly, inaugurating a community: ‘You are invited to share with us our love and laughter, regret and celebrations, as we journey through the never-ending stream of time’ (Munirah 1987, n.p.). The water imagery featuring in the title and these publicity statements continued in the backdrop for the production: the company hung three panels of hand-painted cloth, representing rivers. thinkofariver opened with a poem titled ‘Always Towards’, followed by several pieces authored by A-dZiko Simba: ‘Akil’, ‘Moy’, and ‘Going home (for a good friend to sing on her way home)’. This triptych exemplifies Munirah’s multimodal style, showcasing choreopoetry, mini monologue, and song, respectively; a group-devised improvised skit also followed later, titled ‘Gossip’. An audio recording of ‘Going home’ is preserved in Simba’s collection: a chorus of voices invite a lone friend to call on their support, expressing through sung harmonies their heterogeneous community. This poem picks up the river imagery of the production title, as the voices sing soothingly: ‘Let our refreshing waters wash over you and heal’. The fifth piece in the original production of thinkofariver, ‘Take time to love’, was a song written and performed by Hawkins with other performers  providing the chorus and harmony—and occasionally, from backstage, joined by administrator Marjorie. Other component poems for thinkofariver have been preserved in typescript in Hawkins’ and Simba’s personal collections. All of these explore the subject of relationships. They variously describe the promise of a new partner (Hawkins’ ‘Mixed Doubles’); examine the unevenly gendered realms of private and public life (Hawkins’ ‘Love’s Young Dream’); explore communication and the negotiation of sexual practices (Hawkins’ ‘The Condom (Saviour of Mankind)’); give loving tribute to particular relationships (Simba’s ‘Akil’ and ‘KisFM’); and evoke the interpersonal memories attached to everyday objects (Simba’s ‘Moy’). Metaphor is mobilised regularly as a poetic strategy: ‘Akil’ wittily figures a coming child—named in the title—as the collaborative project of a writer and musician: ‘I got my pen and you got your sticks’ (Simba c. 1987a). ‘KisFM’—an abbreviation of ‘keep it short for movement’, retitled in Simba’s typescript collection as

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‘4 Kas’—was delivered in three parts, meditating on a lover’s qualities with reference to the musical categories of jazz, soul, and calypso. No author is recorded (or remembered) for several of the component works of thinkofariver: ‘Final encounter’, ‘Déjà vu’, ‘Nite time’, and ‘Oh child’. The programme lists only their titles, suggesting an ethic of collective authorship. But the production did prominently feature historic poems by three African American women: ‘Hatred’ (1902) by Gwendolyn B. Bennett, a poet, artist, and journalist of the Harlem Renaissance period, whose poem delivers a vitriolic fantasy of vengeful justice; ‘The Mother’ (1917) by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks; and ‘Only in this way’ (1917) by visual artist and author Margaret Goss Burroughs. As such, thinkofariver hosted a global community of African diasporic women writers. It is significant that Munirah chose to credit those who had gone before; this sense of participating in an historical lineage is an important counter to the misperceptions of Black art as newly emerging. Further, showcasing black cultural production from the early twentieth century pointedly confronts the lie undergirding the practice of enslavement that Black people are less than human. One advantage of an archival methodology is the opportunity to see a text’s genetic development, tracing successive drafts and interpreting the revisions. For Munirah, such edits were collaborative and often had an eye on preparing the poem for the stage. Hawkins’ collected typescripts contain some handwritten emendations, which give a sense both of the company’s creative process and of the piece as performed. The typescript for ‘Mixed Doubles’ shows how the text was adapted for performance, with additional lines added by hand by Simba. The typescript for the poem ‘… and this is now!’ (Figure 3) was also annotated by Simba, assigning lines to three performers: ‘T’ indicates Maureen ‘Talibah’ Hawkins, ‘A’ refers to A-dZiko Simba, and ‘H’ is for Hazel Williams (Hawkins c. 1987). Since Munirah’s work often moves lucidly through different narrative perspectives, it is striking that in this poem the singular first-person pronoun is retained throughout. That ‘I’ is shared among the three voices who speak the text and the three performers who embody it, suggesting both the individual as a complex being comprising different parts, and the collective as unified by a common perspective. A handwritten emendation by A-dZiko Simba instructs the performers to join together in chorus for the final fragment of the poem, occupying this shared ‘I’ simultaneously:

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Fig. 3  Maureen ‘Talibah’ Hawkins, ‘… and this is now!’ (c. 1987). Hawkins personal collection, London. Typescript with handwritten annotations

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A and from now on when you see me Just walk on by cos I’ll just be!! All.

Pause.

In this final aural act the three personae articulate their mutuality. A comparison might be found in Theatre of Black Women’s Pyeyucca (Evaristo and Hilaire  1984), where the two performers incarnate and eventually reconcile the alienated aspects of a single fractured psyche. The personal pronoun is the subject of some editorial  attention in Hawkins’ ‘The Miracle’, a poem that was added to the revised production of thinkofariver later in 1987. This piece traces the period from conception to labour, depicting from a mother’s perspective the experience of anticipating and birthing a child: ‘Before you were conceived/I wanted you/ Before you were born/I loved you’ (Cobham and Collins 1987, p. 100). The poem was published in this form in  Watchers and Seekers that same year, but the archived typescript shows the text’s history: there are many handwritten alterations to the pronouns, systematically changing ‘I’ to ‘we’ and ‘my’ to ‘our’. This inscribes the child’s entry into an unspecified collective—whether the parents, the wider family, a particular community, or humanity as a whole. It modifies the described filial experience from something individualistic and particular to a public declaration of commitment and care, in line with Munirah’s ethic of collective responsibility. A poem titled ‘The Trap Rap’ was also added to the revised production of thinkofariver. Simba’s archive collection preserves an audio recording of this piece under the alternative title ‘No Way Out’. Rap and beatboxing mix with a chorus of spoken and sung poetry to tell of the pressures faced by all members of a family and community, including problems of health, work and unemployment, addiction, poverty, and relationships. As such, it delivers a striking critique of the contemporary economic climate under Margaret Thatcher. The interplay between voices adds texture to this piece: the vocal chorus enacts that these struggles are common to many, while the solo sections illustrate the isolating effects of such alienating experiences. Simba’s ‘Funeral for the Dead’ was the penultimate poem in the original version of thinkofariver, and became the final piece in the revised production. In the film Polishing Black Diamonds, Simba describes writing this poem after seeing images of South Africa under apartheid, with the aim of uniting herself to their struggle. This oppressive regime would not be

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dismantled until 1991. As well as being featured on film the poem is preserved as an audio file in Simba’s possession, capturing how this powerful piece makes use of music, spoken word poetry, and multivocal chanting. Opening pipe music—credited to Tony Mendez for its use on Polishing Black Diamonds—anticipates the layered interplay of spoken voices. The poem’s verbal content is delivered in chorus: one voice (Hawkins) begins with the urgent rhythmic refrain ‘running, running, running, running’, setting a beat for the second voice (Williams) to enter with the line ‘When are they going to bury the bodies?’ (Simba c. 1987b). These two tracks form a sonic backdrop that persists throughout the poem. A third voice (Simba) then joins, adding another layer of sound and meaning. This principal voice celebrates anti-colonial activity across the African continent: the line ‘from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe’ recognises that nation’s rejection of British colonial rule and successful claim to black nationalism; ‘from Congo to Zaire’ acknowledges the renamed state that would last from 1971 to 1997 under military dictator Mobutu Sese Seko; ‘from South West Afrika [sic] to Free Namibia’ anticipates the change that was to come with independence from German and then South African rule in 1990; and ‘from South Africa to Azania’ highlights the continuing campaign to recognise the historic name of Africa’s southernmost state. A hummed harmony of the pan-African freedom song ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’ serves as a chorus; the words go unspoken, poignantly registering the fact that the song was at that time banned by the apartheid government.20 A final climactic repetition of the opening line is finally followed by the return of the pipe music, closing the revised production of thinkofariver. Polishing Black Diamonds pairs the audio track of ‘Funeral for the Dead’ with images of antique maps of Africa (southern, central, west), the Caribbean, and the UK. (Sound engineering for the film was completed by Anthony St Helene, another supporter of Munirah’s activities.) This audio-visual synchronicity insists on the interconnected histories of the different  continents, imaging the triangular ‘Black Atlantic’ (Gilroy 1993). The decision to move ‘Funeral for the Dead’ to the end of thinkofariver in the revised production ensures spectators leave with a clear sense of Munirah’s political commitments, preferring global consciousness over comfortable catharsis.

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Our Bodies Are Our Maps (1990) In their third and final full-length production, Our Bodies Are Our Maps, Munirah shifted their focus from international politics to Black female experiences of embodiment. Bringing to life the contemporary feminist mantra ‘the personal is political’, the component poems deal with the varied subjects of pubescent body shaming (Hawkins’ ‘Two enormous moments’); the divide between body and mind for the working poor (Simba’s ‘Many Hands—A Working Title’); and the cultural and political significance of styling hair (Simba’s ‘Jamaica the first time’). As the production programme (Fig.  4) states, ‘the characters are Afrikan woman unravelling the threads of their lives to liberate their bodies and their true selves’ (Munirah c.1990, n.p.). Our Bodies Are Our Maps was delivered in two parts, titled with aural puns characteristic of Munirah’s humour: Part One ‘The Weight’ links the measurement of body mass with the endlessly deferred promise of perfection (the ‘wait’), while Part Two ‘The Changing Room’ pairs the everyday experience of shopping for clothes with the possibility of radically transforming our social system (‘change’). Founding member of Munirah A-dZiko Simba was joined by two new performers for Our Bodies Are Our Maps: Neema Kambona and Michelle Matherson (Munirah c.1990, n.p.). Hazel Williams’ poetry also featured, although she did not perform. In interview Matherson recalls that the set for the production was based on the female form. Designed by Liza Dickson and constructed by Mark Ellwood and students at Croydon College, it included a chair shaped like a hand and a bed shaped like a stomach and a breast. The performers wore skin-tight outfits, modelling corporeal diversity and body confidence for the (largely female) audience. The opening poem, Simba’s ‘Many Hands—A Working Title’, describes the detrimental psychological effects of monotonous manual labour. In keeping with its theme, the poem grammatically separates body from mind, abstracting the actions from the acting subject with the repeated phrase ‘These are the hands’. The hands stand in synecdochic relation to the unnamed figure at the heart of the poem, imaging a capitalist system where personhood is reduced to productivity—both (under-)paid and domestic. The poem mimics the structure of children’s rhymes as further lines are added with each iteration, giving the sense of a task that is never complete. The final stanza makes explicit the futility of these actions:

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Fig. 4  Munirah, Our Bodies Are Our Maps (1990). Simba personal collection, St. Thomas, Jamaica. Programme. Designed by John Clube

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These are the hands That push and pull push and pull. These are the hands that realise the money is never enough. (Simba c. 1990)

Though the poem does not identify its subject by gender or ethnicity, hierarchically striated confrontations with the ‘boss man’ and ‘the man in the office/on floor 13’ clearly establish the speaker’s subordinated class status. The poem’s subtitle ‘A Working Title’ plays on the convention for describing creative drafts, alerting the audience to the multiple and divergent realities named by the word ‘work’. The second item on the bill for Our Bodies Are Our Maps, ‘Supreme Body’, was a spoof of the song ‘Baby Love’ by The Supremes, performed by Neema Kambona, Michelle Matherson, and A-dZiko Simba. Munirah’s contemporaries Black Mime Theatre also chose to repurpose material from popular culture, most notably in the Women’s Troop production Total Rethink (1991), which parodied the 1990 film Total Recall starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sharon Stone. Unfortunately, few of the component pieces for Our Bodies Are Our Maps have been preserved in typescript or recording. Simba’s mini-­ monologues ‘Jamaica the First Time’ and ‘Goloshes’ are retained in the author’s collection, as is Hawkins’ ‘Two enormous moments’. ‘Jamaica the first time’ was published nearly a decade after its inclusion in this performance, in Hope: Fiftieth Anniversary Anthology of Poems (Fergus 1998), an anthology commemorating the University of the West Indies in the aftermath of the 1995 volcanic crisis in Montserrat. The poem dramatises a young girl’s trip from London to Jamaica, where she is to meet and be appraised by her ‘yellow wavy haired’ grandmother. ‘Goloshes’ is a short prose piece telling of a 1950s migrant’s first experience of snow, in England. Sadly, Simba’s collection lacks other component pieces described by the author as ‘mini-drama’—‘Red Run’ and ‘Daddy’s Girl’—as well as the short story ‘Swallowing Spit’, and the final segment of Our Bodies Are Our Maps, titled ‘Going for it’. Also unpreserved are Williams’ ‘Mother Mirror’—promoted in the programme as a ‘drama trilogy’ (Munirah c.1990, n.p.)—and the group-devised choreography sequence ‘See how

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me sexy’. For several further pieces listed in the programme—‘Uncle Bob’, ‘Ancestral’, ‘Market Blues’ and ‘Lost’—the author is not recorded and texts cannot therefore be traced. This chapter brings to light significant amounts of Munirah’s material, countering previous assumptions in scholarship that the company had no material record at all. But the archive is by no means complete, and this chapter is cut short by such absences. It can only mark—and mourn—the specific gaps where information and items have been irretrievably lost. Perhaps this might serve as a caution to contemporary companies and writers: to document and preserve everything since perhaps, unknowingly, you are making history. * * * From a twenty-first-century vantage point, Munirah’s work can be understood as part of a wider British non-naturalistic performance tradition. IRIE! dance theatre—a company founded in 1985 by Beverley Glean— drew aesthetic influence from Africa, the Caribbean, and Europe in their 1989 production of Raymond Wilkes’ The Black Spirit (IRIE! dance theatre 1989). Temba Theatre Company—founded in 1972 by Trinidadian Oscar James and South African Alton Kumalo, and the first black theatre company to receive annual subsidy from the Arts Council (King-Dorset 2014, p. 79)—eschewed a linear naturalistic narrative in favour of ‘a meditation […] a combination of dreams, memories and questions’ for their 1989 production of Edward Kamau Braithwaite’s Mother Poem at London’s Drill Hall (Temba Theatre Company 1989). Like Munirah, these various companies found that non-mimetic media like dance and music allowed them to compress centuries of history, and to register the relationship between pre-colonial African mythology, the trauma of transatlantic slavery and the plantation economy, and the situation in contemporary black Britain. Elizabeth Clarke’s article on black British theatre, published soon after acting as a consultant on the revisions to thinkofariver, expresses a concern that new plays by writers of African, Asian, and Caribbean heritage in Britain were so dominated by narratives of racism that ‘artistic responsibility’ was  being compromised (Clarke 1988, pp.  62–63). Munirah’s work was certainly political: members of the company were (and are) deeply committed to the global struggle for racial justice, as their self-identification as ‘Afrikan’ suggests, and their productions unflinchingly connected contemporary events with colonial history, as well as

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imaginatively reconnecting the black population of Britain with their African ancestors. But, countering Clarke’s appraisal of the field in general, Munirah’s politics were intrinsically linked with their aesthetic success. One technique of particular significance appears in the performance of the poem ‘Polishing Black Diamonds’, clips of which provide a structural backbone for the documentary film of the same name. Two performers stand back-to-back, side-on to the audience, while the third stands in front, facing the audience, concealing the bodies of the two behind her so that only their heads are visible. This triangulated formation at once signals their connection whilst preserving their difference. The arrangement rotates as different performers move to the frontal position to speak, choreographically matching the poem’s thematic celebration of self-­ actualisation and shared heritage. For Munirah, as for Theatre of Black Women before them, the company’s vital political intervention was enabled and enhanced by their  non-naturalistic aesthetics,  rather than superseding their creative potential. Further setting Munirah apart from some of their contemporaries was their Afrocentric approach to the task of crafting a collective identity. For instance, Zindika’s play Paper and Stone (written in 1989, produced in 1990) deals with intergenerational conflict, responding to racism by emphasising the Britishness of the so-called ‘second generation’. By contrast, Munirah’s global perspective stresses the continuum of African identity throughout the diaspora. In this, Munirah more closely anticipates some of debbie tucker green’s postmillennial plays: stoning mary, trade, generations, and truth and reconciliation draw attention to international injustices such as HIV/AIDS and sex tourism, and ask their audiences to develop awareness and empathy that reaches beyond national borders. It should not be underestimated how pioneering Munirah’s consciousness-­ raising work was in an age before social media facilitated instant global connectedness. The many lively Black arts networks in the 1980s and 1990s, especially in London, are certainly deserving of credit for practically supporting and intellectually nourishing Munirah’s work. But the company should also be celebrated on their own terms: as a creative collective of Black women whose choreopoetry—by turns challenging, intimate, and humorous—activated an attentive audience. Thanks to the generosity of the company members in sharing their remaining materials (including some evocative photographs, such as Fig.  5) and stories, Munirah’s innovative work can now rightfully be inscribed as part of British theatre history.

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Fig. 5  Jheni Arboine, ‘Munirah’ (c.1990). Simba personal collection, St. Thomas, Jamaica. Promotional photograph. (Left to right: Hazel Williams, A-dZiko Simba, Maureen ‘Talibah’ Hawkins, Michelle Matherson)

Notes 1. For references to Munirah Theatre Company in published scholarship, see Goodman 1993a, p. 146; Croft 1993, p. 84; Joseph 1998, p. 198; Aston 2002, p. 326; Godiwala, ed. 2006, p. 77; Goddard 2007, p. 201; Chambers 2011, p. 178. 2. The performance poetry organisation Apples and Snakes was founded in 1982 by Mandy Williams, Pete Murry, and Jane Addison. 3. I conducted an interview with Maureen ‘Talibah’ Hawkins (performer), Marjorie James (administrator), Michelle Matherson (performer), June Reid (board member), A-dZiko Simba (performer), and Hazel Williams (performer) via Skype on 26 November 2017. This chapter has also been enriched by email, telephone, and in person communications with various members since. 4. See my chapter (Abram 2020)  in The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing for a fuller account of arts collectives in twentiethcentury Britain.

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5. The Minority Arts Advisory Service was formed in 1976 by Naseem Khan, author of The Arts Britain Ignores (1976), and was in operation until 1995. 6. Founded by Alan Springer in 1980, Images Theatre Group produced the plays Images in Black (1980), Amazulus (1981), and Who We Are (1982). 7. Cobham and Collins 1987, p. 157; Anon 1985, p. 2. The Greater London Council (GLC) Literature Competition received over 700 entries across its various categories. Jacqueline Rudet came second in the C.L.R.  James prize for unpublished plays, with Basin (Anon 1985, p. 2). Competition organiser Prabhu Guptara commented in his reflections that the event pioneered in the UK what is now known as positive action: it ‘made some sort of legal history in exploring the use of the Race Relations Act 1976 to enable sections of the Competition to be limited to black people’ (Guptara 1985, p. 4). The GLC itself was formed in 1965 to take over local administration from the London County Council, conceiving of London as a much larger area than that earlier body had. During its last period of Labour Party leadership, from 1981, the GLC bolstered arts funding in the capital. In 1986 the responsibility for local government was passed to London boroughs. Zadie Smith memorialises the importance of GLC funding in her novel White Teeth, in which the character Poppy Burt-Jones, a white music teacher working at a London school in the mid-1980s, comments that cuts to education budgets had been so damaging that ‘If it wasn’t for the GLC, there wouldn’t even be a desk’ (Smith 2000, p. 157). 8. Akira Press was founded by Desmond Johnson, who migrated from Jamaica in 1980 (Habekost 1993, p. 31). 9. Anum Iyapo (now Anum Abeng) served as Chairman of the OBAALA committee for a period. He provided the cover illustration for Maud Sulter’s award-winning poetry collection As a Black Woman, published by Akira Press in 1985, and worked on Menelik Shabazz’s 1981 film Burning an Illusion. He was also involved in the design for Our Story: A Handbook of African History and Contemporary Issues, a book of lectures edited by Akyaaba Addai-Sebo and Ansel Wong for the London Strategic Policy Unit and published by Hansib in 1988 as an outcome of the first UK Black History Month—sadly, now out of print. See: https://www.crer.scot/ single-post/2017/09/28/How-did-Black-Histor y-Month-cometo-the-UK. 10. OBAALA 1983, p.  4. For information on The Black-Art Gallery, see Chapter 8 of Eddie Chambers’ Black Artists in British Art: A History since the 1950s (2014). 11. James 1990, p. 10. Haringey Arts Council was an arts development agency, now named Collage Arts. 12. The title of A-dZiko Simba’s poem ‘Afrikan Woman Talk’ echoes the name of the writing collective Black Womantalk, established in 1983 to publish

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anthologies of black women’s writing. Their outputs included the collection Don’t Ask Me Why, which featured Simba’s short stories ‘A Piece of Furniture’ and ‘The Communion (Choong et al. eds, 1991, pp. 5–6, 75–82). 13. Elizabeth Clarke organised ‘Opportunities: The Afro-Asian Contemporary British Theatre Conference’, which took place at the Young Vic Studio on 31 January 1987. This led to an Arts Council commission to report on black theatre to its Drama Council in autumn 1987. As Lynette Goddard notes, the draft report is held at the Arts Council Library (Goddard 2007, pp. 23, 212). 14. The Camden Black Theatre Seasons should not be mistaken for the 1983–1990 Black Theatre Seasons: see Terracciano 2006. 15. See ‘Leaflet for Camden Black Theatre Season’ (image 15 of 15) at http:// www.unfinishedhistories.com/history/companies/theatre-of-blackwomen/ [accessed 27 November 2017]. This statement is repeated in Osborne 2006, p. 77. 16. The film Polishing Black Diamonds is preserved in the Arts Council England Film Collection (ACE431) and is currently available to view for a small fee through the feminist film distributor Cinenova (http://cinenova. org/database/filmdetail.php?&filmId=348), and—to members of UK institutions of Higher and Further Education—through the online Arts on Film Archive hosted by Westminster University (http://artsonfilm.wmin. ac.uk/filmsuk.php?a=view&recid=0). 17. Creation for Liberation was founded in 1975 and existed until 1987. Its activities were inclusive of Asian as well as African and Caribbean populations. 18. The Dark and Light Theatre Company was founded by Frank Cousins in the early 1970s to showcase black actors and new black writing. Cousins stepped aside in 1975, reportedly in response to some pressure from the Arts Council, and the company became the Black Theatre of Brixton under Jamal Ali, Norman Beaton, and Rufus Collins (King-Dorset 2014, pp.  168–169). Cousins went on to serve in  local government (KingDorset, p. 158). The Black Theatre of Brixton closed in 1977. 19. Ken McCalla maintains a website of his artistic activities at http://www. yahwarts.co.uk/. 20. ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’ has, since 1997, formed a portion of the South African national anthem. The song also appeared in the 2005 and 2007 productions of debbie tucker green’s play generations at the National Theatre and Young Vic, respectively, sung by the African Voices choir.

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References Abram, Nicola (2020). ‘Forging Connections: Anthologies, Collectives, and the Politics of Inclusion’, in Susheila Nasta and Mark U. Stein (eds.) The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 403–416. Anon. (1981). ‘National performance listings’. Performance magazine. 14 (November-December), 35–36. Anon. (1985). ‘Preface’. Wasafiri. 3 (Autumn), 2. Apples and Snakes (1986). Women’s Poetry Focus. http://www.spokenwordarchive.org.uk/content/performance/jayne-cortez-jackie-kay-akimbo-munirah-lioness-chant-2 Listings document. Apples and Snakes (1988). Women of the Word. http://www.spokenwordarchive. org.uk/content/performance/women-of-the-word-1. Listings document. Apples and Snakes (1989a). March 1989. http://www.spokenwordarchive.org. uk/content/performance/international-womens-week-3. Listings document. Apples and Snakes (1989b). November 1989. http://www.spokenwordarchive. org.uk/content/performance/jean-binta-breezemunirahdebjani-chatterjee. Listings document. Apples and Snakes (1990a). Everywhere Drums. http://www.spokenwordarchive. org.uk/content/performance/elsewhere-drums-tour-3. Listings document. Apples and Snakes (1990b). Summer 1990. http://www.spokenwordarchive.org. uk/content/performance/munirahmerle-collinsmarsha-prescodpatienceagbabi. Listings document. Apples and Snakes (1991). Mother Tongue. http://www.spokenwordarchive.org. uk/content/per for mance/mother-tongue-uk-tour-91-per f-5 Listings document. Aston, Elaine (2002). ‘Women Theatre Collectives’, in Alison Donnell (ed.) Companion to Contemporary Black British Culture. London: Routledge, 326–327. British Film Institute (n.d.). ‘The People’s Account (1986)’. http://www.bfi.org. uk/films-tv-people/4ce2b7566cf8f (accessed 14 August 2017). Chambers, Colin (2011). Black and Asian Theatre in Britain: A History. London: Routledge. Chambers, Eddie (2014). Black Artists in British Art: A History since the 1950s. London: I.B. Tauris. Choong, Da, Olivette Cole Wilson, et  al., eds. (1991). Don’t Ask Me Why: An Anthology of Short Stories. London: Black Womantalk. Clarke, Elizabeth (1988). ‘Black Theatre in England: A Perspective’. Banja: A Magazine of Barbadian Life and Culture. 2, 60–64. Cobham, Rhonda and Merle Collins (1987). Watchers and Seekers: Creative Writing by Black Women. London: Women’s Press.

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Croft, Susan (1993). ‘Black Women Playwrights in Britain’, in Trevor R. Griffiths and Margaret Llewellyn-Jones (eds.) British and Irish Women Dramatists Since 1958: A Critical Handbook. Buckingham: Open University Press, 84–98. Cudjoe, Selwyn R. (2017). ‘The Web We Weave’. http://www.trinicenter.com/ Cudjoe/2017/2102.htm (accessed 14 November 2017). Evaristo, Bernardine and Patricia Hilaire (1984). Pyeyucca. Evaristo personal collection, London. Typescript. Fergus, Howard A., ed. (1998). Hope: Fiftieth Anniversary Poetry Anthology: Celebrating the University of the West Indies and Montserratian Hope During a Volcanic Crisis. Montserrat: University of the West Indies School of Continuing Studies. Field, Steven (2012). Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra: Five Musical Years in Ghana. London: Duke University Press. Gilroy, Paul (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso. Goddard, Lynette (2007). Staging Black Feminisms: Identity, Politics, Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Godiwala, Dimple, ed. (2006). Alternatives Within the Mainstream: British Black and Asian Theatre. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press. Goodman, Lizbeth (1993a). Contemporary Feminist Theatres: To Each Her Own. London: Routledge. Goodman, Lizbeth (1993b). ‘Feminist Theatre in Britain: a Survey and a Prospect’. New Theatre Quarterly. 4 (33), 66–84. Guptara, Prabhu (1985). ‘Editorial’. Wasafiri. 3 (Autumn), 3–4. Habekost, Christian (1993). Verbal Riddim: The Politics and Aesthetics of African-­ Caribbean Dub Poetry. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Hawkins, Maureen ‘Talibah’ (c.1986). ‘Return of the Kink’. Hawkins personal collection, London. Typescript. Hawkins, Maureen ‘Talibah’ (c.1987). ‘… and this is now!’. Hawkins personal collection, London. Typescript. IRIE! Dance Theatre (1989). The Black Spirit. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Playbills and programmes. James, Marjorie (1990). ‘Coming Together, Growing Together’. Feedback. October, 10–11. Joseph, May (1998). ‘Bodies Outside the State: Black British Women Playwrights and the Limits of Citizenship’, in Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane (eds.) The ends of performance. New York; London: New York University Press, 197–213. Khan, Naseem (1976). The Arts Britain Ignores. London: Community Relations Commission. King-Dorset, Rodreguez (2014). Black British Theatre Pioneers: Yvonne Brewster and the First Generation of Actors, Playwrights and Other Practitioners Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co.

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Lashley, Caroline (1986). ‘Plain Talking Jayne’. The Voice. April 5, 16. Megson, Chris (2012). Modern British Playwriting: The 1970s: Voices, Documents, New Interpretations. London: Methuen. Munirah (1986). On the Inside. Simba personal collection, St. Thomas, Jamaica. Programme. Munirah (1987). Thinkofariver. Simba personal collection, St. Thomas, Jamaica. Programme. Munirah (1990a). Our Bodies Are Our Maps. Simba personal collection, St. Thomas, Jamaica. Programme. Munirah (c.1990b). Publicity pack. Simba personal collection, St. Thomas, Jamaica. A4 brochure. O’Brien Castro, Monia (2017). ‘It’s “Young Black Kids Doing It”: Biased Media Portrayals of the Deviant in Britain?’, in Sandra E. Weissinger, Dwayne A. Mack and Elwood Watson (eds.) Violence Against Black Bodies: An Intersectional Analysis of How Black Lives Continue to Matter. London: Routledge, 178–196. OBAALA (1983). ‘Heart in Exile: An exhibition of drawing, painting, sculpture and photography by British-based Black Artists’. Diaspora Artists. http://new. diaspora-artists.net/display_item.php?id=667&table=artefacts. A5 exhibition catalogue. Ogidi, Ann (n.d.). ‘Ceddo’. http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/ id/569785/index.html (accessed 14 August 2017). Osborne, Deirdre (2006). ‘Writing Black Back: An Overview of Black Theatre and Performance in Britain’. Studies in Theatre and Performance. 26 (1), 13–31. Pearce, Michael (2017). Black British Drama: A Transnational Story. London: Routledge. Procter, James, ed. (2000). Writing Black Britain, 1948–1998: An Interdisciplinary Anthology. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Reckford, Michael (1993). ‘British playwright here researching Marley’. Kingston Gleaner. 67. Rooke, Howard (2017). ‘Sherma Batson obituary’. https://www.theguardian. com/uk-news/2017/feb/03/sherma-batson-obituary (accessed 31 October 2017). Saunders, Graham (2015). British Theatre Companies 1980–1994. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. Sesay, Kadija (2002). ‘Publishing, Newspapers and Magazines’, in Alison Donnell (ed.) Companion to Contemporary Black British Culture. London: Routledge, 250–253. Simba, A-dZiko (c.1986a). ‘The Cherry Groce Suite’. Simba personal collection, St Thomas, Jamaica. Typescript. Simba, A-dZiko (c.1986b). ‘Comic Heroes’. Simba personal collection, St Thomas, Jamaica. Typescript.

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Simba, A-dZiko (c.1986c). ‘Yuh an yuh frien’. Simba personal collection, St Thomas, Jamaica. Typescript. Simba, A-dZiko (c.1987a). ‘Akil’. Simba personal collection, St Thomas, Jamaica. Typescript. Simba, A-dZiko (c.1987b). ‘Funeral for the Dead’. Simba personal collection, St Thomas, Jamaica. Typescript. Simba, A-dZiko (c.1990). ‘Many Hands’. Simba personal collection, St Thomas, Jamaica. Typescript. Smith, Zadie (2000). White Teeth. London: Penguin. Stevenage Borough Council (2017). ‘Press release: Cllr Sherma Batson MBE DL’. http://www.stevenage.gov.uk/news-and-events/press-releases/173952/ (accessed 31 October 2017). SuAndi (2007). ‘Africa Lives On in We: Histories and Futures of Black Women Artists’, in Elaine Aston and Geraldine Harris (eds.) Feminist Futures?: Theatre, Performance, Theory. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillian, 118–129. Temba Theatre Company (1989). Mother Poem. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Playbills and programmes. Terracciano, Alda (2006). ‘Mainstreaming African, Asian and Caribbean Theatre: The Experiments of the Black Theatre Forum’, in Dimple Godiwala (ed.) Alternatives Within the Mainstream: British Black and Asian Theatre. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 22–60.

Black Mime Theatre: The Women’s Troop

Naseem Khan—author of The Arts Britain Ignores (1976), an important report highlighting the ethnic diversity of British cultural production— once joked: ‘If you’d wanted to invent a company with problems, you might call it “Black Mime Theatre”’ (Khan 1991, p.  104). In fact the company of that name was to thrive for fourteen years, developing a characteristic style of physical theatre combined with speech, song, and comedy that has been described by Bernardine Evaristo—a founding member of the first black women’s theatre company in Britain, Theatre of Black Women—as ‘outrageously zany’ (Evaristo 1992, p.  23). Inaugurated in 1984, Black Mime Theatre (BMT) enjoyed a dynamic existence as shifting arrangement of troupes, including a two-year span as a dedicated women’s group from 1990 to 1992. The Women’s Troop—the titular pun was intended to suggest an army marching—focused their productions on subjects of contemporary social significance, such as motherhood, media sexism, and alcoholism.1 Valuing the input of local communities, the company routinely held public workshops to gather source material. Such outreach activities led to the plays Mothers (1990) and Drowning (1991a). The Women’s Troop also produced Total Rethink (1991b), a spoof of a contemporary film. Although very different in form from the poetic monologues and choreographed movement of Theatre of Black Women and the themed poetry performances of Munirah Theatre Company, BMT Women’s Troop shares and extends these pioneers’ mission to bring black women to the British stage. © The Author(s) 2020 N. Abram, Black British Women’s Theatre, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51459-4_4

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History, Activities, Archives Much of BMT’s history has been captured in previously published studies. Lynette Goddard—who was for a time BMT’s stage manager—documents some of the company’s activities in the monograph Staging Black Feminisms (2007) and in a contribution to the Companion to Contemporary Black British Culture (2002). Lizbeth Goodman has conducted audience surveys (Goodman 1993b) and an interview with the company’s Artistic Director, Denise Wong (Goodman and Gay 1996), and written on BMT’s contemporary production context (Goodman 1993a). Several further interviews with Wong have been published: many appeared in ephemeral print media contemporaneous with the company’s activities, such as the listings magazines Southern Arts (Wong 1991), What’s On (Woddis 1991a; Marmion 1991), City Limits (Khan 1989), and The Stage (Miller 1991), as well as in  the monthly feminist magazine Spare Rib (Williams 1991). Another interview was included in a collection purposed for the education sector (Wong 1997), and—most recently—dramatist Kia Corthron referred to a conversation with Wong that took place in October 1999, as part of her essay surveying black theatre in America at the turn of the millennium (Corthron 2002). Unfortunately, the nature of both  the theatre and publishing industries means that information conveyed in these discussions was sometimes outdated by the time it was disseminated. For instance, Goodman interviewed Wong in April 1991, but the Women’s Troop had disbanded by the time extracts of this exchange were published in Contemporary Feminist Theatres (1993a). The interview was updated for its full publication in Goodman and de Gay’s Feminist Stages (1996), but the company closed just two years later. Fortunately there are substantial archival records for Black Mime Theatre, which were deposited with the Victoria and Albert Museum (VAM) by the chair of BMT’s board following the company’s closure. These files contain management information, marketing materials, and production recordings. In the absence of playscripts these recordings preserve a vital record of the company’s work and make scholarship possible—indeed, recordings of Mothers and Drowning underpin this chapter. But this audio-visual material should not be thought of as a definitive record of any given production, since the company continuously revised their work in response to audience feedback. BMT’s archive is therefore a salient reminder of what is inevitably lost to time, despite the company’s unusually thorough attempts at preservation. The files of BMT’s correspondence with the Arts Council of Great Britain (ACGB),

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also housed at VAM, provide further detail on the company’s funding history and include their official appraisals. These composite records inform the following chronology of the company’s activities—as does my own interview with Denise Wong, held in December 2012, in which she shared a personal perspective on the activities of Black Mime Theatre. Black Mime Theatre was formed in 1984 as a company comprising men and women, on the initiative of two white people: David Boxer, who had trained in mime at L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq, in Paris, and administrator Sarah Cahn. Intending to ‘encourage the emergence of Black performers in mime’ (Goddard 2002a, p. 48), Boxer and Cahn held auditions to recruit to the company. Denise Wong joined as a performer for the first production, Tall Stories (1984), along with Carlton Dixon (Black Mime Theatre 1992b). David Boxer left the following year. Wong and Dixon then devised Chasing the Dragon (1985) in collaboration with Josette Bushell-Mingo, under the direction of Sarah Harper (Wong 1991, 1996, p. 195). These early productions reportedly toured mainly to schools, influenced by Boxer’s interest in the cultural practices of young people. Denise Wong had been born in Bedford, to a black Jamaican mother and a Jamaican father with black Jamaican maternal and Chinese paternal heritage. She trained at Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama between 1976 and 1979, enrolling on the innovative Community Theatre Arts programme in its inaugural year. (Bernardine Evaristo, a founding member of Theatre of Black Women, auditioned for entry during Wong’s final year.) After graduating Wong took up a professional opportunity with the theatre company Kaboodle under its energetic director Lee Beagley. But her growing resolve to see physical theatre accommodate a wider range of performers and address more diverse constituencies was to be most fully expressed in her lengthy commitment to BMT. In April 1986 Sarah Cahn left Black Mime Theatre to pursue other opportunities, and Wong was invited to take on the role of Artistic Director (Aston 2002, p. 327; Goddard 2002b). Having little administrative experience, she relied on certain individuals for guidance—most prominently Philip Bernays at Independent Theatre Council, who went on to serve as BMT’s administrative director, chairing its management committee whilst working as Executive Director at the Young Vic. With this support Wong successfully applied for BMT’s first grants from the Greater London Council (GLC) and the London Arts Board. She also organised for a member of Moving Picture Mime, a fellow company, to offer training for

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BMT’s performers. The first production under Wong was Mantrail (1986), which incorporated contemporary urban street art into the company’s emerging style. Six productions followed over the next four years, all of which toured widely: Personal Relationships (1987), Really Street Show (1988), Goin’ Home (1988), Don’t Panic (1989), Rainbow (1989), and Superheroes (1990). Wong had an expansive definition of mime, considering it an ‘umbrella term for dance and music and physical theatre’, as well as recognising its socio-political significance as ‘a means of debate’ (Khan 1989). She worked consistently to challenge its reputation for being exclusive and elitist and to make it more accessible, remarking in a later interview that ‘a lot of black companies use mime, although they do not call it that’ (Anon. 1992). Indeed, other chapters of this book amply demonstrate that mime techniques appear in works by Theatre of Black Women, Munirah Theatre Company, Zindika, and  SuAndi. In the 1988–1989 season Black Mime Theatre received its first Arts Council grant: a sum of £2,000 towards improving the company’s administrative capacity (Black Mime Theatre 1994). A dedicated administrator, Mel Jennings, was appointed to work on developing and retaining audiences. In a particular effort to bring young black people into theatre BMT held street performances during the summer months (Miller 1991). The following year ACGB awarded BMT revenue funding for the first time, at £16,230 (1989/90). The company continued to grow in productivity and popularity and, in 1990, won the award for London International Street Entertainer of the Year with the production Superheroes. Although BMT sometimes employed female performers—Personal Relationships (1987) featured Patricia Warmington, for example—Wong was troubled by the gender imbalance in the company. Reasoning that women had not had access to the training enjoyed by men, she recognised their need for a separate space in which to develop before working alongside the male performers: ‘we needed […] to establish our own identity so that we could then perform on equal terms with the men’ (Woddis 1991a). Wong therefore dedicated the company’s 1990–1991 ACGB funding (a sum of £28,700) towards recruiting female artists and establishing a separate women’s troupe. This initiative was further supported by funds from Greater London Arts, London Borough Grants Scheme, and Southern Arts (Wong 1991). This newly focused venture began in September 1990 with a weekend training workshop in Aldershot enjoyed by thirty women. Remarkably, over 100 had applied (Wong 1996, p. 196).

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Workshops were central to the creative practices of the Women’s Troop. They served both as group auditions that gradually yielded a core cast, and as a means of improvising material for the planned production. Goddard considers this collaborative process to be evidence of a ‘feminist sensibility’ (Goddard 2007, p.  136). Though the method was not unique to the Women’s Troop—the original, male-dominated company had also devised its productions collectively—the context made the Women’s Troop’s workshops a particularly vital social and political intervention. As well as providing training in technical performance skills, the  workshops responded to the double oppression of black women in Britain by promoting self-exploration and self-expression. Like Theatre of Black Women, who regularly ran public writing workshops and held post-show discussions, BMT actively invested in opportunities to gather black women together and centre their stories. As such, the company’s cultural and social significance far exceeded the plays they produced. From the first cohort of  workshop participants three women were selected to perform in the inaugural Women’s Troop production: Cindy Afflick, Paulina Graham, and Sky Hunt. During a further eight-week residency in Aldershot they devised and rehearsed a seventy-five-minute play (Wong 1991), moving from a democratic decision on the aims of the show through a process of improvisation and discussion to a point where Wong could create large storyboards that mapped the ‘throughline’ (Goodman 1993a, p.  170) from scene to scene. This would become the Women’s Troop’s signature method. For the first play, themed on motherhood, the cast also gathered material by speaking to local mothers’ groups and reading relevant literature; one particularly attentive press reviewer (Couzens 1991) recognised the influence of Nancy Friday’s volume of interviews My Mother/My Self: The Daughter’s Search for Identity (1977). The Women’s Troop considered it vital that their source material was specific to the lives of black women in Britain so that their plays could validate that community onstage: as Wong commented in interview, ‘[a]s black British people, for a long time our own material was not allowed us—we were given plays from the US, Africa and the Caribbean. We wanted to find our own stories’ (Miller 1991). Mothers (See Fig.  1) premiered in November 1990 at the West End centre in Aldershot before touring to a number of colleges, studio theatres, libraries, community centres, and arts centres across England. The tour lasted until April 1991 and amounted to sixty-four performances with a total attendance of 3341 (Black Mime Theatre 1994). Mothers also

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Fig. 1  Black Mime Theatre Women’s Troop, Mothers (1990). Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Core Collections: Playbills and Programmes. Flyer. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

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played at several specialist events: the London International Mime Festival at the Lilian Baylis theatre (23 to 26 January 1991)—which made the Women’s Troop visible for their medium rather than under a racialised or gendered identification—and two women-only performances at London Women’s Centre in Holborn (1 and 2 March 1991). Mothers was reviewed as a ‘stunning debut’ (Woddis 1991b), and the Women’s Troop were celebrated by cultural activist Naseem Khan as ‘deft, funny, and deal[ing] with down-to-earth street issues’ (Khan 1991). A crop of staged publicity images for Mothers taken by photographer Desmond Ip (See Fig. 2) have been widely circulated, forming the cover of Goddard’s 2007 monograph and three times accompanying Goodman’s publications (Goodman 1996, p. 33, 1993a, p. 163, 1993b, p. 81). Through this material repetition the Women’s Troop has come to function as an icon for black British women’s theatre more widely. As its title suggests, Mothers explores the lives and trials of several mothers: Sylvie (played by Paulina Graham) cares for her young daughter, Patricia (Cindy Afflick), whilst enduring a violent relationship; Thelma (Cindy Afflick) is emotionally distant from her teenage daughter, Cynthia (Sky Hunt) and unwilling to admit her maturation into womanhood; finally, an adult Cynthia struggles with the demands of raising two children of her own in a metropolitan environment. Lizbeth Goodman described the show as a ‘collage of impressions’ (Goodman 1993a, p. 168), though the three discrete stories do finally cohere into a single narrative: daughters become mothers and call on others for support, showing how patterns of parenting persist across generations.2 In the words of one critic, Mothers is ‘a voyage of discovery, charting the growth of compassion and comprehension until a time when the daughter, now herself a mother, is finally able to say: “I understand”’ (Martin 1990). In a small audience survey, Lizbeth Goodman found that those attending Mothers were largely female but that the precise demographic depended on the venue: performances at London’s Oval House and Bradford’s Mill theatres drew a high proportion of white women between twenty-one and thirty years of age, many of whom were students, while a performance at The Base in south London—a venue established by the black theatre company Umoja—predominantly attracted black women aged sixteen to thirty (Goodman 1993a, p.  46). In an interview Denise Wong explained that BMT were proactive in reaching black people: before a regional tour the company would identify and contact relevant community leaders, looking to recruit readymade audiences from local interest groups. Indeed,

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Fig. 2  Desmond Ip, ‘Black Mime Theatre Women’s Troop’ (1990). Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Black Mime Theatre, Photographs of Mothers, THM/26/5/5. Publicity photograph. (Left to right: Sky Hunt, Cindy Afflick, Paulina Graham) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

respondents to Goodman’s survey reported that the most effective advertising was through word of mouth rather than printed promotional materials (Goodman 1996, p. 32). The company diligently maintained contact with anyone who attended a production, requesting feedback and keeping a database of their details for marketing purposes.3

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Cast members Paulina Graham and Sky Hunt continued into the Women’s Troop’s next production, joined by Syreeta Kumar. Total Rethink premiered on 28 June 1991 at the Unity Theatre in Liverpool, as part of the city’s Festival of Comedy, before a stint at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and an appearance at the British Festival of Visual Theatre at Battersea Arts Centre. The production was financed with £29,500 from ACGB, as well as continuing subsidy from Greater London Arts and London Borough Grants Scheme. It toured until 15 September, totalling twenty-one performances. Unlike the triad of stories structuring Mothers, this forty-five-minute spoof follows a single narrative throughout, mocking the forms and themes of Hollywood action movies through sustained allusion to the film Total Recall (1990) starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sharon Stone. Its all-female cast provocatively queered the heteronormative form of Hollywood film. Total Rethink won the Women’s Troop the prize for mime at the 1991 London International Street Entertainer of the Year awards. Drowning followed, with a completely new cast: Cassi Pool, Tracey Anderson, and Arosemaya Diedrick. This was the third of the Women’s Troop productions, and the longest at one hour and forty minutes. Drowning opened on 7 November 1991 at the West End Centre in Aldershot, and toured until 31 March 1992, amounting to fifty-one performances for a total of 3696 spectators (Black Mime Theatre 1994). The schedule included a sold-out return to the London International Mime Festival, held that year at the Young Vic theatre (See Fig. 3), as well as a number of shows in schools (Woddis 1992). As Goddard observes, access to such a wide range of venues was made possible by the company’s simple, comic style (Goddard 2002a, p.  49). The three central stories in Drowning emerged from research on the subject of alcohol abuse and addiction, including contact with women’s groups. In fact, the production itself had a positive impact: a photograph from Drowning was reportedly used to promote an alcohol recovery centre in Hampshire to black and Asian populations (Black Mime Theatre 1992a). Critics’ responses to Drowning were generally impressed. Some celebrated BMT for updating the abstract classical tradition: ‘To anyone who still equates mime with white faced-figures in billowing silk walking into the wind, it will come as a revelation: mime has acquired a voice and is even in danger of logorrhoea’ (Billington 1992). Others remarked on the production’s politicised content, describing it as ‘almost old-fashioned

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Fig. 3  Black Mime Theatre Women’s Troop, Drowning (1991). Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Core Collections: Playbills and Programmes. Flyer. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

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documentary agit-prop’ (Hewison 1992, p. 115). But some were less persuaded by the claim in the company’s name, pronouncing BMT ‘a standard theatre company without props and only three actors […] the “Mime” bit is a red herring’ (Lezard 1992), and proving unwilling to think beyond the establishment: ‘I cannot help wondering what the French or the Belgians would make of [BMT’s] rough readiness’ (Armitstead 1992). Sadly, it seems that many reviewers were not sufficiently resourced to heed Wong’s appeal for ‘a critical analysis which is not Eurocentric’ (Wong 1996, p. 200). The following year ACGB received a pre-election bonus from the incumbent Conservative government, and invited Black Mime Theatre to apply for three-year franchise funding. Eight years after the company was first founded, and after two years exclusively  focused on working with and for women, Wong decided to form a mixed-gender group to be known as the Ensemble. Publicised as a ‘Theatre of Simplicity’, Wong intended for the Ensemble to deliver black mime in larger venues and to more substantial audiences (Black Mime Theatre 1992b). The funding application was successful, giving BMT £100,000 for the first year of the franchise period (1992–1993). As a result, the dedicated Women’s Troop ceased activity—though the three performers from Drowning continued into the next production. The Ensemble added three male performers to the continuing cast members. Its first piece, Heart (1992), explored the relationships between black men and women.4 It sold out performances at the Young Vic, and had its tour extended in response to demand. Arts Council funding of £102,500 for each of the  1993–1994 and 1994–1995 seasons  enabled two further productions by the Ensemble: EDR: Earliest Date of Release (1993) and Dirty Reality (1994). For the second franchise period (1995–1998) Wong requested an increase to £140,000 per  annum— reduced from a first draft figure of £177,400 (Black Mime Theatre 1994). Arts Council England, newly devolved from ACGB, awarded the company £100,000. The resulting productions Forgotten Heroes (1995) and Dirty Reality II (1996) toured nationally and internationally, including shows in Sierra Leone (Black Mime Theatre 1997). At this time Wong’s personal career was also flourishing beyond BMT. Like Patricia Hilaire of Theatre of Black Women and playwright Zindika, Wong worked with Adzido Pan-African Dance Ensemble: she directed the drama in the productions Oya’s Choice (1994), Thand Abantwaana (1995), and Shango the God of Thunder (1996) (Goddard 2002b). Wong’s commitment to making mime accessible for black women continued in the form of an annual summer workshop (Goddard 2002b).

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Participants were supported through a fortnight’s training to devise and mount a production (Black Mime Theatre 1996). This lively summer programme surfaced so many social issues and powerful personal testimonies that Wong considered reviving the Women’s Troop: ‘there are still so many stories to be told’ (Wong 1996, p. 199). The next Ensemble show, Mourning Song (1997), was to tell some of them. Like both Mothers and Drowning it was formed out of the performers’ responses to a particular experience: in this case, bereavement and grief. Devising began with a cast of five women—Marva Alexander, Gurpreet Bhatti, Tracy Bickley, Hazel Holder, and Mai Vu—and two men. However, the unplanned departure of the male actors unexpectedly returned Mourning Song to the female-­ focused arrangements of the Women’s Troop. Mourning Song opened at Lakeside Theatre, University of Essex, and toured between January and April 1997. Unfortunately the recording of the production held by the Victoria and Albert Museum is, at the time of writing, unavailable to view for conservation reasons. Knowledge of this production therefore relies on witness accounts. Lynette Goddard reports that Mourning Song was markedly less concerned with storytelling and more abstract in style than the plays that preceded it (Goddard 2007, p. 150). It reportedly made use of multiple media, projecting images onto a canopy of screens in the style of live art practitioners SuAndi and Susan Lewis, who had emerged just a few years earlier. The subject matter was expansive in scope, representing multiple geographies, genders, and ethnicities: a Vietnamese boat woman throws herself to a watery grave; a young boy, Darren, dies in a boiling bath while trying to wash away his blackness; another character, Michael, is shot dead in a drugs dispute.5 The production also incorporated multiple languages, including Punjabi, Spanish, and African chant (Goddard 2007, p.  150). This experimental play divided critics. Some esteemed elements of it more than the work of the earlier Women’s Troop, finding it ‘beautifully mesmeric and emotive’ (Williams 1997). However, many found the swift scene changes difficult to follow, and felt that the fragmented structure stunted character development. Unfortunately, Mourning Song was to be BMT’s last production. Alongside her work with Black Mime Theatre Wong was becoming increasingly active in the wider theatre community. In November 1995 she spoke at the Future Histories conference on black theatre in Britain, held at London’s Southbank Centre (Black Theatre Forum 1995a, b). Between 1997 and 1998—several years after she first registered the plan in the 1992 franchise funding application—she took a sabbatical from her

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role as Artistic Director of BMT to join the Arts Council England Trainee Director programme at Birmingham Repertory Theatre (Goddard 2002b). This post was oddly incongruous with her already advanced career. In 1998, the year after Labour was elected to government, Black Mime Theatre’s franchise funding was not renewed  by the Arts Council. The reasons for this remain unclear: in interview, Wong speculates that perhaps her sabbatical gave cause for concern about the company’s leadership, or perhaps the Ensemble’s forays into greater cultural diversity were perceived as crowding other artists’ territory. Without this key financial support, Black Mime Theatre ceased to function. In her presentation to the conference ‘Where Do We Go From Here? The Future of Afrikan Caribbean Theatre in Britain’ at Bristol Old Vic Theatre in April 1998, Wong warned black theatre-makers to learn lessons from such circumstances: she urged companies to diversify their funding base and to support each other rather than internalising the funders’ spirit of competition (Wong 1998, p. 19). Wong’s theatre career continued for some time after the closure of BMT with a move to Streets Alive, a company working with homeless young people in London. But eventually this, too, lost funding, causing her to leave the industry altogether. It is clear that during its fourteen-year existence Black Mime Theatre brought about meaningful change in the field of mime, making this ostensibly elitist art form accessible to black—and, through the focused intervention of the Women’s Troop, female—practitioners and audiences. As the only black mime-based theatre company in Europe, BMT’s historical significance is inarguable (Goddard 2002a, p. 49). The company’s legacy lives on in the artists it nurtured and influenced. Wong speaks with pride of directly supporting several other companies, including Breaking Cycles, run by Benji Reid, and Kwesi Johnson’s Kompany Malakhi. Mojisola Adebayo, who performed with the Ensemble in Dirty Reality II (1995–1996) and worked as a researcher for Mourning Song (Black Mime Theatre 1992a), is now an esteemed performance artist and innovative playwright. Adebayo names Black Mime Theatre as a profound influence on her subsequent solo work, alongside such diverse figures as Samuel Beckett, Augusto Boal, Bertolt Brecht, Jacques Lecoq, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Athol Fugard (Adebayo 2009, p. 102). Black Mime Theatre is here rightfully celebrated in theatre history, taking its place alongside canonical European theorists and practitioners and African American pioneers.

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Mothers (1990) No scripts are preserved for BMT’s productions, and in any case much of the  plays’ meaning depends on the use of movement. Scholarship must therefore include description of the plays’ physical components and transcription of the actors’ speech. Of course, written accounts cannot adequately represent the complexity of drama, and performed content is always mediated in the process of its capture: the punctuation of speech must be inferred, for example, and the scholar must decide how to order their necessarily sequential  written account of what happens simultaneously onstage. So where description and quotation are necessary to orientate analysis, this chapter offers what are inevitably partial and impoverished gestures. The result announces itself as a study of what has been preserved rather than a direct account of the performance event. At times this might make other readings and connections possible. For instance, in a previously published chapter on Black Mime Theatre, Lynette Goddard deploys numerous ellipses to depict the verbal gaps that would have been salient in other ways onstage (Goddard 2007, p. 137). Goddard’s textual rendering of these silences typographically anticipates the active unspoken exchanges that structure the scripts of postmillennial playwright debbie tucker green. The very method of scholarship thereby participates in the work of writing theatre history. The Women’s Troop’s process of developing each production through workshops and community research resulted in a characteristic narrative structure of closely observed case studies. In both Mothers and Drowning this takes the form of a triptych: rather than showing a singular story, or opposing two tales in a  binary pairing, the tripartite format responsibly represents the complexities of lived experience and refuses to allow any one character to take on a representative role. Juxtaposing the three studies also draws attention to the struggles shared by the different protagonists, identifying instances of systemic injustice. Each case study comprises a fast-moving sequence of self-contained scenes, often formed around one core image. This compartmentalised structure explains the recurrent descriptions of the company’s characteristic style as ‘like a sketchbook’ (Wong 1996, p. 195) and ‘cartoon-like’ (Khan 1991). Mothers shares its titular focus with a number of other plays by black British women, including Grace Dayley’s Rose’s Story (performed at South Bank Polytechnic in 1984, published in a collection by Methuen in 1985), Winsome Pinnock’s Leave Taking (performed at Liverpool Playhouse

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Studio in 1988, published in a collection of new plays by Nick Hern Books in 1989), and Trish Cooke’s Back Street Mammy (performed at Lyric Studio Hammersmith in 1989, included in a follow-up collection by Nick Hern Books in 1990). But these works all use slice-of-life realism to deliver their social commentaries; in contrast, the work of the Women’s Troop depends on non-naturalistic aesthetics. Instead of using props and scenery to replicate a recognisable world onstage, BMT’s plays foreground the actions of the human body through simple mime. Detaching these mundane movements (which include eating, drinking, and ironing) from their usual contexts requires the audience to participate in the making of meaning by recognising the characters’ actions and interpreting their purposes. Black Mime Theatre here repurpose an art form commonly perceived to be eccentric and elitist in order to represent everyday practices. The minimalistic staging and simple mime have a defamiliarising effect, promoting a critical perspective on these activities. In Mothers, it is the relationships between women and children that are especially scrutinised. Characters take shape through the performers’ interactions with and gestural implication of other (sometimes absent) bodies. This aspect of Denise Wong’s work can be traced to the influence of Mladen Materic; Wong performed under the Yugoslav director in The Closing Number in 1991, with the touring company Shared Experience. As she explained in an interview, Materic’s work ‘centres on […] human beings and how they relate to each other’ (Marmion 1991). Speech is characteristically absent, and the visual is primary. The relationship between performer and character is of particular interest in the work of the Women’s Troop. The cast of three in Mothers— Cindy Afflick, Paulina Graham, and Sky Hunt—each take one main role as the protagonists in the three case studies. But they also play multiple secondary roles, sometimes switching character within a single scene.6 This proves awkward for scholars attempting to summarise the action.7 Where the change of character crosses gender, Goodman’s solution is to parenthetically anchor her discussion with reference to the performer, writing, for example, that: ‘The “act” of the pop star is undermined when his (her) trousers split’ (Goodman 1993a, p. 170). The irruption of the parentheses typographically inscribes the way in which the performer periodically surfaces through the performance as the viewer’s attention slips from character to actor. Goddard takes the opposite approach, prioritising the performer and rendering the characters parenthetical; for instance, dialogue is attributed to ‘Cindy (as Mum)’ (Goddard 2007, p. 141). In their different ways,  both Goddard and Goodman here affirm the material

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reality of the black female performers, celebrating their constant presence onstage. Certainly, in contrast to the sense of flux produced by the dynamic multi- and cross-casting, the sustained physical presence of the black women onstage becomes a powerful and political act of taking up space. But an analysis focused on  the critical distance produced by the non-­ naturalistic staging recognises the performers’ (racialised, gendered) identities as  part of the production’s enquiry—rather than something with which to stabilise it. As such, this chapter diverges from the practices of previous scholarship by naming the cast members only in the first instance; subsequent references to ‘the performer’ allow that the actor’s identity is no more predetermined than the characters’. Mothers does not distinguish its cast by costume, as Drowning would go on to do. Instead, the three performers share a simple uniform of red tops and black trousers. By eschewing external markers of identity or individuality, the Women’s Troop visually signals the commonality of the various characters. The uniform also allows the actors to move seamlessly between different roles: it announces the performers as performers, rather than naturalising their status as particular characters. A similar technique features in debbie tucker green’s random (Royal Court, 2008), where the solo performer wears a plain vest with a tracksuit top and trousers to play numerous parts. In Mothers, as in random, each character is distinguished not through clothing but through posture, voice, gait, gesture, and the addressee and nature of their (inter)actions. The result is visually compelling, and critics rightly praised the quick conversions between characters in Mothers: ‘Whether portraying chauvinist husbands, brawling brats at bath-­ time, exasperated mothers or giggling teenagers, [the performers] hold centre stage with a charm and skill that is completely infectious’ (Woddis 1991b). The opening scene of Mothers introduces the theme of filial relationships through a suggestive mime sequence. The three performers imply a host of mothers and children, using gesture to indicate the nature of their relationships and thereby also establish their individual identities. Standing separately onstage, the performers each mime actions that identify them in relation to the implied body of an absent other: one directs a kiss upwards towards an implied parent; another issues a smack downwards, inviting spectators to infer the wriggling body of a fractious child. Each gesture from this opening vignette recurs later in the play; this first scene acts to index the distinct case studies to follow. Importantly, Mothers also uses mime to denaturalise interaction even when all of the participating characters are embodied onstage. One such

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scene spatially separates two characters precisely in order to depict their filial intimacy. Two performers play the roles of mother and young daughter, but being adults their equal size does not distinguish between the characters they depict. They therefore stand apart and separately mime the interaction: one orientates herself upwards towards the invisible ‘other’, the other  faces downwards. Spectators both  recognise the characters as mother and child, and acknowledge the two adult actors onstage. The technique draws attention away from bodies and towards actions—specifically, interactions. The first case study in Mothers centres on a nuclear family: mother Sylvie (Paulina Graham), father Clinton (Sky Hunt), and infant daughter Patricia (Cindy Afflick). The father teases his daughter with a mimed crane fly or ‘daddy longlegs’, eliciting a squeamish response. Patricia finds comfort in the arms of her mother, showing care-giving as asymmetrically gendered. The following scene shows Sylvie with her husband, triangulating the domestic relationships and acknowledging each individual’s identity as multifaceted: characters are constituted through their multiple relationships, for example as parent and partner and more. The daughter interrupts her parents’ sexual activities, and there follows a bath-time discussion on human anatomy, explicitly examining the body as the site of (gender) identity. With humour typical of BMT the mother deflects her young daughter’s insistent questions. Far from neutralising the core political issues, the use of comedy—including slapstick and farce—was intended by the company to engage the audience and create the conditions for change, as Wong remembers: ‘We don’t want to depress people, but to give hope, and present new viewpoints and maybe options’ (Wong 1996, p. 197). The scene develops as Clinton becomes physically and psychologically violent towards his wife. A flurry of action follows, enacting the disorientating effects of abuse by disrupting the audience’s own viewing experience. Sylvie’s household tasks are repeatedly interrupted by a series of callers at the door; her husband returns and sees her work uncompleted, and again makes her the object of his aggression. He then briefly holds her in a close embrace. The quick visual transitions between intimacy and violence show the range of possible relational states. In a final fleeting vignette the daughter kneels behind the parents. Her arm is raised to return her father’s violence, while her voice rises to intercept it: ‘Leave my mummy alone!’ In both word and action the child bids for an enduring and exclusive relationship with her ‘mummy’.

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Lizbeth Goodman has observed of Mothers that ‘[n]o single emotion or mood is allowed to dominate in the rapid succession from scene to scene’ (Goodman 1993a, p.  170), and the quick shift from Sylvie’s story is no exception. A sung interlude follows, in which the three performers mimic and thereby mock hypermasculinity. The impression of character in this scene relies on posture: the performers studiously hold themselves with a lower centre of gravity, suspended on slightly bent knees. For Goodman, the 1950s-style pop song they sing offers relief from the ‘emotional intensity of the last image’ (Goodman 1993a, p. 168). Yet this exaggerated performance is more than just entertainment. The singer croons to his ‘girl’—the term infantilises the adult addressee of his affections—and syntactically renders her an object for his possession: ‘You know I need you / I love you / I want you’. In the particular show preserved on film in the VAM collection, one of the performers briefly enters the auditorium at this point and directly addresses a spectator, saying ‘You’re beautiful, come home with me tonight.’ This involves the audience—the majority of whom were female, as Goodman’s survey showed—in the play’s depiction of heteronormative patriarchal culture. The juxtaposition of this with the previous scene is not incidental: the audience are invited to see a connection between the supposed romance in popular culture and the hidden horror of domestic violence. After this sung interlude another swift scene change transfers the focus to the daughter, Patricia, presented at a slightly older age. We watch as she gradually gathers information about puberty from playground conversations with friends and an encounter in the bathroom with her menstruating mother. A second interlude  comprised of synchronised dance movements follows this scene, and finishes the first of the production’s three case studies. These non-naturalistic sequences demarcate the division between stories, and the repetition of certain movements catalogues the emotional undercurrents of each set of circumstances. Using stylised movement alongside recognisable action creates a textured aesthetic that was shared by the playwright Zindika, a contemporary of BMT, who similarly  wove a non-naturalistic chorus through a naturalistic narrative in Paper and Stone (written in 1989; produced in February 1990). The structural separation of the case studies in Mothers formally frames each protagonist’s story but also serves a pedagogical function, providing space for the audience to reflect and eventually to make comparisons. On its own, each character study would seem to be private, specific, and singular. But when placed side by side, the conditions depicted can be seen as structural: the personal becomes political.

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The second case study features a controlling mother (played by Cindy Afflick) who refuses to acknowledge that her daughter, Cynthia (Sky Hunt), is growing up. She ignores her daughter’s desire to buy a bra and wear more adult clothes, pursuing what Goddard identifies as a ‘strong disciplinarian’ style of mothering (Goddard 2007, p. 137). Flashbacks to a younger Cynthia’s playful relationship with her father, Jim, implicate the mother’s jealousy in the breakdown of both the filial and spousal relationships. The mother remains unnamed throughout these scenes. Searching for relationships that would more positively identify herself, she entertains the attentions of Mr Michaelson, a jocular man who saunters around the family kitchen without trousers. Despite the mother’s apparent sexual abandon, she continues to restrict the freedoms of her teenage daughter, calling her a ‘street walker’ for wearing her hair loose and her skirt short. Her refusal to acknowledge Cynthia’s changing needs leaves the young woman without advice or protection. As we will see in the third case study, this ultimately results in Cynthia struggling to handle two infant sons. Cynthia’s first sexual encounter is with Clive, who works as a security guard in a clothing store. This older man exploits her ignorance, asking to meet her in a nightclub before enticing her back to his home. In this scene multi-role playing is used very precisely: as well as playing Cynthia’s mother, Cindy Afflick takes on the role of Clive. Stage right, the mother implies the sexual advances of the (absent) Mr Michaelson by performing her own bored response. Stage left, and lit separately, Cynthia stands alone. The physical distance between the two performers indicates their characters’ emotional detachment. Yet their overtly sexual movements are synchronised in their rhythm and progression—Cynthia’s mother becomes a cipher for Clive. This simple technique conveys layered meanings: a causal relationship between the mother’s actions (or inaction) and Cynthia’s experiences, as well as a comment on the unhealthy instrumentalism of both sexual interactions. Cynthia responds with distress to Clive’s implied advances, first asking and then shouting for him to stop. Staging this scene of sexual assault with only a single actor is especially disconcerting; the effects of the violence can be seen, but not its source. Again, a comparison with Zindika’s Paper and Stone is instructive: in a key scene the character Brenda implies the increasingly aggressive advances of a recent acquaintance, Carl, such that it appears as if her own body is attacking itself (Zindika 1989, p. 42). This illustrates the false logic of victim-­ blaming, where responsibility is wrongly assigned to victim rather than perpetrator, and materialises the symptoms of post-traumatic stress, where

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flashbacks reanimate the traumatic memory. For Cynthia in Mothers, too, the scene emphasises the character’s vulnerability. The non-naturalistic staging with a single actor suggests violence against women to be a spectral threat rather than a singular event, rendering the scene not just part of a specific story but an indictment of a systemic issue. Yet perhaps the staging of this scene might also contain a glimpse of Cynthia’s agency, by amplifying her voice and affirming her as a survivor. The third case study accelerates into the future to find Cynthia struggling to cope with two young sons, named as Patrick and Matthew. The two supporting performers contort their bodies to denote this childhood state: one makes the shape of a pushchair, with her arms as the handles, to imply her character’s infancy; the other mimes pushing the buggy, indicating her character’s relative maturity. The children bicker continuously, and one child then becomes physically aggressive towards a toy. This brief vignette recurs from the cacophonous opening scene; its repetition towards the end of the play suggests a continuing cycle of violence and neglect: the child mirrors the mother’s attitudes and actions, and ultimately reproduces them. Finally, the three case studies cohere into one narrative: Cynthia pays a visit to Sylvie—the mother of her friend Patricia—and to her own mother, who remains unnamed. The meeting is Cynthia’s attempt to restore a relationship with her mother. Her own difficult experiences of maternity allow her to reinterpret the memory of their past: ‘all I want to say is that I think I understand now […] I realise what you must have been going through, Mum’. However, Cynthia’s mother resists her daughter’s appeal for reconciliation, announcing herself as independent of both Cynthia and the grandchildren: ‘I will see you, Matthew and Patrick when I have the time […] I live my life the way I want to’. She goes on to name herself, claiming an identity that is independent of her filial position: ‘I’m no longer Cynthia’s mother. Thelma—me—Thelma Blake’. This speaks to something of a thematic preoccupation of the time: Sandra Yaw’s play Zerri’s Choice (Drill Hall, 1989) presents a migrant woman who wants to return to Guyana and leave behind her British-born daughters, identifying herself in exception to them; the performance piece Fo(u)r Women by Patience Agbabi, Adeola Agbebiyi, and Dorothea Smartt centres on a refrain exploring women’s various relational identifications: ‘mother, lover, sister, other’ (Agbabi, Agbebiyi et al. 2003, pp. 91–94). Thelma’s refusal to be identified by her family role is strikingly different from the practice of postmillennial playwright debbie tucker green, in whose playscripts proper nouns are rare and attributions such as ‘Mum’ and ‘Sister’ abound.

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In each case study, and in their unifying convergence, Mothers exposes the unreasonable pressures that attend women’s lives from infancy through to adulthood—and asks its audience to recognise their complicity in reproducing such an environment. The Women’s Troop did not dilute this message with a happy ending: Mothers turns towards a more abstract and symbolic sequence to close. The three performers stand in a diagonal formation spanning the stage to sing a song composed specifically for the production, titled ‘Unconditional Love’. This is no celebratory hymn to motherhood; the refrain ‘unconditional love: impossible’ speaks to all three case studies by disputing the myth of mothering as natural, effortless, and unaffected by circumstance. Cindy Afflick underlined this message in an interview for Spare Rib: ‘The [through] line of the show is that mothers don’t love unconditionally—their love is subject to human conditions and human emotions’ (Williams 1991, p.  22). More specifically, Lynette Goddard understands Mothers as a rebuttal to the idea of a ‘superstrong black mother’ (Goddard 2007, p. 137, emphasis added). The song is arranged as a round, sung in harmony, indicating that although some experiences are common to the three core characters, each woman endures them differently and with distinct personal inflections. The song allows Mothers to close on a strong thematic statement whilst maintaining its non-naturalistic approach—avoiding the spoken polemic that reviewers were to find distasteful in Drowning.

Drowning (1991) Repeating the triptych structure of Mothers, Drowning has its three performers each play one core character: Cassi Pool (seen on the right in Fig. 4) takes the role of Anna, Tracey Anderson (left, Fig. 5) plays Karen, and Arosemaya Diedrick (left, Fig. 6) plays Remi. The three case studies show the heterogeneous lives lived by black women in late twentieth-­ century Britain, creating a contiguous narrative that nuances  the central  theme of alcohol abuse. Unlike Mothers, this production visually distinguished between the characters by using brightly coloured costumes: Pool wore red, Anderson was dressed in yellow and blue, and Diedrick appeared in green. This use of colour recalls Ntozake Shange’s 1976 choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, which names its characters with the colours they wear, such as ‘Lady in Yellow’ and ‘Lady in Purple’.8 In both plays the use of block colour codes the characters as archetypes; they are to be understood as indicative of a wider, societal problem.

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Fig. 4  Simon Richardson, ‘Black Mime Theatre Women’s Troop, Drowning’ (1991). Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Black Mime Theatre, Photographs of Drowning, THM/26/5/7. Production photograph. (Left to right: Tracey Anderson, Cassi Pool) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

The Women’s Troop again deployed their characteristic cast doubling for Drowning, with the performers playing a kaleidoscope of characters from fractious children to flashy businessmen. As Carole Woddis’ review testifies, ‘there is no one who can cross age and gender barriers in the

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Fig. 5  Steve Speller, ‘Black Mime Theatre Women’s Troop’ (1991). Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Black Mime Theatre, Photographs of Drowning, THM/26/5/7. Publicity photograph. (Left to right: Tracey Anderson, Cassi Pool) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

twinkling of an eye like this group’ (Woddis 1992). The performers abruptly change character even within a scene; this makes literal—and somewhat absurd—the way in which identities and their constitutive behaviours are predetermined by social scripts. Drowning focuses on the

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Fig. 6  Steve Speller, ‘Black Mime Theatre Women’s Troop’ (1991). Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Black Mime Theatre, Photographs of Drowning, THM/26/5/7. Publicity photograph. (Left to right: Arosemaya Diedrick, Cassi Pool) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

public performance of gender; through cross-casting, multi-role playing, and implied interaction, the play explores how far gender identity is determined by the body. Drowning opens with three characters returning home from a drunken night out. Burping, laughter, and lewd jokes accompany their mimed struggle to insert an imaginary key into an invisible door. As they step across the implied threshold towards the audience they suddenly drop these character roles and move apart. The first of the three case studies then begins. Centre stage, the core character sits alone with her head hung; her spotlit chair is the only object in the bare performance space.9 Another performer stands onstage in the darkness, speaking about and on behalf of the one who is illuminated: ‘People frightened me; a drink made me function. I could be expressive, loosen up. Our life revolved around alcohol’. The spotlit performer then lifts her head and speaks to identify herself: ‘My name is Anna’. The same opening sequence repeats for each subsequent study, setting up a comparison between the core characters. As

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Lynette Goddard has observed, this act of self-identification resembles the ritual of addiction recovery programmes (Goddard 2007, p. 146). The act of naming oneself also registers as a defiant response to the histories of ‘distortion’ and erasure to which African diasporic peoples have been subjected (Spillers 1987, p. 69). By asserting her own identity, Anna refuses to be defined by her oppressors. But Drowning does not linger on this initial introspective exposition; the moment is hurriedly broken by the irruption of scenes from Anna’s childhood. The performer falls to her knees to signify a diminutive stature in relation to the other performers, who play  parent figures. She wears kneepads over her leggings, visibly admitting the infant character role as a performance for which she must contort her body. Perhaps the suggestion is that conforming to any socially scripted identity requires the body to be constrained and manipulated in various ways. The scenes from Anna’s childhood show the dysfunctions of her family: her father is interested only in televised horseracing, while her exasperated mother busies herself with ironing, sewing, and loudly complaining that her partner fails to provide. Both parents use Anna to deliver their criticisms of the other. For instance, Anna’s (unnamed) mother charges her daughter: ‘Make sure you don’t marry nobody like your father, you hear me girl? Because child, you will live a very sad and unhappy life’. Father and mother both drink repeatedly throughout the scene, and the infant Anna asks to taste their tipples of choice—Guinness and rum punch, respectively. Placing this flashback after the adult Anna’s announcement of her own alcoholism gives it explanatory force: Anna’s reliance on alcohol to ease social interactions follows a pattern set by her parents’ habits during her childhood. This first case study proceeds by weaving together scenes showing Anna’s awkward adolescence and the decline of her home environment. The humiliation of being overlooked for a school sports team signals the beginning of a social phobia. A brief snapshot of the family home shows her parents’ quarrelling escalate to physical aggression, and Anna is sent away to stay with her aunt. The action then moves forward to Anna’s adulthood, where she drinks, dances, and sings with two friends. When one friend is accidentally injured by a broken bottle, the startled Anna solemnly vows ‘never again’, but it is only a momentary pause before the tableau segues into another inebriated scene in a nightclub. A simple repeated movement illustrates the play’s opening line, ‘Our life revolved around alcohol’: Anna’s partner mimes passing her a bottle, from which she drinks deeply; the two performers then fleetingly take up a ballroom

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dancing pose, before Anna rolls down her partner’s outstretched arm and falls to the floor. After a number of iterations of this same sequence, a third character intervenes, shifting the physical arrangements of the relationship and thereby releasing Anna to make her escape. Fleeing only as far as the nightclub bathroom, Anna laments her situation. The performer falls to her knees, a position that visually cites the character’s childhood and recalls the root of her dependency on drinking. Anna describes the empty repetition of her lifestyle, but stops short of naming the accumulation of these activities as alcoholism: ‘Every week the same: we come here, get pissed and that’s it. I can’t take it any more!’. Yet despite her despair she seems unable to move towards a different life, declining the offer of a lift home from two friendly strangers. Alone again, Anna washes her face and scrutinises herself in the (mimed) mirror. In the absence of props, this supposedly self-reflexive gaze is actually an unmediated frontal encounter with spectators.10 It interrupts the audience’s privileged position as the ones who see but are not seen; instead, they are made to recognise themselves as the objects of the performer’s gaze. This is a meaningful moment in the play’s polemical address: while the character is ostensibly examining herself, her direct gaze at the audience implicitly asks them to reflect on their own alcohol use—or abuse. The following scene shows Anna back with her partner, drinking together in resigned silence. Anna is subjected to her partner’s possessive control, expressed as crushing bodily contact, echoing her parents’ violent relationship. A sung interlude—Smokey Robinson’s ‘The Tracks of My Tears’—comments obliquely on the preceding scenes, telling of the pain concealed behind a public mask. This single song recurs throughout the play, differently arranged to serve the particular meaning of various scenes. On this despondent note Anna’s story then ends, and the performer returns to the central chair. As before, another performer speaks from the shadows while the central performer sits in silence, separating voice from character. Trinh T. Minh-ha reads silence as a consequence of colonial violence: ‘You who understand the dehumanization of forced removal-­ relocation-­reeducation-redefinition, the humiliation of having to falsify your own reality, your voice—you know. And often cannot say it’ (Minh-ha 1989, p. 80, emphasis original). It is because of Anna’s experiences that she cannot speak. As Minh-ha warns, the silencing of the voice is attended by the violence of misrepresentation: ‘they will not fail to fill in the blanks on your behalf, and you will be said’ (1989, p. 80). BMT’s use of speech as part of their practice of mime perhaps follows from an awareness of the

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risks inherent in interpretation, suggesting the company were unwilling to permit what might be heard from complete silence. After Anna, the second protagonist then takes the spotlit seat. A further voiceover describes how this character, Karen, relies on alcohol to deal with stressful situations: ‘alcohol relieved my anxiety. As my tolerance level rose, I needed more to drink. I’m not addicted. I just binge when things get too much for me’. Like the preceding study, Karen’s story also begins in her youth: the first scene shows an earnest schoolgirl performance of Fame, tuneless and unsubtle, for which she is ridiculed by her peers. One classmate cruelly confirms her failure: ‘What’s the matter, Karen? Well, you’ll never make a singer, will you?’. This event precipitates Karen’s adult insecurities. The following scene calls on all three performers to play multiple roles, and makes explicit the performance of gender. It begins with a study in hypermasculinity: the three performers sit astride the chairs, legs akimbo, laughing heartily, mumbling incomprehensibly, drinking competitively, and leering at (imagined) women. Since the stage space is otherwise empty, they skilfully imply the objects of this salacious gaze through synchronised gestures and by orientating their bodies in particular ways. In this mimed scene, ‘woman’ is produced by the male gaze and for male pleasure. She is made object: that which is to be seen but cannot see. But viewers are encouraged to recognise this as a contingent state rather than a natural reality, since the performers are themselves only performing masculinity. The scene thereby  shows gender inequality to be a structural problem, a system that exists prior to any individual, in which individuals simply take up their allotted place. The onstage arrangement then shifts as the three performers move into the counterpoint position to take up the female roles. They chat together about Karen’s new business, before realising that they are being ogled by the (now, reciprocally, implied) men. This familiar scene explores the gendered exercise of power in a public space, echoing a scene in a fast-­food restaurant in Theatre of Black Women’s Silhouette (1983) and anticipating similar in debbie tucker green’s Two Women (2000). The women express their disgust, playing their part in the patriarchal drama as the unwillingly pursued. This moment is followed by another reshuffling of roles, as the three performers return to the male roles and the characters continue their drinking games. This fast-paced multi-role playing certainly has a comic effect. For some critics, the play’s comedy redeemed its polemic; as Michael Billington admits, Drowning was a ‘surprisingly cheerful show’

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(Billington 1992). But this particular  sequence is also politically significant: both the male and female characters are identified through their interactions with others, rather than being determined by the bodies of the performers. Their subjectivity arises through interaction. The use of cast doubling also asserts the multiple ‘presences’ of a single person, returning to the claim in Mothers that an individual always comprises multiple intersecting or layered identities. Karen’s story continues with a scene set in her new restaurant. The two supporting performers create the buzz of a busy kitchen, complete with vocal sound effects of chopping foods, frying, and running water, while Karen sidesteps their complaints about being underpaid. On the other side of the kitchen door, she faces different pressures. Here the auxiliary performers play two male patrons, slurping indulgently through platefuls of Crêpe Suzette and ample refills of wine. Karen waits attentively as they consider whether to offer her a lucrative catering contract. But before the scene closes on the three characters raising a toast to the deal, a brief interlude bisects the action. The memory of Karen’s adolescent shame surfaces, triggered by the stress of the present situation and hauntingly voiced by another performer: ‘You’ll never make a singer, will you?’. A slow-motion sequence then interrupts the narrative, suspending the progression of naturalistic time to give space to Karen’s inner fantasy. (A similar manipulation of time occurs in the second Women’s Troop production, Total Rethink (1991), to signal the irruption of an interior life that has been repressed.) Reacting to the way her two male patrons wield their power, Karen ruins their food and expends her anger with exaggerated punches. Lynette Goddard reads this scene as revealing the social script that requires ‘(black) women […] to suppress angry feelings in order to function in (white) patriarchal society’ (Goddard 2007, p. 147). The fantasised interlude allows a moment of resistance to such coded norms: the protagonist refuses to accept a submissive or subordinate position and instead attempts an alternative way of being in the world, dramatically reconfiguring her interactions with others. It is telling that this takes the form of a physical fight; Karen’s embodied response points to the extreme psychological violence that she daily endures. In the next brief scene we see Karen working out at the gym. The location and activity are again suggested through the performer’s gestures, without props, scenery, or costume change. Abstracted from a recognisable context, these movements invite special scrutiny of the ways in which bodies are controlled and made to conform to cultural standards. Karen’s

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repetitive physical training also suggests a broader recital of social scripts, such as the performance of gender, which similarly requires certain bodily behaviours. Using mime to defamiliarise, Black Mime Theatre promote a critical perspective on otherwise quotidian activities. The closing call of the gym scene—‘Last one to the showers…!’— blends into the opening of the next: ‘First one to the bar!’ As Karen drinks she grows increasingly aggressive. Her companions leave, shocked by her transgression of gendered social codes—namely, of female passivity and decorum—and eventually the barkeeper refuses to serve her. The mechanics of this final interaction are instructive: the figure of the barkeeper is projected through the performer’s own gestures and responses rather than being played by another actor. In effect, then, Karen incarnates the barkeeper: she can only appraise her condition accurately by externalising her perspective. Seeing herself from without, through relational encounters with (imagined) others, enables her to exercise (self-)control. The performer then returns to the spotlit chair, indicating that Karen’s story is coming to a close. Repeating the format of the first character study, her interior monologue is spoken by another performer. The gap between body and voice enacts the feelings of alienation and disconnection that the character experiences: No one tries to understand. They just see a woman who is drunk and I’m labelled there and then. If I was a man […] they would say I was misunderstood. But I’m not a man, I’m a woman: under pressure, insecure, and frightened of my anger.

Karen’s story demonstrates how views of alcohol abuse are differently gendered, as are the attendant social penalties. By foregrounding the particular experiences of women, and showing the characters’ background as explanation for these situations, Drowning promotes in its audiences the empathy and understanding that Karen’s character finds lacking. The final of the three case studies follows. Another proxy introduction voices Remi’s cynicism about the official warnings on alcohol: If I don’t change now, what of the future? Cirrhosis, liver cancer, urinary infections, blackouts. Come on! These are just horror stories: a way of keeping women in their place.

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Remi’s story begins in the Caribbean as an infant. She learns from her grandmother that she is to travel to join her mother, who is domiciled in England. This reunion nods to the experiences of post-war migrants, answering the appeals of the motherland; one such journey was that of director Denise Wong’s mother, who was raised by her grandmother in Jamaica before moving to England (Forbes 1991). The next scene in Drowning shows an adult Remi living in England and reluctantly engaged to be married. The narrative then advances again: the other two performers play Remi’s infant daughters, demanding her attention, but she neglects their needs, focusing instead on numbing her feelings with alcohol. In one scene the older child tries to entertain the younger whilst concealing her own concerns about their distracted mother. The children’s aunt then arrives, offering help; this character is played by Tracey Anderson, who also performed as the other-mothering aunt to Anna in the play’s first case study. But Remi is uninterested in this supportive intervention. Her attitude and actions are judged loudly by onlookers: ‘Just look at her: calls herself a mother. It’s the kids I feel sorry for. They should be taken away from her’. This callous comment presents maternity as an identity contingent on performing a set of behaviours rather than being a biological fact, recalling Thelma’s refusal to mother in Mothers. These bystanders fail to consider the context and complexity of Remi’s actions, and the scene is followed by a haunting sung refrain centred on the line ‘no-one’s asking’. The conclusion to Remi’s story gives voice to her inner conflict, affirming her maternal care whilst also asserting her longing for a different life: I love my children, and I never wanted to harm them. I am a mother who hates being a housewife. I am lonely, and in desperate need of some time to myself. I want to be cared for, and loved. I feel guilty having these thoughts. I feel guilty having these thoughts. I feel guilty having these thoughts. I feel guilty having these thoughts.

The repeated first-person pronoun—‘I love’, ‘I am’, ‘I want’, ‘I feel’— grammatically clutches at the independence Remi craves. But the fact that these words are spoken in proxy, by another performer, shows that she continues to be articulated by her relationships with others. The apparently singular ‘I’ is divided between the body on which the spotlight shines and the performer hidden in the shadows who speaks the core character’s thoughts. As Trinh T. Minh-ha has argued in her writings on difference, the ‘I’ is more complex than its grammar might imply: ‘“I” is […] not a

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unified subject, a fixed identity, or that solid mass covered with layers of superficialities one has gradually to peel off before one can see its true face. “I” is, itself, infinite layers’ (Minh-ha 1989, p.  94, emphasis original). Having two performers manifest the ‘I’ of each character, one embodied and one in voice, confirms the multiplicity of the subject. A similar technique is used in Theatre of Black Women’s Pyeyucca (1984), where two performers incarnate different aspects of a single character, evidencing her psychic split. After this third case study in Drowning concludes, the play revives the framing device of an addiction recovery programme. Each protagonist speaks in turn about her own healing process, pleading for patience from the world around her: ‘One day at a time, that’s all I ask’. But without the supporting roles and narrative context of the earlier case studies, the performers seem in this moment to shed the specificity of their respective characters. Instead, their non-naturalistic costumes make them into avatars for a larger population. Finally the three performers speak a synchronous polemic against the dangers of alcohol, identifying societal responsibility rather than individual failure: ‘No one considers that maybe society has been too keen to market a potent drug’. The humanising exploration of causes and conditions in the three case studies gives way in this conclusion to an urgent public appeal. Recognising that the company’s work had transformative potential—that ‘[t]heatre can move people, maybe even change their lives’ (Wong 1996, p.  196)—Wong used the extensive national tour of Drowning as an opportunity to address a wide audience with this earnest message. Several critics responded to this closing sequence in rather disapproving terms: some reviews describe it as a ‘preach’ (Lezard 1992), as ‘sermonising’ (Topping 1991), and as ‘puritanical’ (Billington 1992). But the multimodal delivery of this message is significant. The closing scene is carefully choreographed: the three performers roll off and return to their chairs in a repeated sequence that echoes the ending of Anna’s story. Reviewing for The Oxford Times, Graham Topping commended this ‘beautiful passage of overlapping movements and voices’ (Topping 1991). Not only do these simple movements visually and viscerally depict the futile cycle of addiction, capturing its destructive patterns;  their synchronicity also suggests the profound power of interpersonal relationships, conveying the hope of change. * * *

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Black Mime Theatre’s Women’s Troop focused on contemporary issues affecting women and did not explicitly voice an anti-racist endeavour in either of the plays discussed here (though Mourning Song—sadly unavailable for analysis—did purposefully explore diverse cultural contexts). However, while the plays seem to be silent on the subject of ethnicity, the company’s formal techniques can be understood as critiquing all essentialist models of identity. Through their aesthetic repertoire of mime, movement, and creative casting, the Women’s Troop reacts against the corporeal obsession underpinning the restrictive regimes of both racial and gender determinism. When playing multiple roles across identity categories, the performer—the performing body—cannot function as a guarantee of the some-body being performed. The actors also gesturally imply the presence of further characters: these absent yet constitutive others displace the spectator’s gaze away from the (black, female) performer’s body. This suggests that identity is not a property of the individual body, but rather accrues from dynamic interactions between bodies: the subject is produced through her relational encounters. As such, BMT’s mime constitutes an anti-essentialist aesthetic. Both Lizbeth Goodman and Lynette Goddard have credited the Women’s Troop with fulfilling a material feminist function: Goodman commends both the company’s representation of female characters and the platform it created for women performers (Goodman 1993a, p. 172), and Goddard similarly celebrates the fact that the company enabled (black) women to participate in the historically (white) male art of mime (Goddard 2007, p. 152). However, Goddard hesitates to read the company’s non-­ naturalistic aesthetic as feminist  in form, given its roots in the original men’s troupe and its continuation in the later mixed ensemble. Placing Black Mime Theatre Women’s Troop within the long history of black British women’s theatre companies and playwrights, as this book does, can give us confidence in this classification. From the Women’s Troop we can look backwards to the pioneering work of Theatre of Black Women and Munirah Theatre Company, as well as forwards to Zindika and SuAndi, and, more recently, debbie tucker green, to find a practice that is strikingly similar. The recurrent techniques of gestural implication, cross-casting, character splitting, multi-role playing, and defamiliarising mime comprise a common aesthetic, rooted in intersectional black British feminism.

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Notes 1. An intervention to correct the spelling to ‘troupe’ is made in some published accounts, such as Goddard (2002a). However, the company’s publicity materials use the given spelling, ‘Troop’. Artistic Director Denise Wong explained the deliberate pun in our interview in 2012. 2. Denise Wong reported in interview that Cindy Afflick became pregnant whilst Mothers was in development. The Women’s Troop therefore had to negotiate its own way through the demands of maternity. Afflick continued the tour at her insistence, although she left before the next production. 3. Audience responses to the production surveys are collated in hard copy in the Black Mime Theatre company files at VAM (THM/26/4/21–30), but access to these records is currently prohibited to protect personal data. 4. The subject of relationships has enduring appeal for audiences; other examples include: Trevor Rhone’s Two Can Play (Tricycle, 1984), Roots Theatre Company’s A Black Woman’s Diary (Shaw Theatre, 1990), Fay Thompson’s Diaries of Black Women (performance status not known, n.d.), and Menelik Shabazz’s 2015 film Looking for Love. 5. Michael’s death in Mourning Song anticipates the emphasis on crime and violence that critic Lindsay Johns identifies and objects to in much postmillennial black drama (Johns 2010). Johns cites Roy Williams’ Fallout (Royal Court, 2003), debbie tucker green’s random (Royal Court, 2008), and Bola Agbaje’s Gone Too Far! (Royal Court, 2007) as examples. However, like random, Mourning Song is concerned not with depicting the event itself but with tracing the effects on the victim’s family. 6. The use of multi-role playing is shared by the first productions of Winsome Pinnock’s Mules (Royal Court, 1996), which had a cast of three playing twelve characters, and Talking in Tongues (Royal Court, 1991), which had a cast of seven playing twelve. 7. Flexible casting is similarly problematic for scholars of Winsome Pinnock’s Talking in Tongues (1991). Published criticism repeatedly identifies an intersex character named Irma as ‘she’ and ‘her’ (Ponnuswami 2007, p. 13; Griffin 2003, p. 82), disavowing the script’s own assertion of doubleness and instead relying on the identity of the performer—a shaven-headed Ella Wilder—to anchor discussion of the performance. 8. The American production of Shange’s for colored girls had transferred to London’s Royalty Theatre in 1979 (Megson 2012, p. 58). See Chaps. 2 and 3, on Theatre of Black Women and Munirah Theatre Company, for discussion of its immediate influence on black British women’s theatre. 9. A similar arrangement recurs in debbie tucker green’s born bad (2003), where a set number of chairs is used to imply the bodies of corresponding characters, making them present onstage even in their absence.

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10. See Chap. 5 on Zindika for the discussion of a similar scene in Paper and Stone. Mirrors are also used innovatively in Fo(u)r Women (ICA, 1994, directed by Jillian Tipene) by Patience Agbabi, Adeola Agbebiyi, and Dorothea Smartt, where the audience takes on the role of the titular fourth woman. The text of this polyvocal performance piece was published in Lizbeth Goodman and Jane de Gay’s Languages of Theatre Shaped by Women in 2003.

References Abram, Nicola (2012). Interview with Denise Wong, 1 December, London. Adebayo, Mojisola (2009). ‘The Supernatural Embodied Text: Creating Moj of the Antarctic with the Living and the Dead’, in Susan Broadhurst and Josephine Machon (eds.) Sensualities/Textualities and Technologies: Writings of the Body in 21st Century Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 92–102. Agbabi, Patience, Adeola Agbebiyi, et al. (2003). ‘Voicing Identities, Reframing Difference(s): The Case of Fo(u)r Women’, in Jane De Gay and Lizbeth Goodman (eds.) Languages of Theatre Shaped by Women. Bristol: Intellect, 89–98. Anon. (1992). ‘A real mimefield’, The Voice. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Temba Theatre Company, Press cuttings about ‘Drowning’ by Black Mime Theatre, THM/77/2/34. Newspaper clipping. Armitstead, Claire (1992). ‘Review of Drowning.’ 22 January. Reprinted in Theatre Record, 12 (2), 113. Aston, Elaine (2002). ‘Women Theatre Collectives’, in Alison Donnell (ed.) Companion to Contemporary Black British Culture. London: Routledge, 326–327. Billington, Michael (1992). ‘Review of Drowning.’ Guardian. 17 January. Reprinted in Theatre Record, 12 (2), 118. Black Mime Theatre (1992a). Booking enquiry correspondence. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Black Mime Theatre Company records, THM/26/2/20. Booking enquiry sheet, contact: Sikander Bawa. Black Mime Theatre (1992b). Ensemble publicity material. University of Bristol. Record of Live Art Practice, B3. Brochure. Black Mime Theatre (1994). Application for franchise funding. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Arts Council of Great Britain, THM/26/3/1. Black Mime Theatre (1996). Photographs of Black Women’s Theatre Project. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Black Mime Theatre Company records, THM/26/5/20. Photographs. Black Mime Theatre (1997). Overseas tours, 1995–1997. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Black Mime Theatre Company records, THM/26/2/19. Document.

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Black Mime Theatre Women’s Troop (1990). Mothers. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Commercial video collection, 054036A. VHS production recording. Black Mime Theatre Women’s Troop (1991a). Drowning. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Commercial video collection, 054033A. VHS production recording. Black Mime Theatre Women’s Troop (1991b). Total Rethink. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Commercial video collection, 054037. VHS production recording. Black Theatre Forum (1995a). ‘Future Histories’ Conference (29–30 November). Unfinished Histories, London. Not catalogued. Flyer. Black Theatre Forum (1995b). ‘Future Histories’ Conference (29–30 November). Goldsmiths University of London. Future Histories—Black Performance and Carnival Archive, Records of Black Theatre Forum, BTF/P/E/4002. Leaflets; list of delegates; evaluation reports. Cooke, Trish (1990). ‘Back Street Mammy’, in Kate Harwood (ed.) First Run 2: New Plays by New Writers. London: Nick Hern Books, 38–95. Corthron, Kia (2002). ‘Black Theatre at the Turn of the Millennium’, in Maria M. Delgado and Caridad Svich (eds.) Theatre in Crisis?: Performance Manifestos for a New Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 107–112. Couzens, Gary (1991). ‘Review of Mothers.’ Due South. University of Bristol. Record of Live Art Practice, B3. Press clipping. Dayley, Grace (1985). ‘Rose’s Story’, in Michelene Wandor (ed.) Plays by Women: 4. London: Methuen, 55–80. Donnell, Alison, ed. (2002). Companion to Contemporary Black British Culture. London: Routledge. Evaristo, Bernardine (1992). ‘Affair of the Heart’. Everywoman. 87 (November), 23. Evaristo, Bernardine and Patricia Hilaire (1983). Silhouette. Evaristo personal collection, London. Typescript. Evaristo, Bernardine and Patricia Hilaire (1984). Pyeyucca. Evaristo personal collection, London. Typescript. Forbes, Deidre (1991). ‘Giving Birth to Mothers’, Now. 22 January. University of Bristol. Record of Live Art Practice, B3. Magazine clipping. Friday, Nancy (1977). My Mother/My Self: The Daughter’s Search for Identity. London: Harper Collins. Goddard, Lynette (2002a). ‘Black Mime Theatre Company’, in Alison Donnell (ed.) Companion to Contemporary Black British Culture. London: Routledge, 48–49. Goddard, Lynette (2002b). ‘Denise Wong’, in Alison Donnell (ed.) Companion to Contemporary Black British Culture. London: Routledge, 330. Goddard, Lynette (2007). Staging Black Feminisms: Identity, Politics, Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Goodman, Lizbeth (1993a). Contemporary Feminist Theatres: To Each Her Own. London: Routledge. Goodman, Lizbeth (1993b). ‘Feminist Theatre in Britain: a Survey and a Prospect’. New Theatre Quarterly. 4 (33), 66–84. Goodman, Lizbeth (1996). ‘Feminisms and Theatres: Cannon Fodder and Cultural Change’, in Patrick Campbell (ed.) Analysing Performance: A Critical Reader. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 19–42. Goodman, Lizbeth and Jane de Gay (1996). Feminist Stages: Interviews with Women in Contemporary British Theatre. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic. Griffin, Gabriele (2003). Contemporary Black and Asian Women Playwrights in Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hewison, Robert (1992). ‘Review of Drowning.’ 26 January. Reprinted in Theatre Record, 12 (2), 114–115. Johns, Lindsay (9 February 2010). ‘Black theatre is blighted by its ghetto mentality’. London Evening Standard. http://www.standard.co.uk/news/black-theatre-is-blighted-by-its-ghetto-mentality-6709941.html (accessed 22 March 2010). Khan, Naseem (1976). The Arts Britain Ignores. London: Community Relations Commission. Khan, Naseem (1989). ‘Weapons of expression’, City Limits. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Temba Theatre Company, Press cuttings about black women in theatre, THM/77/5/18. Newspaper clipping. Khan, Naseem (1991). ‘Review of Mothers.’ 22 January. Reprinted in Theatre Record, 11 (2), 104. Lezard, Nick (1992). ‘Review of Drowning.’ 17 January. Reprinted in Theatre Record, 12 (2), 114. Marmion, Patrick (1991). ‘Wong end of the knife’, What’s On. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Temba Theatre Company, Press cuttings about black women in theatre, THM/77/5/18. Newspaper clipping. Martin, Mick (1990). ‘Review of Mothers’. Guardian. 27 November. Megson, Chris (2012). Modern British Playwriting: The 1970s: Voices, Documents, New Interpretations. London: Methuen. Miller, Kate (1991). ‘Silent Moves from the Streets of Blackness’, The Stage. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Temba Theatre Company, Press cuttings about black women in theatre, THM/77/5/18. Newspaper clipping. Minh-ha, Trinh T. (1989). Woman, Native, Other: Writing, Postcoloniality, and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pinnock, Winsome (1989). ‘Leave Taking’, in Kate Harwood (ed.) First Run: New Plays by New Writers. London: Nick Hern Books, 139–189.

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Ponnuswami, Meenakshi (2007). ‘Alienation and Alienation Effects in Winsome Pinnock’s Talking in Tongues’, in R.  Victoria Arana (ed.) ‘Black’ British Aesthetics Today. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 206–221. Spillers, Hortense J. (1987). ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book’. Diacritics. 17 (2), 65–81. Thompson, Fay (n.d.). Diaries of Black Women. University of Bristol. Women’s Theatre Collection, WTC/PS/000414. Typescript. Topping, Graham (1991). ‘Review of Drowning’, The Oxford Times. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Temba Theatre Company, Press cuttings about ‘Drowning’ by Black Mime Theatre, THM/77/2/34. Newspaper clipping. tucker green, debbie [Debbie Green] (2000). Two Women. British Library, London. MPS 9391. Typescript. Williams, Claudette (1991). ‘Interview with Black Mime Theatre Women’s Troop’. Spare Rib. February (220), 20–22. Williams, Ruby (1997). ‘Review of Mourning Song.’ 2 April. Reprinted in Theatre Record, 17 (6), 348. Woddis, Carole (1991a). ‘Proving them wrong’, What’s On. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Temba Theatre Company, Press cuttings about black women in theatre, THM/77/5/18. Newspaper clipping. Woddis, Carole (1991b). ‘Review of Mothers.’ 31 January. Reprinted in Theatre Record, 11 (2), 104. Woddis, Carole (1992). ‘Review of Drowning.’ 22 January. Reprinted in Theatre Record, 12 (2), 118. Wong, Denise (1991). ‘Mothers of Invention’. Southern Arts. Summer, 4. Wong, Denise (1996). ‘Interview’, in Lizbeth Goodman and Jane de Gay (eds.) Feminist Stages: Interviews with Women in Contemporary British Theatre. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 195–200. Wong, Denise (1997). ‘Interviews with Contemporary Directors’, in Sally Mackey (ed.) Practical Theatre: A Post-16 Approach. Cheltenham: Stanley Thornes, 76–79. Wong, Denise (1998). ‘Black Mime Theatre’, in Lorna Henry (ed.) Where Do We Go From Here? The Future of Afrikan Caribbean Theatre in Britain. Bristol: Kuumba Project, 17–19. Zindika (1989). Paper and Stone. Goldsmiths University of London. Future Histories—Black Performance and Carnival Archive, Records of Nitro Theatre Company, NTC/P/T/1/21/3/001. Typescript. Zindika (1990). Paper and Stone. Goldsmiths University of London. Future Histories—Black Performance and Carnival Archive, Records of Nitro Theatre Company, NTC/P/T/1/21/5/001. VHS production recording.

Zindika

The pioneering theatre companies and arts collectives of the 1970s and 1980s—the likes of Black Theatre Co-operative, Theatre of Black Women and Munirah Theatre Company—helped to establish a platform and an audience for the solo playwrights and performance artists that were to follow. One such writer was Zindika Macheol, latterly Zindika Kamauesi, who often styled herself simply as ‘Zindika’.1 Born in Jamaica and schooled in London, she was a founding member of Peckham Black Women’s Group in the early 1980s,2 and was active in Nka Iban—a south London support group for black women writers—during the 1990s.3 In 1990 Black Theatre Co-operative gave Zindika her first stage production, of her still unpublished play Paper and Stone. This was followed by Leonora’s Dance, which was both produced and published in 1993. A third play, The Day Mother Took Us to the Seaside, was written in 1996 but sadly never staged. This chapter gives an account of Zindika’s creative activities, flagging connections to  broader black British cultural history, and analyses her two unpublished plays in detail. It mines the manuscript and marketing materials held in the Future Histories—Black Performance and Carnival Archive, housed at Goldsmiths, University of London, and is further informed by an interview with the playwright conducted in October 2011.

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History, Activities, Archives Zindika first achieved public recognition as a writer in 1982 when she won the annual Black Young Writers Award, run by the African Caribbean Educational Resource (ACER), with an essay exploring cultural separatism and assimilation.4 Following this success Zindika became ACER’s development worker, promoting the competition in schools and to the media as a means of championing multicultural education. She continued to write, and her first playscript—titled Pigeonhole—was shortlisted by the Greater London Council for its Literature Competition.5 Zindika began work on her play Paper and Stone in 1986. It shares its theme of intergenerational conflict with many black British plays of the time, including Caryl Phillips’ Strange Fruit (Crucible Theatre, 1980) and Where There Is Darkness (Lyric Hammersmith, 1982) Liselle Kayla’s When Last Did I See You (1987), No Place Like Home (1987) by Roselia John Baptiste (an early pseudonym for Trish Cooke, borrowing her grandmother’s name), Killian M. Gideon’s England is De Place for Me (1988), and, later, Roy Williams’ The No Boys Cricket Club (1996). Indeed, the theme was to persist into the new millennium, with Kwame Kwei-Armah’s Elmina’s Kitchen (National Theatre, 2003) and Fix Up (National Theatre, 2004), Bola Agbaje’s Gone Too Far! (2007), and Levi David Addai’s House of Agnes (Oval House, 2008). In Zindika’s version of this familiar tale, the  churchgoing mother Martha alienates her teenage daughter Brenda with her anxious efforts to protect her.6 Brenda turns to her streetwise friend Juliet in search of an alternative lifestyle; the sheltered youth’s wide-­ eyed initiation into this urban subculture prompts all three characters to reflect explicitly on the racism and sexism they live through. Zindika wrote the first draft of Paper and Stone quickly, for submission to a competition, and it was met with little enthusiasm. It was not until Zindika was introduced to the screenwriter and playwright Jamal Ali, in 1988, that she gave the piece further attention.7 Ali invited her to attend a writing workshop he was hosting for Black Theatre Co-operative (BTC), which promised a rehearsed reading for all participants. This proved to be the beginning of a productive partnership between Zindika and BTC. Black Theatre Co-operative had been founded in 1979 by Trinidadian playwright Mustapha Matura and British director Charlie Hanson, initially in order to stage Matura’s play Welcome Home Jacko (produced at The Factory, London, in 1979; published in 1980). Over its seventeen-year

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history BTC consistently brought plays by black and Asian writers to the British stage. This important work was recognised in 1983 with Arts Council revenue funding—that is, funding of the company as a whole rather than for a specific project (Jones 1997, p. 370). This shift in status amounted to the difference between £19,000 of project funding and £61,380  in the first year of revenue funding (Saunders 2015, pp.  79). BTC was only the second black British company to receive this level of Arts Council support, following in the footsteps of Temba (Saunders 2015, pp.  79, 84). The abolition of the Labour-led Greater London Council in 1986 left the Arts Council to fill a significant funding gap, and BTC were among the few beneficiaries to share a £100,000 government bonus in 1986–1987, confirming the company as an Arts Council priority (Saunders 2015, p. 81). Unfortunately, BTC seemed to suffer from a male bias in its early years. Theatre of Black Women took issue with the one-dimensional portrayal of black relationships in the company’s early productions (see Chap. 2), and Jacqueline Rudet reportedly regretted the 1984 production of her play Money to Live, directed by Gordon Case. In its first decade BTC produced only four plays by female writers, and none until the company’s fifteenth production (Bishop 1990). Also symptomatic of the company’s  limited perspective, BTC received a series of damning Arts Council show reports in the early 1980s for productions deemed unrepresentative and even ‘reactionary’ (Saunders 2015, pp.  82–84). But after Alby James was appointed as Artistic Director in 1984  BTC’s 1985 production of A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry and then The Cocoa Party by Ruth Dunlap Bartlett (Helen Stevens) in 1987 suggested a growing responsiveness to women’s ‘demand for participation’ (Croft 1993, p.  86)—even if the company did at first foreground work by American rather than British women. Zindika expressed some concern about BTC’s gender bias before they staged her first play: ‘Because it was a very women-­ orientated play I was a bit worried, because BTC has been quite male-­ orientated in the past’ (Feay 1990b). As one press preview remarks, Paper and Stone was ‘the first time the company […] put on an all-woman production’ (Miller 1990). But Zindika was ultimately to find in BTC a supportive and dynamic community. She certainly benefitted from its ready audiences, and remembers with gratitude its publicity campaigns targeted to black communities through specialist Greater London Radio programmes and local leafleting.

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Zindika’s alliance with Black Theatre Co-operative also proved fortuitous for scholars of her work, since it helped to preserve a material record: Zindika’s papers are collected  as part of Future Histories—Black Performance and Carnival Archive, a visionary initiative by artist and activist Alda Terracciano in collaboration with Black Theatre Forum. The collection was acquired in 2012 by Goldsmiths, University of London, after being held at Middlesex University for a number of years.8 Relevant materials in the collection include typescripts for Zindika’s Paper and Stone and The Day Mother Took Us to the Seaside, three identical video recordings of Paper and Stone dated to May 1990 (attributed to Ronard Recording), and promotional ephemera relating to both Paper and Stone and Leonora’s Dance. Duplicate typescripts for Paper and Stone are held in the Women’s Theatre Collection at the University of Bristol (Zindika 1989a)—it is striking how this work straddles and so confounds  curatorial categories that would focus separately on gender and ethnicity—and at the British Library (Zindika 1990a), as a result of the plays’ staging.9 Records of some of Zindika’s activities also appear within the Arts Council funding files of theatre companies with which she was associated—Black Theatre Co-operative, Talawa Theatre Company, and Black Theatre Forum—held at the Victoria and Albert Museum.10 Additional ephemera have been gathered by the Unfinished Histories project documenting alternative British theatres; this collection was deposited at the Bishopsgate Institute in London in 2016.11 Zindika finished developing Paper and Stone in 1989, and BTC selected the play for a full production. It opened on 23 February 1990 at the Albany Empire in London under the direction of Pam Fraser Solomon, and then had a run at the Lyric Studio Hammersmith from 14 May to 2 June (see Fig. 1). It was subsequently given a national tour: archived press clippings variously report shows at Martin Hall in Loughborough, King Alfred’s Arts Centre in Winchester, and St George’s Theatre in Luton, as well as in Huddersfield and Cambridge, while in interview Zindika recalled further dates at Nottingham Playhouse and in Birmingham and Cardiff (Abram 2011). Reviewers identified an ‘underlying optimism’ (Hall 1990a) in the play, and a ‘courageous note of defiance’ (Robertson 1990) beneath its portrayal of the battles endured by black women in Britain, commending Zindika as ‘a sophisticated, lyrical and assured new dramatist’ (Feay 1990a). Paper and Stone boldly blends naturalistic action with symbolic scenes, resulting in a form described by the reviewer for The Times as an ‘animated patchwork’ (Wright 1990).

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Fig. 1  Black Theatre Co-operative, Paper and Stone (1990). Goldsmiths University of London. Future Histories—Black Performance and Carnival Archive, Records of Nitro Theatre Company, NTC/P/T/1/21/2. Flyer

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After Paper and Stone Zindika published a novel with the specialist African and Caribbean studies publisher Karnak House. Titled A Daughter’s Grace (1992), its formally fragmented narrative traces the life of protagonist and narrator Nehanda—daughter of Barbadian migrants to Britain, estranged partner of Jamaican man Ras Ezekiel, and mother of three girls—who is haunted by her aborted son. The relatively short text blends a study of Rastafarian culture with a snapshot of multicultural liberal London in the late twentieth century, and could productively be compared with Andrea Levy’s Fruit of the Lemon (1999) or Helen Oyeyemi’s The Opposite House (2007) for its personal perspective on the second-­ generation experience. Zindika’s next piece, Leonora’s Dance, had initially been conceived as a screenplay. However, the successful stage production of Paper and Stone encouraged her to pursue playwriting, and with the support of Black Theatre Forum (BTF) she developed the piece for the stage. BTF—previously named Black Theatre Alliance—was an umbrella organisation formed in 1985 to promote the so-called ‘ethnic’ arts. It showcased the work of its member companies by organising six annual Black Theatre Seasons, from 1985 to 1990, and it also provided valuable training in arts administration and management.12 Despite decreasing funds BTF survived until 2001, when the Arts Council’s lack of interest in forming a Black Arts Development Agency finally forced its closure. Zindika worked on Leonora’s Dance as part of BTF’s Writers and Directors Project, before the script was given a public reading at the 1992 Wordplay Festival (Ponnuswami 2000, p. 229). Black Theatre Co-operative then developed Leonora’s Dance for a full production, with financial support from the Arts Council, the London Borough Grants Scheme, and the City of Westminster. The play premiered at London’s Cockpit theatre on 11 February 1993, directed by Joan-Ann Maynard—whose appointment as BTC’s Artistic Director the previous year confirmed the company’s increasing gender inclusivity.13 Leonora’s Dance charts the clash of cultures between three women living in a London house: its eponymous protagonist (played by Judy Hepburn) is a middle-­ aged woman of mixed black Caribbean and white plantation class heritage; Daphine (Doreene Blackstock) is a young black woman, who also has Caribbean roots; Melisa Chung (Toshie Ogura) is a British-born medical student from a Chinese background, who practises ancient rituals but quietly refuses her parents’ traditions. As a result of her experiences of racism Leonora suffers significant mental distress, and this trauma summons a spirit character called Medusa (played by Glenna Forster-Jones). Echoing

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the psychic split of the character Laura in Theatre of Black Women’s Pyeyucca (1984), and the division of body and voice in Black Mime Theatre’s Drowning (1991), Medusa incarnates the elements of Leonora that have been  oppressed and are therefore  repressed—including her blackness. Black Theatre Co-operative presented Medusa with her  hair in braids and wearing beads, and tribal body paint, overwriting the Greek myth with a pan-African alternative—as Gabriele Griffin has observed (Griffin 2003, p. 119). Given her daughter’s incapacity, Leonora’s mother, Frieda (played by Ellen Thomas), finally finds in Daphine a successor for her practice of Obeah, bridging both the spiritual and generational gaps between the Caribbean and Britain. Several critics commended the play’s humour, though others were rather more reserved, calling the narrative ‘scattered’ (Nightingale 1993) and dismissing the mythic figure of Medusa as ‘an overly literal metaphor’ (Jancovich 1993). Undeterred, in July 1993, Maynard entered Leonora’s Dance for the Arts Council’s Meyer-­Whitworth Award for the best produced play by a new playwright (Maynard 1993). It was won by Philip Ridley, for The Fastest Clock in the Universe. Leonora’s Dance has both subject matter and stylistic features in common with other works by black British women artists. Its protagonist dreams of becoming a ballet dancer, but finds her aspirations frustrated by the racialised elitism of the industry; the same story recurs in Ngozi Onwurah’s short film Flight of the Swan (1992). Gabriele Griffin groups Leonora’s Dance with several other plays exploring what she calls  the ‘migration effect’—her term for the misperception that non-white people in Britain must be migrants, regardless of their personal histories—including Jacqueline Rudet’s God’s Second in Command (1985) and Winsome Pinnock’s Water (2000). Noticing recurrent coverage of the topic of black women’s mental (ill) health, Lynette Goddard connects Leonora’s Dance with Bonnie Greer’s plays Munda Negra (1995) and Dancing on Blackwater (1994), Yazmine Judd’s Unfinished Business (1999), Kara Miller’s Hyacinth Blue (1999), and Jenny McLeod’s 1994 play Raising Fires (Goddard 2008, p. 111). Formally, too, Leonora’s Dance participates in a tradition of black British women’s playwriting. Zindika’s play separates the stage into distinct areas dedicated to each of its three main characters, spaced around a neutral meeting zone, which recalls Theatre of Black Women’s Silhouette (1983), where a female slave from Barbados and a young woman living in contemporary London are united across the centuries in a neutral stage space. The technique also anticipates debbie tucker green’s Two Women (2000), where protagonists Roni and Sweet share the stage to deliver their distinct monologues without directly interacting.

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Joan-Ann Maynard has observed that for black British writers ‘[t]here is no natural progression from production to text’ (Maynard 1996, p. 54). It is significant, then, that Leonora’s Dance was published in the same year it was produced: it featured in a volume titled Six Plays by Black and Asian Writers, edited by Kadija George (1993b). Zindika’s work was more amenable to textual preservation than the densely layered physical theatre and sparse dialogue that characterised the work of earlier companies. But its publication can also be credited to George’s continuing literary activism, as well as the vision of the independent press Aurora Metro. The volume was reprinted in 2005 after its initial 1993 publication, suggesting renewed interest in black British women’s theatre—and indicting the dearth of original initiatives in the years between Yvonne Brewster’s third and final volume of Black Plays (1995) and the first of Deirdre Osborne’s two Hidden Gems collections (2008, 2012).14 The plays included in George’s anthology reflect a genuine community of black and Asian women playwrights: Zindika reports working closely with Winsome Pinnock, whose play A Hero’s Welcome is included, and she participated in the March 1993 ‘Write Sister!’ seminar along with fellow contributor Trish Cooke. (Cooke would go on to be appointed the first Writer in Residence at the Bush Theatre, London, in November 2019, as a now multi-award winning playwright and children’s author.) ‘Write Sister!’ was a collaboration between Black Theatre Co-operative, Talawa Theatre Company, and Theatre Royal Stratford East, and held at the Cochrane Theatre. Zindika and Cooke attended in the company of Yvonne Brewster (who had been the first black female Drama Officer at the Arts Council from 1982 to 1984, and  co-­ founded Talawa in 1985, serving as its Artistic Director until 2003), Olusola Oyeleye (now a writer, director and producer of opera, musical theatre and dance), Joy Richardson (who continues to enjoy a successful career performing in theatre, film and television), Denise Wong (Artistic Director of Black Mime Theatre), actress and director Joan-Ann Maynard, and Bonnie Greer—who became BTC’s playwright-in-residence in the autumn of 1993 (Anon. 1993). The script for Leonora’s Dance is held by the British Library (Zindika 1993a), but it is George’s visionary anthology that really makes the play available to scholarly analysis; it has featured in two monographs,  Lynette Goddard’s Staging Black Feminisms (2007) and Gabriele Griffin’s Contemporary Black and Asian Women Playwrights (2003),  as well as in chapters and articles by Lynette Goddard (2008), Kathleen Starck (2006), Gabriele Griffin (2006), and Meenakshi Ponnuswami (2000). Given this relative visibility, Leonora’s Dance is not a focus for analysis in this chapter.

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However, Zindika’s Leonora’s Dance does usefully focalise a significant issue in the history of black British theatre: the inability of cultural gatekeepers to make sense of unfamiliar forms and recognise their value. The play’s  combination of naturalism and non-naturalism was perceived as problematic when the producing company, Black Theatre Co-operative, underwent a routine Arts Council appraisal in December 1994.15 The source of this problem can be located in the Arts Council proforma, which values ‘a clear and compelling narrative structure’ (Anon. 1994), pre-­ emptively biasing the review process towards certain forms of theatre— that which is plot-based, linear, and resolves ambiguity—and away from the symbolism and multiplicity that characterised much contemporary black theatre. BTC’s response to the review was not to challenge the Arts Council’s Eurocentric values but to dispute the reviewers’ responses: Joan-Ann Maynard defended Leonora’s Dance as a naturalistic piece, pointing to its ‘recognisable characters’ and ‘historical and social settings which audiences would be familiar with’ (Maynard 1995). Unfortunately, the Arts Council’s judgement was decisive: BTC’s funding, once awarded at substantial levels—above that of Talawa Theatre Company  and other Arts Council favourites Shared Experience and Cheek by Jowl—was cut.16 Not long after this disappointment, BTC repurposed itself as a black musical theatre company renamed Nitro, appointing Felix Cross as Artistic Director in 1996. In 2015 Nitro evolved again  into nitroBEAT, under Diane Morgan, and is now resident company at London’s Soho Theatre.17 Even without the support of her producing company Zindika remained active in the black theatre community, attending BTF’s Future Histories conference in November 1995 alongside Bernardine Evaristo, founder of Theatre of Black Women (TBW), and Black Mime Theatre’s Denise Wong (Black Theatre Forum 1995). She diversified her playwriting practice by collaborating with Adzido Pan-African Dance Ensemble—as had TBW co-founder Patricia Hilaire and Denise Wong, and as Ghanaian-born publisher Margaret Busby would also.18 Adzido had been founded in 1984 by George Kwame Dzikunu, and delivered large-scale dance productions on national and European tours until its closure in 2005. Zindika wrote the linking narrative for Adzido’s production Akwaaba (1994)—meaning ‘welcome’ in the Akan language of Ghana—and later for Secrets of Makaleng (1999), both directed by Amani Naphtali. In 1996 Zindika wrote a further play, titled The Day Mother Took Us to the Seaside. The Day is structured around the memories of three women abandoned as girls by their mother on a childhood trip to ‘dead end-on-­ sea’ (Zindika 1996, p. 14). Rehearsed readings were held at the Onion

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Shed Theatre in Camberwell and at Battersea Arts Centre. However, funding could not be found to mount a full production, and so The Day was never fully realised onstage. This situation points to a wider phase of funding withdrawal in black theatre, which contrasts starkly with the energy and investment seen in the 1980s and early 1990s. After years of suffering Margaret Thatcher’s efforts to ‘dismantl[e] the complex, symbiotic network that gave rise to the collectivist spirit of socialism’ (Saunders 2015, p.  11), Tony Blair’s neoliberal New Labour, launched in 1994, made the arts into ‘instruments of government policy’ (Tomlin 2015, p. 6), with consequent effects on the kinds of work that were valued. At the same time, identity categories centred on race and sex were fragmenting, along with their associated politics, and many arts collectives organised around these constituencies folded. The crisis of minority arts in Britain was eventually acknowledged by the Arts Council’s Eclipse conference of 2001 and the related recommendations published the following year (Brown et al. 2002). There followed various efforts to increase BAME participation in theatre (Tomlin 2015, p. 36)—but sadly these interventions occurred long after Zindika gave up playwriting. Zindika has since worked in education, managing the curriculum for the Learning Trust in Hackney. She has also written fiction and non-­fiction for young audiences, under her full name Zindika Kamauesi: Valiant Women (2010) profiles the struggles and successes of African women since the sixteenth century, and Ready, Steady, Gold (2012) explores the successes of great Olympians, while her anthology When Will I See You Again? (2002, edited with Natalie Smith) gathers prose and poetry on the subject of migration from the Caribbean to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s. Zindika’s second novel, Black All Over (2018), was published by Risebooks. Her commitment to public education was nascent even in her early playwriting: the collision of Chinese and Caribbean heritages under a London roof in Leonora’s Dance, the character Daphine’s concealed illiteracy, and the frictions between the migrant generation and their British-­born children in Paper and Stone all serve a pedagogical purpose: to reveal the nation to itself.

Paper and Stone (Written 1989; Produced 1990) Zindika’s first play to be produced, Paper and Stone, remains unpublished; the following analysis therefore relies on a range of archival materials. The typescript (Zindika 1990a) records the details of speech and captures the playwright’s stage directions, and video recordings (Zindika 1990b) give a

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valuable insight into the visual dimension of the production. Publicity materials add to this rich cache. All are available for consultation in the Future Histories—Black Performance and Carnival Archive, housed at Goldsmiths, University of London. The archival approach of this study  exposes conflict between written and audio-visual forms, valuing theatre not as a singular and stable work but as a dynamic work-in-­progress. The script and the staged production (and attendant recordings) of Paper and Stone each afford their audience privileged insights at different times. Paper and Stone is structured around a set of female relationships: we witness the friction between Martha Taylor (played by Susan Lycett) and her teenage daughter, Brenda (Marcia Rose), and follow Brenda’s developing friendship with the wayward Juliet (played by Catherine Coffey) The cast are pictured in a publicity photograph by Karl Bartley (Fig. 2). Many black British women’s plays use a cast of three, as Gabriele Griffin has observed (Griffin 2003, p.  242). This triad model allows writers to explore the idea of interpersonal relationships beyond the heteronormative paradigm of the binary couple. In Paper and Stone the focus is on intergenerational filial conflict, which is further complicated by differing national affiliations and cultural norms. Martha is a Seventh Day Adventist from Jamaica, primly dressed in crinoline and busy with the church choir, who frets over her daughter’s exposure to environments and experiences she cannot control. Brenda resists her mother’s rule, but is nonetheless apprehensive about the parties, alcohol, and interactions with men that busy her friend Juliet. Meenakshi Ponnuswami has complained that Paper and Stone uncritically reproduces an image of ‘(stereotypically imagined) conservative immigrant parents’ (2000, p.  223), starkly contrasted with the freedom-seeking second generation. Indeed, the production recording is given as a non-diegetic soundtrack Marcia Griffiths’ ‘Dreamland’—a 1978 reggae song that articulates a fantasy of a verdant far-off land— which would seem to speak of the Windrush generation’s thwarted hopes for life in the UK, and nostalgia for the life left behind. Yet Paper and Stone complicates this typical tale by forming a link between Martha and Juliet, triangulating the three women’s relationships. Before she travelled to England in 1967 the young Martha had been raped by a nameless landowner with a ‘greyish white’ face, and had abandoned the resultant child (Zindika 1989b, pp. 18, 54). In parallel, Juliet was given up as an infant and raised by a series of white foster families in rural England. These revelations promote empathy across the generational divide, and give vital context to the actions and attitudes of each character.

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Fig. 2  Karl Bartley, ‘Black Theatre Co-operative, Paper and Stone’ (1990). Goldsmiths University of London. Future Histories—Black Performance and Carnival Archive, Records of Nitro Theatre Company, NTC/P/T/1/21/4. Publicity photograph. (Left to right: Catherine Coffey, Susan Lycett, Marcia Rose)

Further texturing the typical narrative of generational conflict between migrants and their children, the three actors each also double as symbolic figures in the non-naturalistic interludes that bisect the realist scenes. Six symbolic sections frame ten naturalistic scenes, organising the latter into five sets of two.  Zindika recalls working closely with director Pam Fraser Solomon on the complexities of this. The symbolic figures reveal the hidden qualities of the two teenage characters for whom they double: Stone, the counterpart for Brenda, is described as being ‘hard and robust with a cutting edge of granite’, while Paper—the double for Juliet—is given as ‘soft and fragile with a blow away quality’ (Black Theatre Co-operative 1990). Lending the name of their game to title the play, these characters playfully battle for power: ‘Scissors cut paper […] Paper wrap stone’

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(Zindika 1989b, p. 1). A third symbolic figure, Sea, acts as a double for the mother. She occupies the same dreamlike space as Paper and Stone, and amplifies the play’s message for a wider audience: ‘Dance woman dance … let this dance speak to many in their own tongue’ (1989b, p. 39). Zindika’s stage directions specify the use of coloured costumes to distinguish between characters (1989b, p. 1)—anticipating the bold coding of costume in Black Mime Theatre’s Drowning (1991). This clothing confirms Paper, Stone, and Sea as emblematic icons rather than realistic individuals. The symbolic sections are also  distinguished aurally, through a more poetic language: internal rhyme creates rhythm in the characters’ speech and signals the dreamlike quality of these framing scenes. Dance, ritual games, and song (credited to Rachel Bennett) are also prominent in the symbolic sequences. Several reviewers recognised the value of this syncretic form adopted in  Paper and Stone: for The Independent, Sarah Hemming commended the use of song to ‘anchor the theme in a wider context’ (Hemming 1990), while Maureen Paton for Stage and Television Today agreed that the ‘songs and dances […] give a wider context to the black women’s struggle for self-expression’ (Paton 1990). The play makes reference to and recreates a range of global cultural practices, including music and lyrics from the Akan people of Ghana, the Caribbean tradition of carnival (1989b, p. 2), and the Ashanti dance and drumming ceremony Sikyi (1989b, p.  12). The performers’  style of  movement also  connects them with the earth, following a tradition identified by Kwesi Owusu: ‘the dancers […] move flat-footed, affirming a positive relationship with the forces of nature’ (Owusu 1986, pp. 65–66). These elements give the play a pan-African and African diasporic aesthetic.19 Paper and Stone was given a suggestive rather than mimetic stage treatment. Key objects indicate the setting by ergonomically implying the bodies that occupy it: an offset bench suggests a domestic living space, while a few seats mark out a kitchen area. The domestic setting nods to the British social realist tradition of ‘kitchen sink’ drama, but  pointedly exchanges the infamous  ‘angry young men’ for a cast and character list comprising black women. In further contrast with that referenced theatrical tradition, the sparse staging of Paper and Stone foregrounds the artifice of the play, asking the audience to interrogate the action rather than becoming uncritically immersed in it. A carved wooden backdrop designed by Zara Conway frames the stage space and signals the continuing influence of African history and creativity in the diasporic present (Bishop 1990). There are few props, prioritising instead the presence and

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movement of the actors as the primary mode of making meaning. Much of the material world is implied through gesture: a clap of hands becomes the slam of a door (Zindika 1989b, p. 2), and the extended stroke of an arm stands in for the brushing of hair (1989b, p. 11). The latter movement reveals the structural whiteness of mime. The legibility of the genre depends on a tacit understanding by artist and audience that certain movements mean certain things, but this particular movement implies and so normalises a particular type of hair: long and straight. Presenting the actions of white bodies as if they are universal reproduces the exclusion of non-white practitioners and publics from this classical art form. Not long after Zindika wrote Paper and Stone Black Mime Theatre formed its Women’s Troop, using community research and group-devising processes to ensure that their productions and performance practices placed black women centre-stage (see Chap. 4). The material record for Paper and Stone exemplifies some of the curiosities of an archival methodology. There are significant differences between the stage directions inscribed in Zindika’s script and the production as mounted onstage and recorded on film, provoking questions about authenticity and authorial status: which version of the play is the truer? The one written by the author, bearing her name, but which exists only as intention, or the one realised on stage by a multitude of cast and crew, and seen by the public? Of course, both the written and audio-visual records are vital, and together serve to preserve the work as the outcome of a process; attention to both acknowledges theatre as having a history. Zindika’s script specifies that the play begins in darkness, accompanied by a recording of children singing playground rhymes and a Ghanaian lullaby. This creates a conceptual link between childhood and Ghana; the nostalgia for a personal past is aligned with the cultural loss—or, more precisely, colonial theft—of African history. Zindika’s next play, Leonora’s Dance, did begin with lights dimmed, along with a symbolic dance sequence (Ross 1993), while the script for The Day begins with sound but no visuals, disrupting the primacy of sight conventional in naturalistic theatre. However, the VHS recording of Paper and Stone shows that this production opened with the three performers entering and kneeling on the stage, then commencing a synchronised wail, before standing to sing, clap, and move in unison, as pictured in Fig. 3; that the image reproduced here is of poor visual quality, being a still from a VHS, is a further reminder of the challenges of archival research. Paper, Stone, and Sea are archetypal figures, and their actions in this opening sequence anticipate the events of the plot

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Fig. 3  Black Theatre Co-operative, Paper and Stone (1990). Goldsmiths University of London. Future Histories—Black Performance and Carnival Archive, Records of Nitro Theatre Company, NTC/P/T/1/21/5/001. Still from VHS production recording

to follow. The stage recording tracks how their song gradually increases in tempo, twisting into a dynamic crescendo that seems to manifest the differently traumatic experiences that will be aired in the play: sexual violence, parental abandonment, and structural oppression. The song then abruptly gives way to silence, confirming the loss of the precarious innocence of childhood—and, perhaps, of the pre-colonial  continent. After this opening sequence Paper and Stone play the game that titles the play, gesturing towards the struggles faced by their corresponding characters: Paper wraps Stone, then Stone breaks free, visually announcing her corresponding character’s journey of self-realisation. In the subsequent scenes the play quickly establishes the interpersonal relationships between Martha, Brenda, and Juliet. The paired characters— Paper  with Juliet, Stone  with Brenda, and Sea with Martha—are linked

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through their shared performers, but distinguished through costume: for example, Stone simply removes her African wrapper to reveal the black skirt and white top that signify the character Brenda. Lighting is used to establish lateral connections between characters: for instance,  Brenda secretly reads a letter from her estranged older sister, Betty, who is living in America; its contents are spoken by Juliet/Paper, who is seated separately and spotlit, still wearing a headscarf and patterned wrapper. The absent sister is given both a voice and a presence through this secondary cast-doubling, further disrupting the naturalistic association between actor and character.  Likewise, the stage is here  made to represent both America and England simultaneously, disrupting the naturalistic principles of time and space. Betty’s letter details the current state of the family’s relationships: they are divided by an ongoing conflict between the strict Seventh Day Adventist mother, who is concerned only with reputation and right living, and her daughter Betty, who became sexually active at fourteen and left school without qualifications. Another sister, Carol, is said to follow in Betty’s footsteps. The youngest, Brenda, is positioned as Martha’s pride and joy—indeed, Martha refers to Brenda as her only remaining daughter (Zindika 1989b, p. 6). This expository scene outlines the relational tensions that structure the play. The sequencing of the subsequent action varies between the script and recording. The script proceeds with Brenda tenderly caring for her mother’s sore feet whilst resisting Martha’s spoken instruction that she should marry and confirm her affiliation with the church. The recording leads with a fight between family members, before Brenda acquiesces and cares for Martha’s feet, after which fighting resumes on the subject of marriage and church. Evidently the director’s intervention added further complexity to the play as performed. In both the script and recording Martha’s syntax is suggestive of her Caribbean background, aurally contrasting Brenda’s Standard English. But the initially stereotypical presentation of Martha as a model immigrant—socially conservative and willing to assimilate—is ruptured by the implication that she has secrets in her past, as she fabricates an answer to Brenda’s questions about her scarred hand. Martha’s story is indelibly written on her body, recalling the scars borne by her enslaved ancestors: she is part of a transnational lineage of wounded black bodies, and participates in a long history of black (women’s) exploitation. This detail aligns with Zindika’s intention to ‘explod[e] the myth that “all black women are strong”’ (Feay 1990b), as Suzi Feay’s review for Time Out reports.

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The second symbolic sequence makes explicit the intersecting forces of racism and sexism. This section of Paper and Stone echoes Theatre of Black Women’s Pyeyucca, in which the character Laura practises a torturous beauty regime. Paper and Stone describe white ideals of beauty, which motivate the violent practices of skin bleaching and chemical hair treatments. As Zindika makes clear, these ideals are culturally conditioned: ‘Black girls must swiftly learn’ (Zindika 1989b, p. 11). For the characters in Paper and Stone, the source of these social scripts includes teen magazines. But the ‘brown legged girl’ in Zindika’s play faces a further challenge: being of mixed heritage, she also finds herself shunned by the black sisterhood, lost between two communities and two identities. This symbolic sequence thereby nuances the circumstances set up in the naturalistic narrative, adding colourism to the explicit plot issues of intergenerational and intrafamilial conflict. Paper and Stone layers the particular experiences of migrants’ children—the so-called second generation—over a more generic trajectory of teenage development: ‘a period of confusion and a foraging for identity and friendship’ (Black Theatre Co-operative 1990). The underlying coming of age narrative allows all audiences to enjoy an experiential connection with the characters, regardless of how closely the characters’ ethnicities and  biographies mirror their own. Yet Martha’s efforts to control her daughter also attempt to protect the prized traditions of her Jamaican heritage, specifically. Her incessant questioning—‘Is what you hiding from me?’ (Zindika 1989b, p. 2)—not only intrudes on Brenda’s privacy but also, in its syntactic deviation from Standard English, asserts her migrant status. Brenda’s attempts to shed her adolescence and gain independence are therefore also a struggle to assert her identity as distinct from her mother’s heritage. This story of maturation is irreducibly gendered: Brenda is becoming not only an adult but a woman in a patriarchal world. Martha infantilises her daughter using a lexicon drawn from Caribbean Creole, addressing her as ‘Girl’ and ‘Chile’ (1989b, pp. 2, 8). In the earlier phases of the play Brenda capitulates to these terms and so implicitly endorses her mother’s perspective, managing only to modify the diminution: ‘I’m a big girl now’ (1989b, p. 10, emphasis added). The naturalistic narrative continues with Martha confessing in soliloquy her disappointment with her own life. Juliet then joins the scene. She answers to Martha’s migrant identity by self-defining as ‘black English’ (p. 16). Under pressure in the conversation, Juliet then reveals her orphan status. Without knowledge of her family history or parental ethnicity, she

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cannot claim to belong anywhere except her embodied present; the contemporary nomenclature racialising nationality  is therefore her only option. (It is striking that Jackie Kay’s 1986 play Chiaroscuro also presents an orphan character troubled by the disruption to her identity, in Opal.) Martha reciprocates Juliet’s confession by describing her own failed relationships: she was abandoned by her adulterous first husband, and has parted ways with Brenda’s errant father. But the moment of mutual sympathy proves fleeting, as Juliet refuses to endorse Martha’s religious quips. Martha’s fears about Juliet’s influence on her daughter are realised in the next scene when Juliet asks Brenda to squat with her in a council flat. Once again invoking stereotypical portrayals of the black community—specifically, here,  of unaspiring and underachieving youth—Juliet admits to leaving college and abandoning her plans to study at university. But Zindika is careful to give an emotional and relational context to these choices; they are presented as a consequence of being abandoned. In Juliet’s view this act delegitimates the moniker of ‘mother’; the act of parturition is not in itself sufficient to justify it. Juliet’s language goes even further, to  erase the human agent in her birth: ‘What kind of god sends me into this world without a mother?’ (Zindika 1989b, p. 19).20 Yet, with a stinging irony, the lack of information about her parents means that the generic title ‘mother’ is the only one she has available  with which to name the woman whose absence has shaped her life. Juliet also lacks knowledge of her inherited motherland: ‘Was she from Jamaica, Trinidad, Africa … what?’ (1989b, p.  23). The British state reinforces the trauma of her abandonment by administratively erasing her existence: ‘Officially I weren’t born. If I weren’t born then how can I exist?’ (1989b, p. 23). Abandoned by her parents and abstracted from her past, Juliet knows only her present. This contextualises her opportunistic lifestyle. Tempted by the prospect of a lost heritage that would enable a different present, the two teenagers fantasise about the lives that Juliet’s parents may have lived. Martha then interrupts to summon her daughter to church and issue instructions about the coming visitors. For the first time, Brenda hesitantly refuses to mimic her mother’s regime, and begins to consider instead Juliet’s offer of ‘freedom’. The play then segues into another non-naturalistic scene, which delivers a cautionary tale. Sea—identifiable by a blue wrap draped over her shoulders—stands at the rear of the stage. The other two actors temporarily take on further roles: Marcia Rose (Brenda/Paper) narrates the story of Trevor Shilling, a wayward youth turned criminal whose girlfriend (doubled by Catherine Coffey, who plays Juliet/Stone) left him when he was sent to prison. Having suffered under a racist system, Trevor turns violent,

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attempting to reclaim power by making his masculinity a weapon. His ex-­ partner is the object of his aggression. Alone onstage, the performer implies his actions with her own reactions. This technique for staging violence has a long history in black British women’s theatre. It is shared with Theatre of Black Women’s Silhouette (1983), in which the character Anna implies the unwanted advances of an unnamed man in a fast-food restaurant, Black Mime Theatre’s Mothers (1990), where a mother’s extramarital affair and a teen’s coerced sexual initiation are both performed solo, and debbie tucker green’s Two Women (2000). This technique boldly makes the female body the site of the action, witnessing to the physical and emotional impacts of violence against women. Provocatively, staging such violence without a perpetrator present also seems to position the woman as its source, visually manifesting the twisted logic of victim-blaming. Paper and Stone thus confronts its audience with common societal assumptions. The unnamed girlfriend becomes a proxy for all women who have been hurt at the hands of men, as the defamiliarising presentation of the scene asks why such violence is allowed to go unchallenged and its victims left to suffer without intervention. The plot proceeds with Brenda moving out of the family home to live with Juliet. Mother and daughter fight, each failing to hear the other’s concerns. Brenda asserts her independence, declaring ‘I’m not your clone’, and refuses to compensate for Martha’s personal disappointments: ‘You can’t live your life over again through me’ (1989b, p. 32). The oppositional pronouns (you/your versus I/me) that insistently structure this section of dialogue grammatically enact Brenda’s efforts to realise herself by separating from her mother. Indeed, much of the characters’ speech attempts to recreate their relational realities. Zindika’s specification of proper names in the script supports this, identifying the characters as individuals—unlike debbie tucker green’s postmillennial plays, where characters are often named in the paratext  by their familial relationships. Emboldened by the concrete act of leaving home, Brenda updates her claim to maturity: ‘I am a woman now’ (1989b, p. 32). This is a newly assertive perlocutionary act, performing Brenda’s independence by speaking in terms other than her mother’s ‘Girl’ and ‘Chile’ or her peers’ recourse to a language that centres men: ‘That’s sad boy, real sad’ and ‘Shame guy … shame’ (1989b, p. 14). But despite Brenda’s strong verbal assertion the filial bond between mother and daughter endures in their language: Brenda’s claims to independence are repeatedly appended by an address to ‘Mum’, confirming their continuing relationship (1989b, pp. 4, 32). Martha responds with a weary lament: ‘Children—sometimes they

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mek you regret the day you was born’ (1989b, p. 33). Rather than regretting the day the children were born, imaginatively undoing her daughters’ existence, Martha prefers to fantasise her own erasure. She cannot imagine the absence of her children; she cannot exist unless as a mother. Her use of the second-person address rather than the first-person pronoun performs this spoken self-erasure, as she is grammatically alienated from the subject of the statement. However, Brenda’s claim to freedom is quickly questioned as the play progresses: a scene in which the two young women dress for a party exposes how far Brenda has internalised her mother’s mores, which emerge in stark contrast with the streetwise Juliet’s fashion-consciousness. Juliet restyles Brenda in her own image, with make-up and revealing clothes, and coaches her on how to behave at the upcoming party. This is followed in the playscript with a short symbolic interlude spoken by the matriarch of the archetypes, Sea, who describes the power of dance: to assert femininity, connect with ancestry, and achieve freedom. Her words partly anticipate the party that Brenda and Juliet attend, though the dancing they find there is rather less wholesome. Interestingly, the production as filmed  reshapes these scenes, blending the  naturalistic plot with the symbolic sequence: it has Brenda and Juliet dancing and singing behind Sea as she speaks, with the three performers spotlit separately. Their song is an original piece composed for the production by Rachel Bennett. The next scene sees Brenda visibly awkward and out of place at the party; exasperated, Juliet leaves her alone in search of a good time on her own. The sequence that follows repeats the earlier technique of implied violence, but transports it from the abstract realm of the symbolic interlude to the world of the naturalistic narrative. In low lighting, Brenda describes being approached at the party by fellow college student Carl. The interaction ends with a suggestion of sexual assault. Alone onstage, the performer implies the actions of the perpetrator using her own body. Her movements become frantic oscillations and her speech gives way to a scream: (moves) Don’t stand so close to me. Yes, it does bother me … a lot. (she moves away) […] Let go of me, will you? […] (backing away) […] What are you doing, Carl? Don’t touch me. I know it’s only my shoulder, but please don’t touch me. No, I don’t want to kiss you. […] (she goes one way and then another) I said excuse me. Don’t touch me. Can you stop it … I’m going inside. Please let go of me…please, please don’t do that. Please stop. I’ll scream. Stop it. (she screams loud. lights down) (1989b, p. 42)

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This is a visceral scene: as the ellipses in the playscript suggest, it is fully realised only onstage. The solo performance produces the disconcerting sense that Brenda is being attacked by her own contorted body. This materialises how trauma is repeated physiologically—in the form of panic attacks, flashbacks, and other stress responses—by and on the very body that experienced it. It conveys the sense of being betrayed by one’s own body that often attends experiences of sexual abuse. Centring the female performer asserts the gendered reality of sexual violence, and suggests the danger simply of being a woman in a misogynistic environment. Later, when disclosing the incident to Juliet, Brenda describes how Carl ‘had his hands there … there … and there’ (1989b, p. 46), while gesturing towards her breasts, hips, and thighs. This might be compared with debbie tucker green’s random (2008), where the solo performer points to her own body to describe her brother’s fatal wounds. On hearing of Brenda’s experience Juliet earnestly expresses her care, but Brenda is more concerned about preserving her mother’s reputation than reporting to the police. After further enquiry Juliet is affronted to find that Brenda was not in fact ‘raped’, as she first termed it. Juliet dismissively tells her that unwanted sexual contact is commonplace, and nonchalantly  reports her own past experiences. The teen retains little hope for a healthy relationship: ‘The dirt touches everyone eventually … even you’ (Zindika 1989b, p. 48). This exchange is followed by a non-naturalistic scene that explores a more explicit scenario of sexual exploitation, as the performers double to play the roles of a prostitute and a punter. A commentary by Sea laments the lack of opportunities available to black women, showing how gendered injustice is complicated by racism and, further, intersects with issues of class. The scene ends with a euphoric coming to voice, as Stone (doubling as the sex worker) speaks a final refusal: ‘no’. Deciding that the promised freedom comes at too great a cost, Brenda begins packing to leave the flat  she shares with Juliet. Her departure repeats the trauma of Juliet’s infant abandonment. The next scene parallels Juliet and Martha, who appear separately onstage and each speak in turn to complain about being left by Brenda. Martha laments: ‘I am nobody’s mother any more. I have no children left’ (1989b, p. 53). Following from her earlier declaration this statement still identifies her as a mother, but now of a negative entity: ‘nobody’, ‘no children’. She appeals to her Jamaican heritage for the vocabulary necessary to describe this state: ‘I is left empty, light and hollow like a calabash’ (1989b, p. 53). The culturally located simile of the bottle gourd points to an enduring identity that has

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not been lost despite her international migration. It offers security amidst the flux of her relationships. The two characters’ alternating speech then shifts to explore another shared experience: Martha recalls the child she conceived through rape and birthed alone in a field, while Juliet speculates on her mother’s circumstances. Spotlighting is again used to signal the relationship between these two women: when Juliet speaks of and to her lost mother she is unlit, and the spotlight instead illuminates Martha, visually implicating her in a parallel of Juliet’s past. This pairing of the two characters is not present in the printed script: it takes place outside the verbal sign-system, and so is visible only in the production and its recordings. The strategic doubling of characters is shared with Black Mime Theatre Women’s Troop, whose Drowning (1991) has the protagonist of each case study sit centre-­ stage while another performer speaks their voiceover, and further echoes Theatre of Black Women, whose Chiaroscuro (performed in 1986; first published in 1987) has two characters match with symbolic movement the spoken poetry of two others. Each of these characters is more fully realised through the perspective of another. Lynette Goddard has described Paper and Stone as journeying towards the characters’ ‘personal autonomy’ (2007, p. 47), but attention to the production recording allows another perspective: the play’s non-naturalistic scenes and techniques seem instead to stress the constitutive significance of relationships. The directed lighting makes literal the idea that interpersonal interaction can be illuminating. Spatial positioning is also used to signal particular relationships between the characters. At one point Juliet makes to look at herself in a mimed mirror, yet her gaze is directed towards the area of the stage occupied by Martha. If looking into a prop mirror would be understood as an introspective search for self-knowledge, miming the same allows a second, simultaneous meaning: an attempt also  to connect with that which lies beyond. Again, Paper and Stone shares this trope with Black Mime Theatre’s Drowning (1991), though in that later play the protagonist looks through an implied mirror towards the audience  rather than at another character. Paper and Stone ostensibly presents Martha as absorbed in her own lament, but as she repeats the gesture of looking towards an imagined mirror she actually reciprocates Juliet’s gaze. Here the textual record of the play provides a privileged insight to the reader that is invisible to the spectator; it is only in Zindika’s written stage directions that we are told Juliet ‘sees herself for the first time’ (1989b, p. 54). The typescript thus both instructs and helps to interpret the action onstage.

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By portraying the three characters’ common experiences of an unjust world, Paper and Stone affirms the importance of black female solidarity. A review in The Guardian commended Zindika for registering the women’s shared needs: ‘movingly and challengingly captur[ing] the essence of the common burden borne by her three very different characters’ (Martin 1990). Juliet quickly recognises the value of a community shaped by gender: ‘We’re women, the same’ (Zindika 1989b, p. 51). Brenda comes to agree only after experiencing life outside her mother’s home. After this she is able to recognise the everyday ways in which she is racialised: ‘You think when I walk down the street, anyone is going to see me as a big-shot lawyer? No … they’ll see what they want to see’ (1989b, p.  55). Formally confirming her self-actualisation whilst also thematically  expressing the importance of community, Brenda is given the final statement of the naturalistic scenes: ‘You’re a black woman … we can’t rely on luck’ (1989b, p.  55). The shift in this short sentence from the second-person address (‘you’) to the first-person plural (‘we’) is significant. Brenda enters here  into a collective identity, constituted not by an innate and eternal essence but by shared experiences of objectification. The final symbolic scene expands from the experiences shared by black women in Britain to posit a global community. The repeated refrain ‘You’ll know her’ directly addresses the audience, rhythmically demanding attention. Paper celebrates black women’s many and varied contributions to culture, naming African American jazz and blues singers Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, and Ella Fitzgerald. Sea decries shared experiences of stop and search (‘sus’) laws and racist policing: ‘my child can’t walk the streets ‘cos he is a crime’ (1989b, p.  56). (Such a statement repeats the sentiment of Marsha Prescod’s 1984 poem ‘May the Force Be With You’, which satirises the racist perspective of the ruling class: ‘De only Blacks who ain criminals / is entertainers, sportsmen, or Police’ (Prescod 2000 [1984]).) Stone expresses solemn solidarity with the people of antebellum America: ‘You’ll know her, those were her children hanging from trees, in the deep southern states’ (1989b, p. 56). This character also comments on the overrepresentation of black people in prisons and psychiatric institutions. The trio’s claim to black female kinship finally expands to include  the Global South: ‘You’ll know her for she lives in all the mineral-rich countries of the world. She is the one sitting on the sidewalk, selling dry fish to survive’ (1989b, p.  57). Reviewing Paper and Stone for City Limits, Martina Hall found it ‘a critical but nevertheless jubilant celebration of black womanhood’ (Hall 1990b). In this first produced

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work, Zindika uses the tools of both stage and page to propose a global black sisterhood—one that arises from shared experience, and is a source of great solace and support, though is not without its complications.

The Day Mother Took Us to the Seaside (1996) Zindika’s final play, The Day Mother Took Us to the Seaside, tells the story of three sisters.21 Its cast of three echoes the plays Mothers (1990) and Drowning (1991) by Black Mime Theatre Women’s Troop, and anticipates debbie tucker green’s early unpublished play She Three (1997) and later trade (2005). As for Paper and Stone, the cast of three allows an exploration of difference without reifying this as a binary opposition. In The Day Zindika  has her characters  Serena, Valerie, and Nkrumah revel in their divergent personalities and resulting life choices, but share the formative experience of having been deserted by their mother as children. The mother herself is conspicuously absent from the stage; she appears only in the memories recounted by those left behind.22 Indeed, much of The Day consists of the characters’ retrospective accounts. Their memories of that past shape their present, but are, at times, contested and corrected by their siblings. The Day is organised into two acts, framed by a prologue and epilogue, and the narrative arc moves the sisters simultaneously towards reconciliation with each other and imaginative reunification with their mother. Like Paper and Stone, this play makes use of non-naturalistic techniques to compress time and place and complicate the relationship between actor and character. However, unlike Paper and Stone, The Day was sadly never given a full production. Analysis of its staging relies instead on the directions inscribed in the script; the details of form discussed below refer to the playwright’s written instructions, rather than describing an actual production. Zindika’s stage directions propose that the play opens with a darkened stage and a soundtrack of seagulls and crashing waves. If the visual mode focuses a spectator’s attention on a singular sight/site, the auditory envelops the audience, producing a collective sensory experience. The particular sounds that begin The Day invoke a generic—placeless and timeless—seaside setting, summoning spectators’ personal memories by aural association. The ambient sound of rushing water is suggestive of the womb, a space of generative possibility into which the audience is incorporated. This immersive soundscape was then to be interrupted by bright lights, denoting the start of the prologue proper. This framing sequence is set on a pier. It is not clear from the script how Zindika meant to signal this

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scene, but a suggestive use of objects and minimal scenery would accord with black British women’s theatre tradition. Seated on deck chairs and wearing identical swimming costumes are three adult sisters, named in the script as Serena, Valerie, and Nkrumah. Their matching clothing signifies their sibling relationship, anachronistically repeating their childhood past within their adult present. Their conversation is structured around a repeated refrain: ‘I’ll never forget’ (Zindika 1996, p. 1). In quick flashes of vivid visual, aural, and olfactory memory, the sisters describe the fateful day trip: ‘Laughing policeman […] The smell of fish and chips […] The penny fountain’ (1996, p. 2). They also give voice to other remembered characters, speaking the words of a fortune-teller with a Cockney accent (1996, p. 1) and reciting their mother’s speech (1996, p. 3). This composite account gathers their differing perspectives on the same location and events. The mother’s visit to the fortune-teller forms the dramatic pivot of their remembered story. We learn that she had emerged suddenly from the fortune-teller’s booth, screaming with shock, and ran from her daughters through the crowded seaside town. No explanation is given for this action, and nor did the children receive any indication of its reasons at the time. The trauma of abandonment was repeated two weeks later when the mother briefly returned to the family home to collect her belongings. Remembering the desertion of the character Juliet in Zindika’s earlier play Paper and Stone, and her consequently insecure cultural and ethnic identity, we might read the absence of the mother in The Day as figuring the loss of the motherland for the migrant generation. It would also be possible to read the loss of the mother in The Day Mother Took Us to the Seaside, as well as the character Juliet’s motherless state in Paper and Stone, in relation to the practices of slavery, where children were forcibly removed from their enslaved mothers to be sold separately as chattel. Frederick Douglass’ 1845 memoir Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself describes the resulting psychological disruption between siblings. In The Day the daughters are haunted by this loss, and their horizontal relationships do indeed suffer for it. The rest of Zindika’s play circles around this fundamental maternal absence. The Day moves unannounced between different places and moments in time, mimicking the fluid and associative movement of memory. There is little narrative action, but rather than simply reporting their past lives the characters re-enter those experiences as if a present event. This collapse of temporal distance  relies on the signifying codes of posture and gesture.

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For example, when they describe the long moments spent anxiously waiting outside the palm-reader’s booth the adult sisters incarnate their younger selves by holding hands (Zindika 1996, p.  4). An anonymous script-reader criticised the play’s conflation of time periods; an A4 page of handwritten notes appended to the typescript advises a stronger distinction between the adult characters and their infant selves (1996, n.p.). But the technique is not incidental: the unremarked slippage between past and present demonstrates the continuing significance of these events for the three sisters, enacting the way in which traumatic experiences viscerally recur as embodied flashbacks. The palimpsest of each character’s past and present also comments on the very concept of ‘identity’: in the adult actors holding hands we see not only the sisters’ lateral relationships with each other but also the continuity of each character with her own younger self. Both the interpersonal and the intrapersonal are vital aspects of subjectivity. The prologue ends with an attempt by Serena, the eldest sister, to rewrite the family narrative. When  her sisters valorise their surrogate father, Raymond, Serena replies by asserting her own unrecognised efforts, correcting Nkrumah and Valerie’s mirrored statements ‘Daddy grew us’ with the indignant declaration ‘I grew you’ (1996, p. 5). Act One begins with a more naturalistic sequence, as the adult characters reflect on—rather than revisit—their abandonment and its effects. The women speak from separate spaces onstage: this physical distance indicates the divergence of their lives and the rupture of their family unity. They tell of a planned seaside reunion to mark the anniversary of their mother’s departure: this will become the stable present to which their various recollections are tethered. The gathering has been initiated by Serena, the only sister to have since become a mother herself: she attends with her sixteen-year-old son, Karl. Her intention is to confront the fortune-teller who precipitated their mother’s disappearance, and thereby end what she perceives to be a ‘curse’ (1996, p. 18) on the family. Serena’s monologue is organised by the repeated phrase ‘Don’t imagine’, which contrasts with the nostalgic ‘I remember’ that structured the prologue. Her words caution the audience to look beyond the frumpishly dressed single mother who appears onstage and instead see her complex history: ‘Please don’t imagine that you know me’ (1996, p. 6). As Serena continues to speak of her life and losses we learn of her love for music and her unrealised ambition to become a radio presenter. We come to know her not through her appearance but by the stories she tells. Her son Karl mirrors his mother’s story with his own, organised by the counter  refrain ‘I forget’ (1996,

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p.  7). Serena believes him to be suffering from memory loss caused by complications at birth (1996, p.  18), but his forgetting might also be understood as repressing the traumatic memory of his mother’s psychosis and violent actions (1996, p. 18). Mother and son are triangulated by the introduction of Karl’s father, Berry. We hear of his teenage relationship with Serena and the unintended pregnancy that resulted. Zindika’s script signals that Berry is to be played by the same actor who plays Karl, using a mask to signal the father figure  (1996, p.  9). This cast-doubling cannot be dismissed as a decision forced by material circumstances, such as the availability or cost of performers, since The Day was never produced; instead, it should be understood as a primary facet of the play’s meaning. The bodily continuity of cast-doubling affirms the biological relationship between father and son, yet the need for one to stand in for the other in a mutually exclusive arrangement characterises Berry precisely by his absence from the family. Additionally, bracketing father from son using a mask suspends the otherwise incestuous implications of the increasingly sexual encounter between Serena and Karl-as-Berry. Serena and Berry interact verbally at first, as Berry pleads with the teenage virgin: ‘you’ll gain a lot from this […] You’ll be a woman’ (1996, p. 10). When the encounter becomes physical (Karl-as-)Berry leaves the stage, and Zindika’s script directs Serena to enact the encounter with her own body by sighing heavily and simulating sexual movements (1996, p.  10). This repeats Zindika’s directions for Paper and Stone, as well as scenes from Theatre of Black Women’s Silhouette (1983) and Black Mime Theatre’s Mothers (1990), where a lone performer implies the sexual actions or abuse performed by an absent character. In The Day the action eventually yields again to spoken recollection, as Serena returns to her solitary present. She recalls returning home after Berry coerced her into sex to find her father demanding his dinner: in both circumstances she is subjected to the male will, and made to feed his desires. The girls’ surrogate father, Raymond, is next to appear onstage. There are no breaks between scenes in The Day, and characters are scripted to enter and leave the playing space led by the free flow of memory. However, Zindika mandated for the stage to be partitioned by the use of lighting, in order to direct audience attention to different zones and the particular stories they depict. Raymond and Serena stand apart from each other, imaging the relational distance between them. Enacting the lack of communication that characterised Serena’s childhood—‘We never really

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talked’ (1996, p.  11)—their alternating monologues unwittingly repeat each other but do not directly interact. With neither a biogenetic claim nor an enduring relational connection to Serena, Raymond struggles to assert his status in the unfolding story. Seemingly unaware that he was cuckolded by his wife—the girls’ mother, named by him as  Phyllis—he confesses to his disappointment at having daughters, and fantasises that sons would have affirmed his faltering masculinity. Raymond works as the pier-keeper, and reports on this work as well as reminiscing about his absent wife. Over the course of his interrupted monologue, he hints at the emasculating effects of the abandonment, giving voice to cultural norms of gendered and familial responsibility: ‘I never heard of a woman walking’ (1996, p. 16). He also offers the only explanation given in the play for that pivotal event, implying that it was the result of a migrant’s unhappy dislocation: ‘I knew she wanted to go back home’ (p. 17). Raymond then  goes on to introduce another daughter. He tells of his shock at seeing her kissing another woman—an act that decisively threatens the reproduction of the  patriarchy  that Raymond so ardently  upholds—before Nkrumah enters the stage and continues the narration. Formerly known as Jemima, Nkrumah has since renamed herself after the twentieth-­century Ghanaian revolutionary Kwame Nkrumah. This act of self-­determination stresses the significance of names and naming for the peoples of the African diaspora, given the colonial effacement of language, religion, ritual, culture, and kinship systems, and the imposition of new (Anglophone, patronymic) monikers. Zindika uses the name ‘Nkrumah’ for this character throughout the script, even when she introduces herself with her given name ‘Jemima’  whilst performing her childhood state (1996, p.  4): this  paratextual intervention honours and affirms the character’s chosen identity. Nkrumah’s monologue repeats the refrain ‘Imagine’—directly countering Serena’s earlier ‘Don’t imagine’— to imaginatively re-connect with her mother’s life and choices. Nkrumah’s later refrain ‘Tell me’ invites external affirmation of this filial similarity. Nkrumah speaks of her close relationship with her mother and the suffering that followed their separation. Like Serena, she has returned to the seaside for the anniversary event. The script places her in the hall of mirrors in the amusement arcade, and describes those mirrors as smeared and stained (Zindika 1996, p. 11). The distorted reflections prevent Nkrumah from seeing her true likeness and therefore realising herself. Zindika’s script instructs that the mirrors should then  gradually clear throughout the scene, with the intention of visually  indicating the character’s

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development (Zindika 1996, p. 11). Nkrumah longs to reunite with her mother, but over the course of her monologue she learns instead to identify her mother’s influence within herself: ‘I know what she’ll say. She’ll say, what’s important is not how you got in there, it’s how you gonna get out’ (1996, p. 13). Nkrumah continues by imagining a fuller conversation: ‘You’re not mad are you mum? […] I know what she’ll say. She’ll say that I always had a wayward streak in me. Well you know what they say mum. Like mother like daughter’ (1996, p. 14). Here, then, the missing mother is made to speak through the characters’ imaginative interactions, as well as being more generally centred in the play through the characters’ recollections. In this fantasised conversation the daughter stands in for her mother: Nkrumah gives Phyllis life, voice, and body; she integrates her mother into herself. Both by casting performers in multiple roles, and by constituting characters relationally rather than in isolation, The Day presents subjectivity as radically connected. The next character to speak is Valerie. She is seated in a driving simulator in the arcade, a setting suggestive of her ambitious personality and personal  accomplishments. Like her sisters Valerie reflects on her childhood, though she uniquely recalls a close bond with Raymond and a rather cooler relationship with her mother. Valerie presents herself as the most intelligent and culturally literate member of the family, forgoing sisterly solidarity in order to advance her career in journalism. She expresses her ambitions in uncompromisingly gendered terms: ‘I want the freedom of men’ (1996, p. 12). Valerie’s and Nkrumah’s monologues alternate but do not interact, reflecting the lack of connection between these  characters. Valerie’s scene then segues into Act Two, marked by her arrival at the anniversary picnic. Her attendance is pragmatic rather than nostalgic: she hopes to end what she calls Serena’s ‘wild goose chase’ (1996, p. 14). The archive preserves a record of some debate about this aspect of the plot: the anonymous script-reader for Black Theatre Co-operative found Serena’s attendance at the reunion unconvincing, considering the character’s reservations about it greater than her reasons to go (1996, n.p.). Unfortunately, no response from the playwright is recorded to this criticism. Throughout The Day, various scenes point to the role of relationships in subject formation. In the absence of Karl’s father and the sisters’ mother, the development of gender identity seems particularly threatened. Karl rejects his mother, Serena, turning instead towards Raymond in search of a model for masculinity. Raymond promises Karl that a trip to the Caribbean will secure his gender: ‘He says there I can really be a man’ (1996, p. 15).

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The implication is of sex tourism, a neo-colonial practice complicated by the fact that Karl is, through Serena, a direct descendent of the African diasporic population most exploited in these circumstances. Serena attempts to block Raymond’s influence on Karl: ‘Filling his head with nonsense, that’s all he ever does’ (1996, p.  15). However, using the thirdperson pronoun to refer both to the older man and to her son renders the referent for ‘he’ and ‘his’ somewhat slippery. Ultimately, identifying both characters by their common masculinity only reinforces the connection between the two. Raymond polices the performance of gender by other characters, too. Objecting to Nkrumah’s changing appearance, his creolised syntax anxiously insists on the lesbian woman as female through the repetition of the gendered pronoun: ‘She cut off she hair’ (1996, p. 23). The sisters then  again revert to a childlike state, layering the present moment with the remembered past: Valerie and Serena bicker, regressing to the patterns of their childhood, and Serena runs complaining to Raymond.23 This scene can be compared with Leonora’s Dance, where the protagonist regresses as her mother recounts the death of her father: this temporal shift is expressed in the physical contortion of the actor’s body, as she crawls on the floor, and in her speech as she repeats: ‘I must help mama’ (1993, p. 108). In The Day Valerie attempts to secure the temporal present by gripping onto her adult accomplishments, describing prioritising her career over the possibility of having children—a choice the conservative Raymond cannot comprehend. He, in turn, recounts conversations with Phyllis that posited motherhood as the fulfilment of femininity (1996, p. 24). We are invited to read her disappearance, then, as a refusal of such: a turning away from  gendered social scripts. By juxtaposing the  various characters’ statements and sentiments, Zindika explores the ways in which plans for the future and retellings of the past are a creative—perhaps even fantastical—act. Though such narrative acts may have our emotional integrity or even physical survival as their goal, they cannot adequately account for the messy incoherence of reality. A further incident of specified cast-doubling follows, formally emphasising the play’s focus on interpersonal interactions. As Raymond speaks of his wife the three daughters each double as their respective biological fathers. These three characters then share their own memories of Phyllis. Two-tone music lover Frederick (doubled by Nkrumah, his daughter) tells of a wild and rebellious woman disappointed by life and longing for a freedom that he could not provide despite his promises of global travel (1996, p. 24). A burly mechanic with a suspect past, Johnny (doubled by Serena) tells of a

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bird-like being he wilfully wounded: ‘I wanted us to grow old together, so I broke her wings’ (1996, p. 25). His poetic language belies this confession of domestic violence. Marcus (doubled by  Valerie), an esteemed lawyer with ambitions to enter government, remembers Phyllis as his young extramarital affair, whom he showered with gifts but refused to commit to. The practice of cast-doubling visually unites father and daughter through the performer’s body. However, this technique also means that father and daughter characters cannot both be present at once. This materialises their relational distance. Indeed, none of the three men ever met their daughters, and one even offered to fund an abortion (1996, p.  26). It is precisely through their absence that these men shape their daughters. This particular scene in The Day can be read through the work of Hortense Spillers. Spillers catalogues the presumption common in sociological discourse on African American family structures about the absence of the Father and the related pre-eminence of the female line. She perceives this narrative as a ‘stunning reversal of the castration thematic, [which] displac[es] the Name and the Law of the Father to the territory of the Mother and Daughter’ (Spillers 1987, p. 66; see also pp. 74, 80). Zindika literally replaces her characters’ fathers with the three performers’ female bodies; this cast-doubling actualises Spillers’ comment that ‘“Sapphire” enacts her “Old Man” in drag’ (1987, p. 66). Spillers argues that the ‘misnaming’ of African diasporic culture as matriarchal is not only inaccurate but unhelpful, serving instead to perpetuate racist perceptions of the black family as pathological. In The Day, the absence of the biogenetic fathers and the substitute presence of Raymond mirrors what Spillers calls ‘a dual fatherhood […] comprised of the African father’s banished name and body and the captor father’s mocking presence’ (1987, p. 80). Raymond’s ethnicity is not specified in the script, but would be manifest in the actor cast for the role, while the absent fathers are embodied—and their ethnicity implied—only through their daughters. This cast-doubling makes the ‘flesh’ of the female actors hyper-visible, endorsing the centrality of the female, even approaching the ideas of matriarchy to which Spillers objects. The performers take up space, positively countering the elision of women from the Windrush narrative, and perhaps defying the historic containment of women transported as chattel from the African continent (1987, p. 72). This cast-doubling continues in the play  with the three female actors then taking up the roles of three security guards—echoing the guard characters in Tiger Teeth Clenched Not to Bite (1982)  by Theatre of Black Women co-founder Bernardine Evaristo. The security guards keep watch

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as Raymond laments the decline of his marriage; eventually their surveillance comes to dominate the scene, as they surround him. Across all these various subsidiary characters, Zindika planned The Day such that its black female performers maintain a continuing presence onstage. Their significance thus exceeds their scripted roles. The process of remembering and re-enacting the past proves powerful for the three sisters, and each finally achieves symbolic reunification with their mother. Nkrumah identifies with Phyllis through costume by attending the picnic wearing the 1960s rock and roll dress that was described by her father, Frederick. Nkrumah thereby revives her mother’s past in her own present—to the extent that she is mistaken for Phyllis by Raymond (1996, pp. 28–29). After confessing her resentment of older sister Serena for taking on the maternal role, Valerie resolves that ‘We’re all our mother’s daughter’ (1996, p. 28). Serena’s act of identification with Phyllis is rather more extreme than her sisters’. As a child she took on her absent mother’s maternal responsibilities, and then unwittingly repeated her mother’s actions with an unplanned pregnancy. And, as Valerie reveals, Serena’s son Karl was born on the anniversary of the sisters’ abandonment (1996, p.  14), meaning the commemorative picnic marks the date on which Serena became a mother as well as the date on which her own mother fled. Further,  Raymond had Serena’s children committed into state care, further repeating her own mother’s separation from her children (1996, pp. 21, 27). Phyllis’ life is therefore a pattern for Serena’s. This identification climaxes as Serena finally and fatally re-enacts her mother’s departure: she jumps from the pier, exclaiming ‘I tried not to become her, but it was no use […] her future is my future, her death is my death’ (1996, pp.  27, 28). The only mother among the three sisters, Serena marks Phyllis’ disappearance by choosing her own death. Serena’s apparent suicide is both a distressed response to her mother’s absence and a constructive attempt to identify with it. Zindika prepares for this climactic event by affirming the archetypal link between water and woman throughout the play.24 When the girls stand nervously outside the fortune-teller’s booth, the sea provides a comforting surrogate; unlike the mother the girls wait to lose, the sea is always present. Serena’s statement ‘The day my water broke in the supermarket’ (1996, p. 7) echoes the syntax of the play’s title, placing ‘my water’ in the syntactical position of ‘Mother’. Serena also relates the sound of the sea to an aural memory of the womb, and describes her experience of parturition using water imagery: ‘First a trickle, then a stream, then a flood’ (Zindika 1996, pp. 7, 14).

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The association between woman and water also features in Zindika’s novel A Daughter’s Grace, where Aunty Lou is described as ‘like the sea breeze’ (Zindika 1992, p. 17), and the protagonist Nehanda imagines her parents to have met on the ship from Barbados (1992, p. 31). Zindika revisited this link in the text for the Adzido production Akwaaba (1994): her written preface, titled ‘The River Speaks’, adopts the perspective of African rivers and connects this with a mother’s sustenance: ‘Am I not the birth water that nourishes and feeds?’ (Zindika 1994). These positive associations cast Serena’s suicide as resolution rather than resignation. Confirming this, Zindika makes the sea the site of Serena’s rebirth: she is revived in the epilogue. The epilogue returns to and directly repeats the prologue, giving the play a cyclical structure. Again, the three women are seated on the beach dressed in identical swimming costumes. Now facing the audience, they deliver their final address directly. They begin by remembering their mother’s appearance, actions, and words, before identifying her trace on their own bodies: raymond

Is that a picture of her? You have her…

serena Eyes. nkrumah Lips. valerie

Cheekbones. (1996, p. 30)

In turn, each sister announces ‘I am her and she is me’ (1996, p. 32). This repeated filial declaration also serves to  identify the  sisters with one another, and the restoration of their relationship is aurally performed when the three women finally speak together as a chorus, adopting a collective ‘we’ (1996, p. 30). The loss of the mother in The Day is certainly ‘harrowing’ (Griffin 2003, p. 251), as Gabriele Griffin records, but out of this originary loss the play guides the sisters towards positive identification with each other, and has each integrate her mother with herself. As in Paper and Stone, the characters of The Day Mother Took Us to the Seaside finally recognise themselves to be constituted in dynamic mutual relation. * * * Zindika’s plays constitute an important material intervention in 1990s’ Britain by making space for black women on the nation’s stages. But—as for Theatre of Black Women, Munirah Theatre Company, and Black Mime

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Theatre before her—the significance of Zindika’s plays was also symbolic. The purposeful use of multi-role playing is crucial to her work: this non-­ naturalistic technique moves beyond an instrumental use of the black female body as a channel for character, and instead centres and celebrates the black female body itself.

Notes 1. See Zindika’s artist website at: https://zindika.com/. 2. Peckham Black Women’s Group was informally begun in the early 1980s, and appears in a 1985 census of black women’s organisations (Anon. 1985a, p. 70). After opening a dedicated centre, the group closed in 1990 due to lack of funding (Sudbury 1998, p. 251). 3. Nka Iban published several anthologies: Words of Nka Iban (1993) and Ripples: An Anthology of Poetry and Short Stories (1997). 4. The African Caribbean Educational Resource was founded in 1977 to champion multicultural education. It continued to operate until 1988. 5. The GLC Literature Competition was established in 1985, and received over 700 entries. Prizes were awarded on July 10 of that year at the Royal Festival Hall, London, by James Baldwin (Anon. 1985b, p. 2). 6. Gabriele Griffin lists Zindika’s Paper and Stone as one of a cluster of black British plays studying the role of religion and spirituality in contemporary Britain and highlighting the intergenerational conflicts that ensue. Griffin specifically compares Paper and Stone to the earlier Rose’s Story by Grace Dayley, which was produced in 1984 and published in 1985 (Griffin 2003, pp. 207–208). 7. Jamal Ali founded the Radical Alliance of Poets and Players in 1972 to produce group-devised poetry, drama, and music rooted in Brixton. He was later involved in the Black Theatre of Brixton (1975–1978), with Norman Beaton and Rufus Collins. 8. Special Collections, Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, London, SE14 6NW. 9. University of Bristol Theatre Collection, 21 Park Row, Bristol, BS1 5LY. 10. Victoria and Albert Museum Theatre and Performance Collections, Blythe House, 23 Blythe Road, London, W14 0QX. 11. Bishopsgate Institute, 230 Bishopsgate, London, EC2M 4QH. 12. Information on the activities of Black Theatre Forum is collected in its correspondence with the Arts Council, held by the Theatre and Performance Collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. See the records of the Arts Council of Great Britain, ACGB/34/10.

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13. Joan-Ann Maynard took over the position of Artistic Director of Black Theatre Co-operative from Malcolm Frederick. She would remain in post until 1995, after which Felix Cross took on the role. Maynard had previously directed Jackie Kay’s Chiaroscuro for Theatre of Black Women in 1986. 14. Yvonne Brewster edited three volumes of Black Plays, published by Methuen: see Brewster, ed. (1987, 1989, 1995). Osborne’s first anthology was followed by Lynette Goddard’s 2011 anthology with Methuen. 15. 1994 was the year in which the Arts Council of Great Britain underwent devolution into its constituent nations, resulting in Arts Council England. 16. For a full discussion of the role of the Arts Council in shaping black and Asian theatre in Britain, see Graham Saunders (2015), pp. 78–101. 17. See www.nitrobeat.co.uk for information on the company’s recent activities. 18. Margaret Busby wrote the text for Adzido’s Sankofa (1999) and Yaa Asantewaa—Warrior Queen (2001) (Pearce 2017, p. 161). 19. Like the movement of performers in Zindika’s Paper and Stone, the character of Medusa in Zindika’s second play, Leonora’s Dance, moves with what one reviewer calls ‘elemental abandon’ (Jancovich 1993). Medusa’s free movement contrasts with the European form of ballet, with which the play’s  titular character is obsessed. In this  technical mode, in Kwesi Owusu’s words, dancers must ‘fight bodily weight in a tip-toe poise away from earth’ (Owusu 1986, p. 66). 20. An equivalent might be found in Lynel Gardner’s Black Son, No Father (1994), in which the playwright recalls his father’s criminal lifestyle and the demise of their relationship. 21. The title of Zindika’s last play invites a comparison with French feminist Hélène Cixous’ 1977 manifesto on theatre, ‘Aller à la Mer’, originally printed in French daily Le Monde (Cixous (1995 [1977])). Cixous’ essay is titled with a homophone that speaks the Francophone link between the sea (la Mer) and the mother (la Mère). Readers may perceive here an echo of Paper and Stone, where the actor playing the mother, Martha, doubled as the symbolic character Sea. Several scholars have made use of French feminism to read black British women’s theatre: Gabriele Griffin (1993, 2003), Laura Griggs (2005), Molly Thompson (2005), Jozefina Komporaly (2006) and Deirdre Osborne (2010). The playwright Winsome Pinnock excerpts Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex as an epigraph to her play Leave Taking (1989, p. 140). 22. The mother figure is also absent from the stage in other black British plays: Lemn Sissay’s Something Dark (Contact Theatre, Manchester, 2004) documents the playwright’s personal search for his birth mother, while in Bola

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Agbaje’s Gone Too Far! (Royal Court, 2007) the mother speaks from offstage, sidelined by her two teenage sons. See also Chap. 6 on SuAndi’s The Story of M for a play that plays with the mother’s absent presence. 23. A similar technique features in Brown Girl in the Ring by Valerie Mason-­ John (1999),  produced at the Lyric theatre, Hammersmith, in  1998, where the narration slips between the adult speaker and her eight year old self. 24. In Trish Cooke’s Running Dream, too, the sea images amniotic fluid (Griffin, 2003, p. 70). The connection also appears in Munirah’s choreopoetic performance work thinkofariver (produced in 1987). The lyrics to the title song, written by the late Sherma Springer, include the line: ‘Life is a river / Moving water flowing through’ (1987, p. 3), and the programme comments that though individuals may be represented by single drops of water, the collective effect is of a rushing river.

References Abram, Nicola (2011). Interview with Zindika Kamauesi, 2 October, Telephone. Anon. (1985a). ‘Black Women’s Groups and Organisations’. GEN: An Anti-Sexist Educational Magazine. 6, 70–71. Anon. (1985b). ‘Preface’. Wasafiri. 3 (Autumn), 2. Anon. (1993). Report on Write Sister! seminar. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Arts Council of Great Britain, Talawa Theatre Company file, ACGB/34/157. Anon. (1994). Appraisal report: Black Theatre Co-operative. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Arts Council of Great Britain, Black Theatre Co-operative company file, ACGB/34/9. Bartley, Karl (1990). Publicity photograph: Paper and Stone. Goldsmiths University of London. Future Histories—Black Performance and Carnival Archive, Records of Nitro Theatre Company, NTC/P/T/1/21/4. Bishop, Marla (1990). ‘Behind the Myth’. Everywoman. April, 16. Black Mime Theatre Women’s Troop (1990). Mothers. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Commercial video collection, 054036A. VHS production recording. Black Mime Theatre Women’s Troop (1991). Drowning. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Commercial video collection, 054033A. VHS production recording. Black Theatre Co-operative (1990). Programme: Paper and Stone. Goldsmiths University of London. Future Histories—Black Performance and Carnival Archive, Records of Nitro Theatre Company, NTC/P/T/1/21/2/002. Black Theatre Co-operative (1993). Application for franchise funding. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Arts Council of Great Britain, Black Theatre Co-operative company file, ACGB/34/9.

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Black Theatre Forum (1995). ‘Future Histories’ Conference (29–30 November). Goldsmiths University of London. Future Histories—Black Performance and Carnival Archive, Records of Black Theatre Forum, BTF/P/E/4002. Leaflets; list of delegates; evaluation reports. Brewster, Yvonne, ed. (1987). Black Plays: 1. London: Methuen. Brewster, Yvonne, ed. (1989). Black Plays: 2. London: Methuen. Brewster, Yvonne, ed. (1995). Black Plays: 3. London: Methuen. Brown, Stuart, Isobel Hawson, et  al. (2002). Eclipse: Developing Strategies to Combat Racism in Theatre. London: Arts Council England. Cixous, Hélène (1995 [1977]). ‘Aller à la Mer’, in Richard Drain (ed.) Twentieth-­ Century Theatre: A Sourcebook. London; New York: Routledge, 133–135. Croft, Susan (1993). ‘Black Women Playwrights in Britain’, in Trevor R. Griffiths and Margaret Llewellyn-Jones (eds.) British and Irish Women Dramatists Since 1958: A Critical Handbook. Buckingham: Open University Press, 84–98. Evaristo, Bernardine (1982). Tiger Teeth Clenched Not to Bite. Evaristo personal collection, London. Typescript. Evaristo, Bernardine and Patricia Hilaire (1983). Silhouette. Evaristo personal collection, London. Typescript. Evaristo, Bernardine and Patricia Hilaire (1984). Pyeyucca. Evaristo personal collection, London. Typescript. Feay, Suzi (1990a). ‘Review of Paper and Stone.’ 28 February Reprinted in Theatre Record, 10 (4), 263. Feay, Suzi (1990b). Review of Paper and Stone, Time Out. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Temba Theatre Company, Press cuttings about Paper and Stone by Zindika (Black Theatre Co-operative), THM/77/2/78. Newspaper clipping. Gardner, Lynel (1994). Black Son, No Father. University of Bristol. Records of National Review of Live Art, A002961. Production recording. Goddard, Lynette (2007). Staging Black Feminisms: Identity, Politics, Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Goddard, Lynette (2008). ‘Middle-class Aspirations and Black Women’s Mental (Ill) Health in Zindika’s Leonora’s Dance and Bonnie Greer’s Munda Negra and Dancing on Blackwater’, in Rebecca D’Monté and Graham Saunders (eds.) Cool Britannia?: British Political Drama in the 1990s. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 96–113. Goddard, Lynette, ed. (2011). The Methuen Drama Book of Plays by Black British Writers. London: Methuen. Griffin, Gabriele (1993). ‘‘Writing the Body’: Reading Joan Riley, Grace Nichols and Ntozake Shange’, in Gina Wisker (ed.) Black Women’s Writing. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 19–42. Griffin, Gabriele (2003). Contemporary Black and Asian Women Playwrights in Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Griggs, Laura (2005). ‘Medusa? Medusa Black! Revisionist Mythology in the Poetry of Dorothea Smartt’, in Kadija Sesay (ed.) Write Black, Write British: From Post-colonial to Black British Literature. London: Hansib, 179–192. Hall, Martina (1990a). ‘Review of Paper and Stone.’ 1 March Reprinted in Theatre Record, 10 (4), 263. Hall, Martina (1990b). Review of Paper and Stone, City Limits. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Temba Theatre Company, Press cuttings about Paper and Stone by Zindika (Black Theatre Co-operative), THM/77/2/78. Newspaper clipping. Hemming, Sarah (1990). ‘Boys, booze and the big city’, review of Paper and Stone, The Independent. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Temba Theatre Company, Press cuttings about Paper and Stone by Zindika (Black Theatre Co-operative), THM/77/2/78. Newspaper clipping. Jancovich, Ben (1993). ‘Review of Leonora’s Dance.’ 18 February. Reprinted in Theatre Record, 13 (3), 133. Jones, Matthew (1997). ‘Funding a ‘Company of Identity’’. New Theatre Quarterly. 13 (52), 370. Kamauesi, Zindika (2010). Valiant Women: Profiles of African Women in Struggle 1500s–1970s. London: BIS Publications. Kamauesi, Zindika (2012). Ready, Steady, Gold: Great Olympians. London: BIS Publications. Kamauesi, Zindika (2018). Black all Over. London: Risebooks. Kamauesi, Zindika and Natalie Smith, eds. (2002). When Will I See You Again? London: Pen Press Publishers. Kay, Jackie (1987). ‘Chiaroscuro’, in Jill Davis (ed.) Lesbian Plays. London: Methuen, 58–83. Komporaly, Jozefina (2006). Staging Motherhood: British Women Playwrights, 1956 to the Present. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Martin, Mick (1990). ‘Review of Paper and Stone.’ 12 May. Reprinted in Theatre Record, 10 (10), 632. Mason-John, Valerie (1999). Brown Girl in the Ring: Plays, Prose and Poems. London: Get A Grip. Matura, Mustapha (1980). Nice; Rum an’ Coca Cola; Welcome Home Jacko: Three Plays. London: Methuen. Maynard, Joan-Ann (1993). Letter to Ian Brown, Drama Director, ACGB. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Arts Council of Great Britain, Black Theatre Co-operative company file, ACGB/34/9. Maynard, Joan-Ann (1995). Letter to Terry Hawkins, Drama Officer, ACGB.  Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Arts Council of Great Britain, Black Theatre Co-operative company file, ACGB/34/9. Maynard, Joan-Ann (1996). ‘Trends in Black Writing for Theatre’, in Ruth Tompsett (ed.) Black Theatre in Britain. Amsterdam: Harwood, 53–56.

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Miller, Carl (1990). Preview of Paper and Stone, City Limits. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Temba Theatre Company, Press cuttings about Paper and Stone by Zindika (Black Theatre Co-operative), THM/77/2/78. Newspaper clipping. Munirah (1987). thinkofariver. Simba personal collection, St. Thomas, Jamaica. Nightingale, Benedict (1993). ‘Review of Leonora’s Dance.’ 17 February. Reprinted in Theatre Record, 13 (3), 133. Nka Iban (1993). Words of Nka Iban (Women Organizing Towards a Common Aim). London: Nka Iban Writers Group. Nka Iban (1997). Ripples: An Anthology of Poetry and Short Stories. London: Nka Iban Writers Group. Onwurah, Ngozi (1992). Flight of the Swan. Channel Four. 12 mins. Osborne, Deirdre, ed. (2008). Hidden Gems, vol 1. London: Oberon. Osborne, Deirdre (2010). ‘debbie tucker green and Doña Daley: Two Neo-­ millennial Black British Women Playwrights’. Antares. 4, 25–55. Osborne, Deirdre, ed. (2012). Hidden Gems, vol 2. London: Oberon. Owusu, Kwesi (1986). The Struggle for Black Arts in Britain: What Can We Consider Better Than Freedom. London: Comedia. Paton, Maureen (1990). Review of Paper and Stone, Stage and Television Today. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Temba Theatre Company, Press cuttings about Paper and Stone by Zindika (Black Theatre Co-operative), THM/77/2/78. Newspaper clipping. Pearce, Michael (2017). Black British Drama: A Transnational Story. London: Routledge. Pinnock, Winsome (1989). ‘Leave Taking’, in Kate Harwood (ed.) First Run: New Plays by New Writers. London: Nick Hern Books, 139–189. Ponnuswami, Meenakshi (2000). ‘Small Island People: Black British Women Playwrights’, in Elaine Aston and Janelle G.  Reinelt (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 217–234. Prescod, Marsha (2000 [1984]). ‘May the Force Be With You’, in James Procter (ed.) Writing Black Britain, 1948–1998: An Interdisciplinary Anthology. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 100–101. Robertson, Nicola (1990). ‘Review of Paper and Stone.’ 23 May.. Reprinted in Theatre Record, 10 (4), 632. Ross, Leone (1993). Review of Leonora’s Dance, The Journal. Zindika personal collection, Dartford. Newspaper clipping. Saunders, Graham (2015). British Theatre Companies 1980–1994. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. Spillers, Hortense J. (1987). ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book’. Diacritics. 17 (2), 65–81. Sudbury, Julia (1998). Other Kinds of Dreams: Black Women’s Organisations and the Politics of Transformation. London: Routledge.

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Thompson, Molly (2005). ‘Patience Agbabi: An Interview’, in Kadija Sesay (ed.) Write Black, Write British: From Post-colonial to Black British Literature. London: Hansib, 145–164. Tomlin, Liz (2015). British Theatre Companies 1995–2014. London: Bloomsbury. tucker green, debbie (2005). trade & generations. London: Nick Hern Books. tucker green, debbie (2008). random. London: Nick Hern Books. tucker green, debbie [Debbie Green] (1997). She Three. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Talawa Theatre Company, TTC/5/1/119. Typescript. tucker green, debbie [Debbie Green] (2000). Two Women. British Library, London. MPS 9391. Typescript. Wright, Michael (1990). Review of Paper and Stone, The Times. Zindika personal collection, Dartford. Newspaper clipping. Zindika (1989a). Paper and Stone. University of Bristol. Women’s Theatre Collection, WTC/PS/000465/1. Typescript. Zindika (1989b). Paper and Stone. Goldsmiths University of London. Future Histories—Black Performance and Carnival Archive, Records of Nitro Theatre Company, NTC/P/T/1/21/3/001. Typescript. Zindika (1990a). Paper and Stone. British Library, London. MPS 4479. Typescript. Zindika (1990b). Paper and Stone. Goldsmiths University of London. Future Histories—Black Performance and Carnival Archive, Records of Nitro Theatre Company, NTC/P/T/1/21/5/001. VHS production recording. Zindika (1992). A Daughter’s Grace. London: Karnak House. Zindika (1993a). Leonora’s Dance. British Library, London. MPS 5674. Typescript. Zindika (1993b). ‘Leonora’s Dance’, in Kadija George (ed.) Six Plays by Black and Asian Women Writers. London: Aurora Metro Press, 76–110. Zindika (1994). ‘The River Speaks’, Akwaaba. Zindika personal collection, Dartford. Programme. Zindika (1996). The Day Mother Took Us to the Seaside. Goldsmiths University of London. Future Histories—Black Performance and Carnival Archive, Records of Nitro Theatre Company, NTC/P/T/2/144. Typescript.

SuAndi

The early years of black British women’s theatre were characterised by collaboration: group-devised productions, the formation of specialist theatre companies and arts collectives, and various writing workshops and peer networks. Theatre of Black Women, Munirah Theatre Company, Black Mime Theatre Women’s Troop, and Black Theatre Co-operative—the company that developed and produced plays by Zindika—staged many versions of black women’s lives in Britain, making use of movement, mime, and multi-role playing to question commonplace notions of black femininity and instead  show identity as produced through interactions. What can solo performance offer to this anti-essentialist project? How can a single performer defy what Kobena Mercer has so usefully described as the ‘burden of representation’  (Mercer 1990)? An answer is offered by SuAndi’s internationally acclaimed production The Story of M (1994)— which, exceptionally, is still being staged more than two decades after its creation. The following discussion draws on (and, occasionally, corrects) the various existing accounts of SuAndi’s activities, informed by a personal interview in 2011 and continued correspondence since.1 Unlike the plays featured previously in this book, The Story of M has been published— repeatedly, in fact. But it warrants inclusion alongside those other forgotten works since archived recordings show the play in production to be far more complex than what has been—and what can be—preserved on the page.

© The Author(s) 2020 N. Abram, Black British Women’s Theatre, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51459-4_6

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History, Activities, Archives ‘SuAndi’ is the self-styled title of Susan Maria Andi; the name conjoins her personal and paternal names, and registers the convergence of different histories and ethnicities in her family. Born in Hulme, Manchester, in 1951, SuAndi is the daughter of a white woman from Liverpool with Irish Catholic roots and a black seaman from Nigeria. She therefore shares with Bernardine Evaristo (Theatre of Black Women) and Denise Wong (Black Mime Theatre) a ‘second-generation’ perspective: she inherits the impact of parental migration, yet is herself a citizen of a singular nation. In her own words, ‘Africa is the root base of my soul, England is my home’ (SuAndi 2011, p.  221). SuAndi’s Nigerian heritage counters the dominance of Caribbean references in much black British theatre of the 1980s and 1990s (Pearce 2017, p. 59). Yet she has also worked in partnership with others from across the African diaspora, as well as other people of colour: accordingly, she has expressed her preference that the term ‘Black’ should be capitalised in this chapter where it relates to her work, since she uses it to indicate a political collective. SuAndi has also named herself as ‘a very northern, mixed-race woman’ (Fuchs 2006). She continues to live in Manchester, countering the London bias of much black British theatre— though London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) has been a vital champion of her work. SuAndi’s regional location has visibly inflected her creative practices through the influences and opportunities available to her. When she first began to write, the lack of specialist black bookshops outside London and the limited touring schedules of black theatre productions meant she had little access to home-grown voices of dissent (Ramey 2009, p.  296) or to the emerging African American canon. This has changed significantly over the course of her career: she has since worked with a number of practitioners in the United States, and in April 2009 she completed a residency in the Department of Undergraduate Drama at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. But SuAndi first emerged as an artist within a particular local community: it was poetry in performance, rather than in publication, that informed and inspired her early work. SuAndi entered the performance industry circuitously. After a period of modelling and working as a restaurateur she trained in dance at Russell Leite Theatre School in Manchester, reaching teacher level, before being employed as a residential social worker in a children’s home. When her mother Margaret Josephine Andi (née Wilkey) died in 1980, SuAndi turned to writing in an attempt to record her memoirs. This was prompted

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by conversations with her manager at Stockport County Council, Keiran O’Malley—an Irishman whose propensity for storytelling matched her mother’s. SuAndi’s friends enthusiastically shared this early work with a reading circle, and encouraged her to submit the manuscript for publication, but it was rejected: SuAndi remembers the publisher commenting that the text did not adequately address the subject of racism (Abram 2011). SuAndi then put the project aside, though she continued to develop her passion and talent for stories through her work with children. In the mid-1980s SuAndi became involved with a Black writers’ group in Manchester, named Identity. Previously known as The People’s Writing Group, Identity was part of the writing development organisation Commonword, and specifically affiliated with its subgroup Cultureword, which had been formed by the poet Lemn Sissay in 1986 to focus on Black writers. SuAndi was invited to organise a fashion show for one of Identity’s events, and in time she began to perform her own poetry. These recitals were characterised by a certain fluidity of identity: unremarked transitions  between poems, conflating various poetic personas with her own personal voice.2 SuAndi’s first public appearance was to co-host an event at the Old Trafford Community Centre with Lemn Sissay. She later appeared alongside comedians Jo Brand and Steve Coogan, and remembers attending events featuring poets John Agard, Grace Nichols, and Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze (SuAndi 2011, p. 219). In 1986 Black Arts Alliance (BAA) was formed by a group of artists frustrated at the failure of national community arts organisation The Shelton Trust to acknowledge black arts practitioners and practices. SuAndi took on the role of administrator, and later became BAA’s freelance Cultural Director. BAA launched with a mixed-media show called Revelations of Black (Fig. 1). This four-hour production took place at the Royal Exchange theatre during the Manchester Festival, and drew over 400 spectators (Fuchs 2006, p. 206). SuAndi recalls its eclectic aesthetic (Fowler 2013a, p. 98): the production involved nineteen collectives and individuals, practising a range of art forms including jazz and sitar music, African drumming,  Indian classical dance, and poetry in Urdu, English and patois. The performers included Lemn Sissay, John Lyons, and the Jamaica-born performance poet Valerie Bloom—who was to prove a great encouragement during SuAndi’s creative and professional development. SuAndi contributed an untitled performance based on a single character: an old woman, whose changes of costume mark her travels in time and across continents. The piece is described in the programme as ‘The

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Fig. 1  Black Arts Alliance, Revelations of Black (1987). Making Histories Visible—Black Archive and Collection, Preston. Flyer

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experience of one Blackwoman, yet all women’ (Black Arts Alliance 1987, n.p.). This was SuAndi’s first venture away from reciting poetry towards live art, although she did not name it in those terms at the time. A second BAA production, Revelations of Black II, followed at the same venue on Sunday 25 September 1988, with Benjamin Zephaniah as the headline performer (Fowler 2013a, p. 98). In 1987 a women’s collective broke away from Identity writers’ group, calling itself BlackScribe (Fowler 2013b, p.  216). This proved to be a powerful crucible in forming SuAndi’s craft and intersectional consciousness: she credits the collective as of ‘fundamental’ influence (SuAndi 2011, p. 221). BlackScribe included Elaine Okoro, who had published a poetry collection titled Thoughts Feelings with Commonword in 1981; Victoria McKenzie, who had contributed to a 1985 publication on Caribbean migrants’ experiences called Just Lately I Realise; Pauline Omoboye, whose poetry collection Purple Mother was published in 2004 by Manchester’s Crocus Press; and Tina Tamsho, whose work features in Peepal Tree’s 2010 anthology of contemporary black British poetry, Red. McKenzie, Tamsho (as ‘Tina J’), and SuAndi had all performed in the original Revelations of Black event. The women of BlackScribe worked together for three years, before the group broke down under the pressures of uneven workload and diverging  individual career paths. Evidently SuAndi benefitted practically from the platform and peer support provided by arts communities organised around racialised experiences, even though her later work often seeks to interrogate racial categories. It has been written that SuAndi also joined another company of Black women poets, called The Blackout Point (Fuchs 2006, p. 205); however, SuAndi dismissed this in our email communications. This is a salient lesson in historiography, as remembered accounts are easily distorted. Between 1987 and 1988 SuAndi served at Commonword as the development worker for Black women writers. In November 1988 she attended a residential writing retreat at Lumb Bank in West Yorkshire—a site then leased by the Arvon Foundation from Ted and Carol Hughes, and purchased the following year with funding from the Arts Council.3 Carol Hughes was at the time Chair of Arvon, having been appointed in 1986; she served in this role until 1990. SuAndi attended the residential workshop alongside Merle Collins—the Grenadian poet, short story writer, and member of performance troupe African Dawn—who then supported SuAndi to prepare and edit the manuscript for what would become her first collection of poetry.4 Style in Performance was published in June 1990

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by Purple Heather Press of Leeds, printed by Manchester’s Pankhurst Press. An edited second edition of the collection  was published in December 1991.5 Collins wrote a glowing introduction for the publication, commending ‘SuAndi’s voice [as] that of an entire generation of Black people born in Britain’ (Collins 1991). SuAndi’s story proves how such personal connections are vital for generating opportunities. SuAndi’s increasingly public profile as a practitioner and advocate of live arts then brought her into contact with Linda Newton, the Literature Touring Officer at North West Arts, and Lois Keidan, who was at the time National Officer for Performing Art at the Arts Council of Great Britain (ACGB). It was Keidan who encouraged SuAndi to pursue her creative work professionally (Fuchs 2006, p. 208). She supported SuAndi through a residency at Wolverhampton Polytechnic, and then—in her post as Director of Live Arts (1992–1997) at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA)— she awarded SuAndi her first commission. The result was SuAndi’s first full-length solo show: This Is All I’ve Got to Say (1993).6 This Is All I’ve Got to Say premiered on 8 October 1993 as part of the ICA’s ‘Respect’ season, fitting neatly within the venue’s programme of black arts and benefitting from its cultivation of black audiences.7 A VHS recording of the production dated 13 October 1993 is preserved and made accessible to the public through the Study Room at the Live Art Development Agency (LADA) in London. This Is All I’ve Got to Say evolved from poetry that SuAndi had written in response to Carrie Mae Weems’ photography exhibition …And 22 Million Very Tired and Very Angry People, which showed at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New  York, in 1991 (SuAndi 2011, p.  223). SuAndi’s production made use of projected images—echoing Weems’ photography—as well as recited poetry, recorded voiceovers, and music, continuing in a solo mode  the mixed-media format of BAA’s collaborative endeavours. The ICA auditorium was configured as a classroom, and the stage dressed accordingly, making explicit the play’s didactic agenda: to educate its audience about the historical oppression of Black people. SuAndi reports further performances of the production at the Greenroom  in Manchester and at the Black Theatre Festival at Birmingham Repertory Theatre. Sadly no reviews have been collected by any relevant archives, and none feature in the compendium Theatre Record: as SuAndi herself observed, the press rarely review live art or performance poetry, and the perception that b/Black arts are only of niche interest makes for a double disadvantage. However, fragments of the text of This Is All I’ve Got to Say have been published, appearing as discrete poems in SuAndi’s collections Nearly Forty (1992)

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and There Will Be No Tears (1995c), albeit abstracted from their performance context. The section ‘Playing for Life’ was later reproduced in full in Lynette Goddard’s monograph Staging Black Feminisms: Identity, Politics, Performance (2007, pp. 157–158), showing how scholarship can contribute to a work’s preservation as well as its interpretation. Some material from the production was also repurposed a decade later in SuAndi’s libretto for The Calling (Bridgewater Hall, 2005). This Is All I’ve Got to Say ended by paying tribute to white women who entered into relationships and/or had children with black men and endured racist abuse as a result. This subject was drawn from SuAndi’s own familial story. Lois Keidan encouraged SuAndi to develop this section, affirming the worth of a writer’s own experiences. Sara Ahmed confirms the importance of biography and autobiography for black feminism in particular, commenting that life writing ‘renders explicit the subject’s immersion within the social and the political’ (Ahmed 1997, p.  154). Indeed, this final section of This Is All I’ve Got to Say shows racialisation to be a social process, with the white woman’s spousal and filial proximity to blackness deemed by her peers  a racial betrayal. As such, the production directly answered to identity politics at the time, where the strategically inclusive term ‘Black’ was being fragmented into ever-more specific ethnic groups. SuAndi continues to hold to the generative possibilities inherent in the personal perspective: ‘I can only truly speak for myself […] that is the best starting point for the creative flow’ (SuAndi 2011, p. 221). Evidently the self-reflexive experience of this first live arts commission proved galvanising; on the return train journey to Manchester she wrote the monologue that would form The Story of M. Keidan has said that commissioning this next piece remains one of her ‘proudest moments’ (Keidan 2017, p. 56). The Story of M premiered at the ICA on 9 September 1994, alongside the work of fellow black British artists Susan Lewis and Dorothea Smartt, as part of the ‘More Respect’ season curated by Catherine Ugwu (ICA Live Arts Deputy Director, 1991–1997). A VHS recording from this date is preserved in the LADA archives. The production tells the story of SuAndi’s mother, building on the draft sparked by This Is All I’ve Got to Say as well as revisiting the memoirs that SuAndi had written years previously. This material was compressed to fit the 55-minute slot that was conventional for performance at the time, and adapted into a monologue format inspired by Alan Bennett’s BBC television series Talking Heads. SuAndi recalls watching the first episode of Bennett’s series, entitled ‘A Woman of No Importance’ (1982), in which Patricia Routledge played a woman in hospital. Noticing that Routledge bore a startling, almost

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sisterly resemblance to her mother, she conceived of an alternative version of the piece that would tell a different story. The Story of M also places its protagonist, Margaret, in hospital, where she is dying of cancer. This terminal diagnosis occasions her retrospective narration: ‘it’s a long drawn out death. And you’d be amazed how those memories come flooding back’ (SuAndi 2002c, p. 2). SuAndi herself played the central role. The Story of M enjoyed much acclaim, and has since been staged internationally. The Theatre Collection at the University of Bristol collates a few review articles from regional publications (Manchester Evening News) and international contexts (Victoria Times and Victoria News, Australia), and SuAndi herself has a record of productions that took place across the United States, in Mexico, and in Ireland.8 It was not until 2002 that The Story of M was put into print, though, as part of a collection by artBlackLive—the publishing arm of Black Arts Alliance—entitled Four for More. SuAndi’s written monologue is there  accompanied by the same images that were projected onto a screen during the performance, adapting the mixed-media format for the page. However, the publication does not attempt to reproduce the realities of the performance event itself: it contains no images of the stage, nor of SuAndi in character. In fact, neither does the text exactly match that which was delivered live and is preserved on film: SuAndi’s organic, spontaneous style makes each performance unique. The published text should be considered a related but distinct work, then, rather than a record of the production. In fact, the published text is not stable in itself. Since this first publication The Story of M has been republished twice: it was included by Routledge in a 2010 drama anthology, featuring the same images at SuAndi’s insistence, and issued by Oberon as a single edition in 2017, with minor changes. Happily, thanks to negotiation by Deirdre Osborne, the play is now listed by British exam board Edexcel among its recommended resources for A-Level English Literature coursework, promoting it to the next generation. SuAndi continues to perform The Story of M—most recently at Goldsmiths, University of London (January 2017), Bernie Grant Arts Centre, London (October 2017), and the University of Surrey (January 2018). She still plays the central role herself, and maintains close interest in the use of the text: she allowed and observed a rehearsed reading of an extract at the ‘Black Women Playwrights’ workshop at the National Theatre Archives on 27 October 2012, but withheld permission for an amateur undergraduate production which would have been delivered by a white performer and planned to appropriate the original text to describe a

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different place and time. SuAndi has agreed that Carla Henry—the actress who has appeared in many of the productions in the auxiliary role of the nurse—may perform The Story of M after the author’s death. SuAndi remains best known for The Story of M, but her creative outputs have been many and diverse. Her mixed-media production Storia (1993) was a North West Arts Board/BAA commission, bringing together traditional African and Indian and contemporary British dance, visual artists, and a guitarist. That same year she curated Images of a Native Girl, a photography and Braille exhibition by visually impaired women, at the Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool. She also wrote a series of inscriptions for the Ship Canal Centenary Walkway in Salford Quays, a work she titled Words on Discs (1994). These durable etchings speak of the diasporic past and make concrete the multicultural present of the northern city; Deirdre Osborne has termed their form ‘landmark poetics’ (Osborne 2011b). This was followed by Talking Chapters 1–6, a collaboration with Carla Henry, mounted at Manchester’s Greenroom in May 1996. SuAndi has also collaborated with visual artist Alnoor Mitha and dancer Ngoma (Colin Johnson), resulting in Still Moving Forward, shown at Rochdale Art Gallery. In the millennium year she commissioned a number of male writers and convened a workshop involving over one hundred men, resulting in the ambitious production In My Father’s House, which was staged at Manchester’s Contact Theatre in 2001 (McMillan 2004, p. 83). A follow-­up production written and devised by young black men, In My Father’s House II, was mounted in 2007 at Zion Arts Centre, Manchester. She has published further poetry, both in various anthologies—including Kiss: Asian African Caribbean Chinese Love Poems (1994b), published by Crocus books for Commonword—as well as issuing another collection of her own, I Love the Blackness of My People (2003). SuAndi’s interest in mixed-media work and artistic and public collaboration continues. She wrote a poetic response to multimedia artist Chantal Oakes’ video installation Thoughts That Make Actions In the World (2008), which was displayed in an empty unit at St. John’s Shopping Centre, Preston. Unfortunately plans to broadcast this poem over the tannoy at Preston bus station were never realised, though the piece did feature in the annual Black History Month exhibition by the black artists’ organisation Kitchen Sink Arts Group—of which Oakes is a founding member—at the Nguzo Saba Centre in Preston. SuAndi’s poem is now preserved and made publicly accessible online (SuAndi 2008), showing how technological advances have democratised access to the arts even during the span of SuAndi’s own career.

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SuAndi has also written operatic libretti, following a path previously trodden by Patricia Hilaire of Theatre of Black Women. Her first was for Mary Seacole (Royal Opera House, 2000) on the invitation of Larry Coke, Artistic Director of Gyenyame for Performing Arts. The text was published in the second volume of Deirdre Osborne’s collection of plays by black British writers, Hidden Gems (2012).9 Mina Karavanta has described this piece as ‘translat[ing] autobiography into intercultural narration’ (Karavanta 2012, p.  323). It tells of Seacole’s Scottish and Jamaican heritage, using creolised language, and sensitively shows how women can be united by shared experiences of sexism yet remain divided by racist perceptions. Adopting similar techniques to those used by Theatre of Black Women in Silhouette (1983), Black Mime Theatre in Mothers (1990), and Zindika in Paper and Stone (1989) and The Day Mother Took Us to the Seaside (1996), SuAndi includes in Mary Seacole two sets of side-­ by-­side soliloquys (Act 1 Scene 7; Act 2 Scene 5). These scenes parallel Seacole with Florence Nightingale, visually demonstrating the relational distance separating the two women whilst illuminating the similarities between them. These moments imaginatively explore the lack of communication from Nightingale, which—as Karavanta observes—‘bewilders Seacole in her autobiographical text’ (2012, p. 325). After Mary Seacole, SuAndi was scheduled to write for Streets of London: The Stephen Lawrence Story, and began a script that drew on the structure and themes of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and its musical adaptation West Side Story. However, she later withdrew from the project. The resulting production showed at the West End theatre in 2002. SuAndi’s next venture was The Calling (Bridgewater Hall, 2005), a dance production centred on the personified Mother Africa, in which colonial violence is figured as domestic abuse.10 Much of the text was developed from SuAndi’s early performance piece This Is All I’ve Got to Say. A revised version of the poem that closed The Calling, titled ‘My Presence’, was published in the edited collection Feminist Futures? (SuAndi 2007a, pp. 127–128). SuAndi’s latest publication is Strength of Our Mothers (2019), the result of a 2017–2019 National  Black  Arts  Alliance project supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund. This collection of interviews movingly  documents the lives of twenty-three local white women in interracial relationships with African migrants, from the 1940s to the new millennium.11 Lynette Goddard has commented that live artists like SuAndi enjoyed more aesthetic and ideological freedom than their contemporaries in theatre companies, who were constrained by their funders (Goddard 2007,

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p. 178). However, SuAndi’s story reveals a cost to this kind of independence. The archives of Theatre of Black Women, Black Mime Theatre, and Black Theatre Co-operative (the company who produced two plays by Zindika) are preserved largely through their association with funders, as much of their administrative and creative  history is documented in the Arts Council company files held by the Victoria and Albert Museum as part of its Theatre and Performance collections. Conversely, the archive of SuAndi’s work is small, and scattered. Recordings of her performances are the lucky outcome of her interactions with interested individuals. In 1999 Lois Keidan and Catherine Ugwu—who facilitated the production of SuAndi’s work at the ICA—co-founded the Live Art Development Agency (LADA), through which VHS recordings for SuAndi’s two ICA productions are made available to the public. Additionally, Ugwu edited Let’s Get It On (1995), which contains the first published account of SuAndi’s achievements in performance. Sadly, little remains of SuAndi’s other live art productions. There is no record of In My Father’s House— SuAndi reports that ‘someone forgot to put the video on two nights running’ (Fuchs 2006, p. 216)—while technical faults compromised the film for her untitled piece for Revelations of Black: apparently one camera recorded sound but no image, and the other had a visual feed but no sound. SuAndi does discuss these works in several useful interviews (Ramey 2009; Fuchs 2006; McMillan 1999), but retrospective  description clearly cannot compensate for this archival lack. Described by acclaimed theatre director Yvonne Brewster as a ‘woman of vision and action’ (SuAndi 2002b, p. 4), SuAndi has long been a vocal advocate for Black arts. Throughout the mid-1990s she hosted a series of annual forums and showcases under the title ‘artBlackLive’, for Black Arts Alliance (SuAndi 1995a). After BAA’s Arts Council England funding ceased in 2009, SuAndi led the organisation into its new incarnation as the National Black Arts Alliance (NBAA). In 2012 NBAA received Heritage Lottery Funding for the project Afro Solo UK, which gathered the life stories of men and women who had  travelled from Africa to Greater Manchester between the 1920s and 1950s, producing a rich written collection (2014).12 SuAndi has also worked in creative contexts with prisoners, addicts, the visually impaired, children, and the elderly. From 1995 to 1997 she  was a member of the Board of the National Disability Arts Forum, and she was tasked with preparing the first Arts Council England report on b/Black arts and disability: There Are No Limitations (1996). In 1999, these many and varied services to the arts were recognised with the

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award of an OBE in the Queen’s Honours list. In 2001 SuAndi launched ‘Acts of Achievement’, a celebration of Black History Month in the northeast of England, which continued annually for eight years. She has received the Windrush Inspirational Award (2003) and a NESTA Dreamtime Fellowship (2005), and in 2015 she was given an honorary doctorate by Lancaster University, cementing her affiliation with the institution and commemorating her lifetime’s work in both art and activism. In 2019 she received a further honorary doctorate from Manchester Metropolitan University, recognising her contribution to art and culture, particularly to the Black arts sector and within the North West. NBAA’s activities continue under SuAndi’s vibrant leadership, and include conferences, commissions, fundraising, and training, as well as running a library and resource centre in Manchester dedicated to documenting Black arts in the region.13

The Story of M (1994) The following analysis draws primarily on a combination of the first published (2002) text and the LADA recording of the original ICA production, dated 9 September 1994. The video usefully records the embodied and durational aspects of The Story of M in performance, though it is also a sobering reminder that much is lost in any attempt at preservation: the gap between the live event and its archived record manifests whenever the camera operator fails to anticipate shifts in the location of the action or the lens is slow to focus. Most significantly, perhaps, the unidirectional gaze of the camera ignores the audience, whose demographic and responses are a constitutive part of the play’s meaning. Minor variations in each performance of the play also preclude the possibility of making a definitive recording: SuAndi has now delivered The Story of M countless times, across more than two decades and in different countries, and although the play’s structure remains consistent its conversational style allows for improvisation—sometimes with material specific to a particular context—and demands audience response. Such spontaneous content is irretrievably lost beyond the moment of its performance. Like the work of Black Mime Theatre, which was reportedly revised in response to audience feedback, The Story of M has been shaped by both its spectators and performance spaces. So despite the efforts of publishers and archivists towards preservation, The Story of M ultimately resists being fixed. In recognition of the play’s ongoing and dynamic development, this chapter makes supplementary reference to the revised text of 2017 and the production in January of

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that same year, which updated the play with contemporary content. However, in line with this book’s focus on retrieving forgotten materials, discussion mostly focuses on moments of performed significance, recovering that which is outside the scope of the published text and only made visible by the archived recording. The Story of M is a collage of a life: protagonist Margaret Josephine Andi gives an animated account of growing up in Liverpool, being taken in by a Catholic orphanage after her mother’s death, working in a wartime laundry, and raising her son and daughter—Malcolm and Susan—in Manchester during the 1940s to 1960s. She delivers her stories with candour and a conspiratorial laugh, giving herself freely to the watching audience (SuAndi 1995b, p. 154; see also Osborne 2011b, p. 235). In both subject matter and form, The Story of M might be considered a precursor to Victoria Evaristo’s Ma Joyce’s Tales from the Parlour (Oval House, 2004; Zoo Southside, Edinburgh Fringe, 2010), a comedy about a white Irish woman who married a black Nigerian man. In SuAndi’s ‘monodrama’—a term coined by Deirdre Osborne to refer to plays focused on a single figure (2011a, b, 2013)—M’s speech is characterised by repetitions, elaborations, and deviations. The narrative takes a subjective course, following—as Elaine Aston has noted—the ‘lateral, associative surfacing of memories’ (Aston 2003, p. 144), rather than reproducing the linear chronology of the events. The result is a very personal account. (A similar technique is used in debbie tucker green’s random, where the characters’ circling speech performs a phatic function—to craft connections between individuals—as much as a semantic one.) In the margins of Margaret’s memoir emerges an incidental account of Britain’s multicultural history; she speaks of ‘folk from all over the world doing their bit for the war effort’ (SuAndi 2002c, p. 3), and fondly recalls a diverse Liverpool population—including her Polish ‘fella’ (SuAndi 2002c, p.  11)—who ‘all lived happily side-by-­side’ (SuAndi 2002c, p. 5). The Story of M exemplifies some of the themes common in black British cultural production. It shares its focus on a filial relationship with Come to Mama (1982) by Bernardine Evaristo of Theatre of Black Women, Mothers (1990) by Black Mime Theatre Women’s Troop, and Paper and Stone (1989) and The Day Mother Took Us To The Seaside (1996) by Zindika. Furthering this thematic focus, the 2017 edition of The Story of M appends to the playscript a selection of SuAndi’s previously unpublished poems on the theme of mothers. More specifically, the play’s depiction of maternal cancer is shared with The Body Beautiful (1990), a short film by Ngozi Onwurah—who later became the first black British female director of a

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feature film, with Welcome II the Terrordome (1995). Other black British plays and performances that pay tribute to the artists’ parents include Dorothea Smartt and Sherelle Mitchell’s From You to Me to You (ICA, 1994), which honours Smartt’s father Fred and Mitchell’s mother Linda; Lynel Gardner’s Black Son, No Father (ICA, 1994); and Mem Morrison’s Lilac (Oval House, 1999), which was named for the colour of his mother’s wedding dress. But in The Story of M the performer is uniquely identified with the protagonist: not only does SuAndi write her mother’s life but she also plays her mother’s role, as well as appearing onstage as herself. The result is a work that has been termed ‘auto/bio/graphical’ (Osborne 2011a, p.  231). SuAndi’s creative conflation of her mother with herself both participates in and makes literal a tradition of writings by women of African descent, including Lorna Goodison’s poetry collection I Am Becoming My Mother (1986), Jamaica Kincaid’s prose narrative The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), and Jacqueline Bishop’s oral history collection My Mother Who Is Me (2006). The energy of Margaret’s many tales contrasts with the sombre occasion of their telling: she is hospitalised with a cancer that will prove to be fatal. By positioning spectators inside Margaret’s hospital room and speaking to them as if to a personal visitor, The Story of M creates an intimate and emotionally charged experience. SuAndi recalls how the framing device of the hospital visit determined bookings for the play: she avoided stages she considered too expansive and venues that risked being disruptive. Scenery for the production was minimal, but meaningful. The LADA recording begins with M costumed in a crimson dressing gown and seated off-centre among a few emblematic props, such as a jug of water and a box of tissues—though the gown SuAndi has worn in recent productions is blue, producing different symbolic readings. M is mostly alone on the stage, giving her a compelling authority. Her retrospective account is occasionally interrupted by the activities of a nurse, most often played by Carla Henry—with whom SuAndi collaborated for Talking Chapters— although Tracy Vidal, Hanna Adu-Boateng, and Crystal James have also taken the role, as have Christina Fonthes (Goldsmiths, January 2017) and Heather Marks (Bernie Grant Arts Centre, October 2017) more recently. This supporting figure enters the playing space several times, attending to Margaret and her environment. The hospital context is also conveyed acoustically through the diegetic clattering of a dropped bedpan and the periodic streaming of a recording of hazy voices and footsteps. The props, scenery, soundscape, and identifiable characterisation align The Story of M

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with the mimetic performance tradition; indeed, SuAndi considers this to be her only theatre play (Fuchs 2006, p. 210). But that dramatic realism is also strategically ruptured. In the original production at the ICA, a still image of a hospital scene was projected above an actual bed and privacy screen, playfully producing an excess of the real. Further disrupting the naturalistic mode is the use of visual media: in every production to date a large screen has been elevated above the playing area, onto which is projected a sequence of photographs and documents that illustrate Margaret’s meandering stories (SuAndi 1994d). These include a Salvation Army flag, newspaper clippings, family photographs (Figs. 2 and 3), and legal documents. These images divert the spectators’ gaze away from the performer, setting up a series of contrasts: between technology and the human body, between paper archives and personal memory, between the visual and the aural. It is testament to SuAndi’s skill in performance that Margaret’s spoken descriptions seem more vivid than the images that appear on the screen.

Fig. 2  SuAndi, The Story of M (1994). Live Art Development Agency, London. V0238. Still from VHS production recording

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Fig. 3  Heather Marks, ‘SuAndi, The Story of M’ (2017). Still from digital production recording

These projected images act as ‘authenticating tools’ (Heddon 2007, p.  142), anchoring the play in both personal and public realities. Their ephemeral status demonstrates how history depends on selective processes of preservation and reproduction. Some of the events referred to in the projected newspaper clippings include the murder of Lesley Ann Downey by Myra Hindley and Ian Brady in 1964, the death of singer Sam Cooke that same year, and the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965. These invoke a sense of collective memory and shared mourning. The latest published text of The Story of M also adds reference to Donald Trump (SuAndi 2017, p. 34), though SuAndi has said in correspondence since that this was an editorial suggestion rather than on her own initiative. A document held in the Record of Live Art Practice at the University of Bristol records the playwright’s provision for international audiences who may not be familiar with the cultural and historical referents embedded in the play; this A4 sheet gives a brief account of African migration to Britain and a glossary of the terms used in the production, including ‘Lime Street’, ‘Arthur Askey’, and ‘Weave-On’ (SuAndi 1994a). In the 2017 publication SuAndi offers further information in footnotes: glossing the terms ‘munitions’ and ‘hire purchase’, describing the various places named, and introducing Malcolm X. These updates thoughtfully accommodate a new, school-age readership.

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Alone on the stage, SuAndi uses various physical gestures to imply the presence of others: Margaret waves to indicate her departing husband, and thumbs to the side to invoke her new neighbours in Levenshulme. This technique establishes the central character through her relationships with others, rather than relying solely on the performer’s body. In her speech, too, Margaret identifies herself relationally, as Robert Crawshaw catalogues: the monologue makes reference variously to ‘M’s daughter (“my daughter”, “her”), the daughter’s “boyfriend” (“my daughter’s boyfriend”, “him”, “he”), external agencies: (“The Sally Army”, “they”; “poor Malcolm” [viz. Malcolm X], “him”) and finally the reader/listener/participant (“you”)’ (Crawshaw 2014, p.  117). Though this is a solo performance, through these various references the stage comes to feel fully populated. On another occasion SuAndi uses a protracted silence to imply the chilling absence of Lesley, the murdered playmate of Margaret’s infant daughter. By repeatedly displacing the gaze from SuAndi’s embodied performance to the implied crowd that fills the bare stage, The Story of M shows that identity is always a social process, established and sustained through relationships with others. This extends to racial identity, too: Margaret is racialised through the actions of others, such as the refusal of credit in a department store and the profiling of her family by police—an experience that correlates with the migrant parents’ suspicion of the police in debbie tucker green’s random (tucker green 2008, pp. 25, 30). Margaret is subjected to racism by association with her children, despite  being white  herself—a fact that may not yet be apparent to the audience. We listen and watch as the character is read as ‘other’ to herself by store workers, police, and spectators. The concept of embodiment is further explored through Margaret’s poor health. Her cancer becomes a metaphor for the racist abuse directed towards her children’s bodies. Margaret describes sewing labels specifying the day of the week into her daughter’s school uniform, in order to prove her cleanliness. As she tells this story, stage directions instruct the nurse to hand her a bowl to vomit into (SuAndi 2002c, p. 8). This collocation is no accident: we are to understand that both cancer and racism turn the body against itself. Everyday experiences of racism risk its metaphoric metastasis, its internalisation by the one it addresses. The raw violence of racism is viscerally figured in Margaret’s protracted coughing fits and intermittent loss of consciousness. Her illness foregrounds her corporeality; as Amelia Jones writes, ‘[i]n phenomenological terms, illness concretizes the body, forcing the subject to become hyperaware of her or his body-in-pain’

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(Jones 1998, p. 230). Racism functions in a similar way, making one’s own body a source of distress and alienation. In the 2017 production at Goldsmiths, Christina Fonthes attended directly to the seated SuAndi-as-M, as written in the 2002 text. But in the recorded 1994 production this care-giving action strategically complicates the performance of character. Stage left, the nurse enters the hospital scene and sits on the edge of the bed, waiting attentively, before removing the bowl and exiting the stage. Through these actions the performer implies the location and condition of Margaret’s bed-bound body. However, SuAndi remains seated in a chair stage right. On the nurse’s exit a spotlight returns the audience’s attention to the central performer, and SuAndi speaks again as Margaret: ‘I don’t know about / getting rid of the cancer [but half my stomach and a kidney’s just gone in that bleedin’ bowl]’ (SuAndi 2002c, p. 10, 1994c: my parenthetical intervention adds to the published text the additional speech preserved in the production recording). This statement denies the distance between SuAndi’s embodied position of enunciation and the hospital scene where Margaret’s ailing but absent body was implied. We are to understand that Margaret is not manifested only by the performer’s body; the character is constituted through a series of social interactions. SuAndi builds into the structure of the production several moments in which Margaret’s monologue pauses. These are framed within the narrative as brief lapses in Margaret’s consciousness, caused by her illness and its invasive treatment: her eyes close, her head lowers, and the lights are dimmed. But these moments are also non-naturalistic suspensions of the narrative, and demand audience participation; they are, to counter Robert Crawshaw’s appraisal of The Story of M, ‘literally interactive’ (2014, p. 112). In these few hushed seconds audience members are made viscerally aware of both theatre and life as fragile states. In the LADA recording Margaret addresses the audience directly when she wakes: ‘What was I talking about?’. Silence ensues. Perhaps the audience is unsure who is speaking to them, and in what capacity: is this Margaret, as part of the script? Or SuAndi, in a momentary aside? The performer continues to prompt for a response: ‘Am I that boring?’. Such interactions coach the audience to engage actively with the stories being told, and prevent The Story of M from descending into what Coco Fusco calls an ‘emotional striptease’—a white audience’s passive consumption of intimate personal details from a black performer (2001, p. xiv). Instead of observing naturalistic convention and allowing the audience to remain comfortably

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undisturbed, as silent observers, these moments of direct address make clear that SuAndi-as-M returns the spectators’ gaze. An equivalent might be found in Black Mime Theatre Women’s Troop’s Drowning (1991), where looking into a mimed mirror at the same time allows the performer  a frontal encounter with the audience. After Margaret’s second request for a prompt, the audience grows confident of the invitation to participate: one voice calls out ‘the blouse’, and another supplements this answer with ‘days of the week’. Their responses refer to Margaret’s story about proving her daughter’s cleanliness in the face of racist accusations. But Margaret breezily dismisses these suggestions: in a moment of clarity she remembers mentioning Manchester’s Ancoats estate (‘the maisonette!’) and her monologue continues. Although this interlude passes quickly, the occasion is significant. The responses given by the audience members were correct: before the narrative break Margaret was indeed talking about her daughter’s school uniform. She had welcomed the audience to  laugh along with her, before intervening: ‘You’re laughing, / I’m laughing. / But it’s not funny. It’s not funny to be called dirty and smelly’ (SuAndi 2002a, p. 8).14 SuAndi here creates an educational opportunity, condemning uncritical responses as passively condoning racism. So when Margaret later asks for a prompt from her audience, it is exactly this story that the audience are supposed to remember: the account is thereby made part of their own memory, and they are asked to repeat it, ensuring that the circulation of such testimonies does not cease. For Lynette Goddard, audience interaction is one of the features of The Story of M that make it exemplary of ‘a provocative black feminist practice’ (Goddard 2007, p. 13. See also Goddard 2007, pp. 42, 177). The dialogue between performer and audience hints at the call and response tradition and the community-sustaining function of the African griot, as well as resembling the rote learning and recall techniques used in SuAndi’s earlier piece, This Is All I’ve Got to Say. The audience exchange preserved in the recording of the 1994 production of The Story of M thus validates Deirdre Osborne’s tentative impression from the published text of an ‘almost pedagogical poetics’ (Osborne 2011a, p. 239). Through audience interaction, enhanced by post-show discussions, SuAndi’s audience acquire intimate knowledge of racial violence. These techniques also provide time and space for the audience to consider how their own life stories relate to those being shared onstage. As Lynette Goddard laments, little has changed between the ‘then’ of Margaret’s recollections and the ‘now’ of their narration (Goddard 2007, p.  158,

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cites Ugwu 1995, p.  68). Sadly no audience surveys or demographic records have been kept; the lack of such information on black British theatre is a noted loss to scholarship (Griffin 2003, p.  236; Osborne 2011a, p. 234). But SuAndi’s use of pedagogical devices might imply an expectation that the show would mostly draw white spectators: her didactic praxis serves to initiate its audience into a politically charged community of (Black) experience. The production recording shows how the  closing moments of Margaret’s story again make the audience share in her experience. Her final words indicate a gradual loss of consciousness: ‘It’s getting dark in here. It’s getting very dark in here. Nurse!’. At the same time the stage lights dim, decreasing the sensory stimuli available to the audience. This blackout serves as a transition from the performed play back to the present moment. When the lights rise again, SuAndi stands and removes her gown, shedding the performed character. This act images a rebirth: SuAndi comes forth from her mother, and her body returns to signifying itself. She explicitly ruptures the suspension of disbelief encoded in naturalistic theatre when she refers to the central character and the previous scene as distinct from herself: ‘When my mother died, the world did not stand still’ (SuAndi 2002c, p. 17). A projected image of Margaret’s death certificate serves as a larger than life depiction of her absence. SuAndi reads aloud from the document displayed, pronouncing her mother’s death while performing her own continuing presence. This part of SuAndi’s performance is always raw with the reality of maternal loss, and she considers it ‘important for the audience to know that the tears are not faked’ (Fuchs 2006, p.  211). Her emotion visibly attests to the significance of the relationship; by mourning the loss of another, the self reveals itself to be intimately and constitutively connected. As such, The Story of M is not only the story of ‘M for Margaret’, but a story of many. The production recording also documents how the visual aspects of the closing vignette cleverly suggest a continuing corporeal connection. As SuAndi stands in front of the projected death certificate, clothed in a long black shift dress, her spotlit form casts a shadow against the screen. She thus obscures the fact of her mother’s death by covering its official record. The shadow mediates between SuAndi’s embodied presence onstage and the textual sign of Margaret’s absence. The one was born from the other’s body; both become themselves in relation to the other. So although the narrative of The Story of M ends with Margaret’s death, SuAndi’s emergence from that character role is also a hopeful moment of symbolic parturition: Margaret is shown to live on in her performer-daughter.

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No images are shown of Margaret until this epilogue, allowing audience assumptions about her to circulate while she speaks. First, the audience is encouraged to read the character as black because the performer appears black; then, when SuAndi discloses the biographical and biogenetic link with the character she plays, the audience reads the mother as black because the daughter is black. But The Story of M is structured to surprise: a final flickering photograph reveals to the audience that Margaret was white. With this revelation SuAndi inverts the status of whiteness as normative; she makes the white body visible as white. The audience is asked to reevaluate Margaret’s story as one of prejudice by proximity: she is marked as ‘other’ by association with her ‘mixed-race’ children, not because of her own features. The Story of M thus shows the illogic of absolute racial divides, since a white mother can produce a black daughter and a black performer can effectively play a white character. SuAndi’s play challenges both naturalistic conventions of casting and the cultural certainty of ‘race’. By withholding this revelation until the postscript of the production, SuAndi suggests that only in death is Margaret’s identity determined by her body; only in death is Margaret’s identity no longer responsive to the others around her. By unsettling the relationship between actor and character, signifier and signified, The Story of M proposes that all identity is produced by socially coded performances. The autobiographical form might pretend to the stability of the speaking voice, but—as Avtar Brah observes—it finally reveals this as a fiction: ‘“I” and “me” have been changing all the time’ (Brah 1996, pp. 9–10). SuAndi’s final lines in The Story of M demonstrate this multiplicity, layering statements of racial affiliation, ethnic heritage, and gender with a declaration of her filial status: I know exactly who I am— I am a Black woman A mixed race woman. […] a Nigerian daughter […] the daughter of a Liverpool woman of Irish descent (SuAndi 2017, p. 55)

SuAndi’s ‘I’ is not one here, but many. The Story of M displaces obsession with the black, female (performer’s) body by incarnating its central character through her relationships with a number of constitutive others from the past and present, including the audience. Strikingly, SuAndi shares this

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practice of disrupting the relationship between character and actor, identity and body, with the other theatre companies and playwrights discussed in this book. It is salient to remember that the Manchester-based artist had not then seen or read the work of her contemporaries in London—though she was later to be influenced by a conference paper on debbie tucker green delivered by Lynette Goddard, writing the poem ‘She Telling Secrets’ in response (SuAndi 2007b, p. 47). This common aesthetic is not, then, a knowing appropriation of specific techniques. Rather, the correlation between The Story of M and earlier works by Theatre of Black Women, Munirah Theatre Company, Black Mime Theatre Women’s Troop, and Zindika suggests a spontaneous reaction to a shared experience in Britain; it is at once diagnosis of racism and sexism, and a didactic effort to change the nation.

Notes 1. I first met with SuAndi in Manchester in October 2011; subsequent correspondence by email and in person has further informed and enriched this chapter. 2. This unremarked transition between personas speaks to the 1980s politics of a collective voice, as exemplified in the editorial policy of Speak Out, the magazine of Brixton Black Women’s Group, which did not identify the authors of individual articles or poems. Similarly, several anthologies of black women’s creative writing do not name individual editors but a collective: for example, the publication Black Women Talk Poetry (1987) is attributed to the group Black Womantalk. 3. https://www.arvon.org/centres/lumb-bank/ 4. Merle Collins’ continued engagement with the Arvon Foundation is captured in her poems ‘For the Lumb Bank Group, December 1991’ and ‘The Lumb Bank Children’ published in Out of Bounds: British Black and Asian Poets (2012). 5. Curiously, some scholarly references to the second edition of SuAndi’s Style in Performance credit the publication to ‘Pink Heater Press’ (Osborne 2011a, p. 217, 2011b, p. 246). 6. The same production is sometimes given an alternate title, This Is All I Have To Say (McMillan 2006, p. 139). I adopt the title given on the contemporaneous VHS production recording, held at the Live Art Development Agency in London, and used in print by the ICA’s then Deputy Director, Catherine Ugwu (Ugwu 1995, p.  150; Donnell, ed. 2002, p. 289).

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7. Some of the ICA’s efforts to support black arts included a Black Power season in the 1970s; a mid-1980s exhibition of art by black women entitled ‘The Thin Black Line’ (Ponnuswami 2000, p. 222); and, in the 1990s, the monthly ‘Ripple Effect’ platform, showcasing performances by Patience Agbabi, Adeola Agbebiyi, and Dorothea Smartt, among others. 8. SuAndi reports that after performing The Story of M in Ireland, audience members offered the details of Wilkey families who may be relatives of her mother. She chose not to investigate this. 9. SuAndi regrets that the full cast and production team were not credited in the 2012 publication of the text for Mary Seacole, and has requested that their names be included in any reprints. 10. The figure of a female ‘Africa’ also featured in Marianne Jean Baptiste’s play Ave Afrika (Oval House, 1991), where protagonist Ave Lucas must make contact with her inner self, ‘Afrika’, in order to survive. 11. For details of the project, and the resulting publication, see https://ourmothers.org/. 12. For the output of the National Black Arts Alliance’s Heritage Lottery Funded ‘Afro Solo UK’ project, see https://issuu.com/afrosolouk/docs/ afro_solo_uk_by_suandi 13. The National Black Arts Alliance library is housed at the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Resource Centre, Central Library, St Peter’s Square, Manchester, M2 5PD. 14. The use of laughter also features as a didactic strategy in Jackie Kay’s 2010 memoir, Red Dust Road. In an interview for Wasafiri by Maggie Gee, Kay describes using humour to lower the defences before asking a provocative question (Gee 2010, pp. 21–22).

References Abram, Nicola (2011). Interview with SuAndi, 14 October, Manchester. Ahmed, Sara (1997). ‘“It’s a sun tan, isn’t it?” Auto-biography as an Identificatory Practice’, in Heidi Safia Mirza (ed.) Black British Feminism: A Reader. London: Routledge, 153–167. Anon. (1985). Just Lately I Realise: Stories From West Indian Lives. Manchester: Gatehouse. Aston, Elaine (2003). Feminist Views on the English Stage: Women Playwrights, 1990–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bishop, Jacqueline (2006). My Mother Who Is Me: Life Stories from Jamaican Women in New York. Trenton NJ: Africa World Press. Black Arts Alliance (1987). Revelations of Black. University of Central Lancashire. Making Histories Visible, Black Archive & Collection, Box 3, Item 42.

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Black Mime Theatre Women’s Troop (1990). Mothers. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Commercial video collection, 054036A. VHS production recording. Black Mime Theatre Women’s Troop (1991). Drowning. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Commercial Video Collection, 054033/A. VHS production recording. Brah, Avtar (1996). Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London: Routledge. Choong, Da, Olivette Cole Wilson, et al., eds. (1987). Black Women Talk Poetry. London: Black Womantalk. Collins, Merle (1991). ‘Introduction’, Style in Performance. Manchester: Purple Heather Press and Pankhurst Press, 3–4. Crawshaw, Robert (2014). ‘Translating the In-Between: Performance Poetry and the Relationship between Language, Literature and Society’, in Naomi Segal and Daniela Koleva (eds.) From Literature to Cultural Literacy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 106–121. Dawes, Kwame (2010). Red: An Anthology of Contemporary Black British Poetry. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Donnell, Alison, ed. (2002). Companion to Contemporary Black British Culture. London: Routledge. Evaristo, Bernardine (1982). Come to Mama. Evaristo personal collection, London. Typescript. Evaristo, Bernardine and Patricia Hilaire (1983). Silhouette. Evaristo personal collection, London. Typescript. Fowler, Corinne (2013a). ‘Publishing Manchester’s black and Asian writers’, Postcolonial Manchester: Diaspora Space and the Devolution of Literary Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 79–109. Fowler, Corinne (2013b). ‘“Rebels without applause”: Manchester’s poetry in performance (1960 to the present)’, Postcolonial Manchester: Diaspora Space and the Devolution of Literary Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 207–267. Fuchs, Anne (2006). ‘“I’m a Very Northern, Mixed-race Woman”: An Interview with SuAndi’, in Geoffrey V. Davis and Anne Fuchs (eds.) Staging New Britain: Aspects of Black and South Asian British Theatre Practice. Brussels; New York: Peter Lang, 205–218. Fusco, Coco (2001). The Bodies That Were Not Ours, and Other Writings. London: Routledge; Institute of International Visual Arts. Gale, Maggie B. and John F. Deeney, eds. (2010). Routledge Drama Anthology and Sourcebook: From Modernism to Contemporary Performance. London: Routledge. Gee, Maggie (2010). ‘Stories and Survival: An Interview with Jackie Kay’. Wasafiri. 25 (4), 19–22.

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Goddard, Lynette (2007). Staging Black Feminisms: Identity, Politics, Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Goodison, Lorna (1986). I am Becoming my Mother. London: New Beacon Books. Griffin, Gabriele (2003). Contemporary Black and Asian Women Playwrights in Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heddon, Deirdre (2007). ‘The Politics of the Personal: Autobiography in Performance’, in Elaine Aston and Geraldine Harris (eds.) Feminist Futures?: Theatre, Performance, Theory. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 130–148. Jones, Amelia (1998). Body Art: Performing the Subject. Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press. Karavanta, Mina (2012). ‘SuAndi’s Mary Seacole: A Hybrid Cartography in Libretto’, in Deirdre Osborne (ed.) Hidden Gems. London: Oberon. 2, 323–329. Kay, Jackie, James Procter, et al., eds. (2012). Out of Bounds: British Black and Asian poets. Tarset: Bloodaxe. Keidan, Lois (2017). ‘Endorsement (2016)’, The Story of M. London: Oberon, 56. Kincaid, Jamaica (1996). The Autobiography of My Mother. London: Vintage. McMillan, Michael (2004). ‘“What happened to you today that reminded you that you are a black man?” The process of exploring black masculinities in performance, Great Britain’, in Richard Boon and Jane Plastow (eds.) Theatre and Empowerment: Community Drama on the World Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 60–93. McMillan, Michael (2006). ‘Texts of Cultural Practice: Black Theatre and Performance in the UK’, in Gail Low and Marion Wynne-Davies (eds.) A Black British Canon? Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 129–142. McMillan, Michael (1999). ‘“There’s a poem in everybody but not a poet”: Interview with SuAndi’, in Paul Munden and Stephen Wade (eds.) Reading the Applause: Reflections on Performance Poetry by Various Artists. York: Talking Shop, 41–45. Mercer, Kobena (1990). ‘Black Art and the Burden of Representation’. Third Text: Third World Perspectives on Contemporary Art & Culture. 10 (4), 61–78. Onwurah, Ngozi (1990). The Body Beautiful. BFI Production Board. 23 mins. Osborne, Deirdre (2011a). ‘The Body of Text Meets the Body as Text: Staging (I) dentity in the work of SuAndi and Lemn Sissay’, in Charles I. Armstrong, Seán Crosson and Anne Karhio (eds.) Crisis and Contemporary Poetry. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 230–247. Osborne, Deirdre (2011b). ‘Set in Stone: SuAndi and Lemn Sissay’s Landmark Poetics’, in Arturo Cass and Cordelia Graebner (eds.) Performing Poetry: Body, Place and Rhythm in the Poetry Performance. Amsterdam; Atlanta: Rodopi, 197–217. Osborne, Deirdre, ed. (2012). Hidden Gems, vol 2. London: Oberon.

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Osborne, Deirdre (2013). ‘Skin Deep, a Self-Revealing Act: Monologue, Monodrama, and Mixedness in the Workf of SuAndi and Mojisola Adebayo’. Journal of Contemporary Drama in English. 1 (1), 54–69. Pearce, Michael (2017). Black British Drama: A Transnational Story. London: Routledge. Ponnuswami, Meenakshi (2000). ‘Small Island People: Black British Women Playwrights’, in Elaine Aston and Janelle G.  Reinelt (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 217–234. Ramey, Lauri (2009). ‘SuAndi’, in R. Victoria Arana (ed.) Dictionary of Literary Biography: Gale. 347: Twenty-First-Century ‘Black’ British Writers, 291–298. SuAndi (1991 [1990]). Style in Performance. Manchester: Purple Heather Press and Pankhurst Press. SuAndi (1992). Nearly Forty. Liverpool: Spike Books. SuAndi (1993). This Is All I’ve Got To Say. London. Live Art Development Agency, V0134. VHS production recording. SuAndi (1994a). Information sheet: The Story of M. University of Bristol. Record of Live Art Practice, S7. SuAndi (1994b). Kiss: Asian African Caribbean Chinese Love Poems Manchester: Crocus. SuAndi (1994c). The Story of M. Live Art Development Agency, London. V0238. VHS production recording. SuAndi (1994d). Technical requirements: The Story of M. University of Bristol. Record of Live Art Practice, S7. SuAndi (1995a). artBlackLive Forum (Manchester). University of Bristol. Live Art Archive, ACELAP/AV/000002. VHS production recording. SuAndi (1995b). ‘SuAndi’, in Catherine Ugwu (ed.) Let’s Get It On: The Politics of Black Performance. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 150–155. SuAndi (1995c). There Will Be No Tears. Manchester: Pankhurst Press. SuAndi (1996). There are No Limitations: Creativity within Black Disabled Communities Project. London: Arts Council England. SuAndi, ed. (2002a). 4 for More. Manchester: artBlacklive. SuAndi, ed. (2002b). Acts of Achievement Colloquium 2001. Manchester: artBlacklive. SuAndi (2002c). ‘The Story of M’, in SuAndi (ed.) 4 for More. Manchester: artBlacklive, 1–19. SuAndi (2003). I Love the Blackness of my People. Manchester: Pankhurst Press. SuAndi (2007a). ‘Africa Lives On in We: Histories and Futures of Black Women Artists’, in Elaine Aston and Geraldine Harris (eds.) Feminist Futures?: Theatre, Performance, Theory. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 118–129. SuAndi (2007b). ‘Cultural Memory and Today’s Black British Poets and Live Artists’, in R. Victoria Arana (ed.) ‘Black’ British Aesthetics Today. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 31–49.

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SuAndi (2008). ‘Thoughts That Make Actions In The World: A Response’. https://vimeo.com/269155926 (accessed 16 May 2018). SuAndi (2011). ‘Eartha Kitt Once Told Me’, in Arturo Cass and Cordelia Graebner (eds.) Performing Poetry: Race, Place and Gender in Performance Poetry. Amsterdam; Atlanta: Rodopi, 219–228. SuAndi (2012). ‘Mary Seacole’, in Deirdre Osborne (ed.) Hidden Gems. London: Oberon. 2, 330–379. SuAndi (2014). Afro Solo UK. Manchester: artBlacklive. SuAndi (2017). The Story of M. London: Oberon. SuAndi (2019). The Strength of Our Mothers. Manchester: artBlacklive. tucker green, debbie (2008). Random. London: Nick Hern Books. Ugwu, Catherine (1995). Let’s Get It On: The Politics of Black Performance. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts. Zindika (1989). Paper and Stone. Goldsmiths University of London. Future Histories—Black Performance and Carnival Archive, Records of Nitro Theatre Company, NTC/P/T/1/21/3/001. Typescript. Zindika (1996). The Day Mother Took Us To The Seaside. Goldsmiths University of London. Future Histories—Black Performance and Carnival Archive, Records of Nitro Theatre Company, NTC/P/T/2/144. Typescript.

Conclusion: In the Spirit of Sankofa

‘Sankofa’, a proverb of the Akan people of Ghana, exhorts its hearers to return to the past and retrieve what has been forgotten in order to make sense of the present and move forward into the future. This concept is imaged in the Adinkra symbol of a bird facing backwards whilst holding an egg in her beak (Fig. 1). Both the sentiment and symbol of sankofa have travelled across the diaspora and continue to circulate in contemporary black British culture: it gave name to a 1980s filmmaking collective, titles critical discourse, and has even appeared in postmillennial  mainstream television.1 Heeding its wisdom, this book turns back to previous decades to retrieve some of the rich history of black British women’s theatre. This is not an easy task: too often such works have been sidelined or silenced, with promising playscripts languishing unproduced, while those that did make it to the stage then thought too niche to be reviewed in mainstream media, and overlooked by publishers. To compensate for and correct those absences, this book looks to archival materials of different kinds: unpublished typescripts and production notes, promotional ephemera and performance recordings, administrative correspondence and practitioner interviews. It situates five key theatre companies, playwrights, and performers within their social, cultural, and political contexts—charting their creative histories and observing their changing relationships with funders, venues, audiences, and critics—and analyses their written and performed responses to the intersecting regimes of racism and sexism. In their varied works Theatre of Black Women, Munirah Theatre Company, Black Mime © The Author(s) 2020 N. Abram, Black British Women’s Theatre, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51459-4_7

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Fig. 1  Sankofa bird © Reynolds/Fotolia

Theatre Women’s Troop, Zindika, and SuAndi tell of a present impoverished by injustice but survived through black (women’s) solidarity, and they labour to imagine and to incarnate a fairer, freer, more joyful future. These artists also vividly demonstrate the importance of preserving the past. In a few cases visionary archivists have acquired a company’s or individual’s material record, ensuring its preservation and availability for public consultation; often, though, such material remains in the artists’ own possession: forgotten, uncatalogued, and at risk of loss or damage. By reproducing in facsimile various ephemera and excerpts from manuscripts, Black British Women’s Theatre: Intersectionality, Archives, Aesthetics not only articulates a hidden history but allows its readers their own encounter with the fragile record of this vibrant past.

Looking Back This book began with the pioneering company Theatre of Black Women (1982–1988). The first playscripts by founding member Bernardine Evaristo redistribute identical passages of dialogue to different characters across the variant texts, showing her writing to be a dynamic process in which identities are constantly coming into being. The company’s first full productions deliberately destabilise the relationship between cast and

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character: in Silhouette (1983), the two  performers play multiple roles across centuries and continents, and in Pyeyucca (1984) they incarnate the component parts of a split psyche. By subverting the conventions of contemporary naturalistic theatre, as well as by promoting and producing the work of other black women writers, Theatre of Black Women both had an immediate impact and left a lasting legacy in the British cultural landscape. Munirah Theatre Company (1983–1991) performed their poetry on stages shared with Jayne Cortez, Jackie Kay, and Ntozake Shange, as well as in three full-length productions: On the Inside (1986), thinkofariver (1987), and Our Bodies Are Our Maps (1990). The performers move dextrously between characters and contexts, creating a vivid collage of impressions. The company also ran public workshops, investing in the political consciousness and personal welfare of their local communities. Munirah were directly supported by Theatre of Black Women, and actively connected with a number of other artists—most notably through the Organisation for Black Art Advancement and Leisure/Learning Activities (OBAALA) and its London venue The Black-Art Gallery. As such, this chapter’s celebration of Munirah’s own activities also registers the lively network sustaining black culture in 1980s Britain. The next chapter turns to Black Mime Theatre (1984–1998), focussing on its short period as a dedicated Women’s Troop (1990–1992). The company developed a characteristic style of mime and a distinctive structure for their productions: both Mothers (1990) and Drowning (1991) stage a triptych of case studies, creating a large chorus of parts with just three performers. BMT’s multi-role playing and use of mime to imply further characters presents identity not as a property of the body but as constituted through characters’ interactions with each other and actions in the world. Thanks to the company’s long tours, its training and employment of several key figures (including Lynette Goddard as stage manager and Mojisola Adebayo as researcher and performer), and the deposit of its archive with the Theatre and Performance Collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the work of Black Mime Theatre is already relatively well known. Its inclusion in this book serves to situate the company as part of a longer history of black British women’s theatre; through this juxtaposition, aesthetic strategies common across decades become visible. The 1990s saw the rise of individual playwrights and performance artists. Two unpublished plays by Zindika explore the relationships between mothers and daughters: Paper and Stone (1990) explores how parental migration inflects intergenerational frictions, and the unproduced The Day

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Mother Took Us To The Seaside (1996) depicts the psychological and interpersonal consequences of maternal desertion. Zindika’s filial focus emphasises the relational nature of subjectivity: both in  plot and performance technique, her characters are always mutually constituted. Producing company Black Theatre Co-operative’s careful lighting and choreography silently signify these formative relationships, while multi-role playing layers naturalistic narrative with non-naturalistic commentary, providing a reflexive perspective on the ‘real’. SuAndi’s acclaimed production The Story of M (1994) amplifies the preceding plays’ emphasis on the relational through its solo performer. Although she is alone onstage, SuAndi implies a host of characters of both personal and public significance through gesture and story. The auto/ biographical casting and strategic use of audio-visual technologies further interrogate ideas of identity and the body. Pedagogic techniques build affinity with the audience and generate understanding of and empathy for Black experience, but by withholding information about the ethnicity of the protagonist until an epilogic revelation, The Story of M cautions spectators about the danger of reading identity from the (performing) body. Where once drama students Bernardine Evaristo and Patricia Hilaire found few plays featuring black female characters—and the frustrating reproduction of stereotypes in those that did—Theatre of Black Women, Munirah Theatre Company, Black Mime Theatre Women’s Troop, Zindika, and SuAndi reconfigured the British theatre industry by centring black women on the nation’s stages. Their work directly addresses the material problem of underrepresentation. Yet they also answer to the symbolic overdetermination of the black woman: through cross-casting, cast-­ doubling, figurative gestures, audio-visual technologies, and synchronised choreography, these artists all find ways to displace spectators’ attention from the (black, female) performing body. Their work thus disrupts both the gaze that ignores and the gaze that lingers. These five chapters are ordered chronologically by the practitioners’ first activities, but this should not be taken to imply that techniques common across the decades were directly inherited. Some of the practitioners were known to one another, but limited production runs in small specialist venues and the lack of contemporaneous publication generally forestalled direct influence; in interview most of these artists cite African American writers as inspiration more commonly than British peers.2 The continuity of form that emerges across these chapters is not, then, an intentional borrowing or knowing inheritance; rather, it speaks of a common cultural environment.

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Like other forms of black women’s activism it is alert to the relationship between the personal and the political, understanding and addressing ‘common economic, social and cultural oppressions [and] the ways in which our experiences of the world “out there” are shaped by common objective factors’ (Parmar 2000, p. 298). It is a refusal of essentialist models of identity, which presume to know the black woman as her body, doubly objectified by racism and sexism. It is, therefore, an intersectional aesthetic.

Archival Interventions: The Unpublished Plays of debbie tucker green This recovered history of pioneering companies, lively creative networks, and anti-essentialist aesthetics pivots into the present with another playwright, debbie tucker green. Continuing the material intervention of her predecessors, her plays actively create work for black actors. In random (2008), for example, the dextrous display demanded of the solo performer, specified in the script as a black woman, directly answers to the poor range of roles historically available in Britain—a complaint that echoes from the 1980s into the new millennium (Oyelowo 2016)—while the large cast of truth and reconciliation (Royal Court, 2011) includes roles for twelve black actors, making visible the scale of talent available. As well as ensuring black representation onstage, tucker green’s plays have twice featured in the Royal Court’s ‘Theatre Local’ outreach programme, working to widen access to drama and diversify its audiences. But tucker green departs from the identity politics that insistently gave name to the organisations of the 1980s and 1990s—the likes of Theatre of Black Women, The Black-Art Gallery, Black Mime Theatre, Black Theatre Co-operative, Black Theatre Forum, BlackScribe, and Black Arts Alliance. She has identified herself as having ‘Jamaican blood’ (Sierz 2003), but rather than repeating the claims to a defined black space, tucker green’s success instead owes much to a renewal of interest in new writing—driven in part by successive Artistic Directors of the Royal Court, and facilitated by Paines Plough, a company dedicated to promoting new theatre.3 tucker green’s plays eschew her precursors’ efforts to establish an African diasporic or black British identity, seeking instead to promote lateral solidarity: sometimes transplanting international humanitarian issues into a British context, sometimes showing how human experiences—suffering, injustice, interpersonal struggles—are common across the world. Her unflinching invocation of taboo issues (sexual and domestic abuse, incest)

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and global crises (HIV/AIDS, child militia, torture) has seen her grouped with other British playwrights whose work is explicitly confrontational: Aleks Sierz coined the term ‘in-yer-face theatre’ (Sierz 2001) to name this emerging canon, and Lynette Goddard borrowed the phrase to title a study of tucker green in the monograph Staging Black Feminisms (Goddard 2007, p. 181). Yet tucker green does not stage climactic events, nor even catalogue their causes; instead, she explores their effects, focussing on the psycho-social depths of her complex characters. There is a subtlety to her work that defies both the separatist stance of her antecedents and the shock-factor sensibility of her contemporaries. tucker green’s relationship with the theatre and publishing industries, the press, the academy, and the archive makes a striking counterpoint to the artists populating the previous chapters—yet, as I will argue, it is possible to read her stance as similarly responsive to racialised and sexist histories of representation. Despite her limited engagement with the media, she is far better known than her forebears. Beginning with dirty butterfly (Soho Theatre, 2003) all of her scripts  have been given a concurrent paperback publication by Nick Hern Books, facilitating scholarship, teaching, and onstage reproduction. Testament to its significance, random was even reprinted in 2010 with some amendments. As a result there are now various critical studies of tucker green’s work, from articles and chapters to a dedicated edited collection.4 Her plays have been staged across the nation: stoning mary transferred to the Drum Theatre in Plymouth, for example, after opening at the Royal Court in April 2005, and in 2010 random toured for four weeks to Birmingham, Bristol, Sheffield, and Deptford—though SuAndi laments in interview that tucker green’s work still has not reached Manchester (Abram 2011). Several of tucker green’s plays have since been remounted, both in the UK and overseas. The Young Vic staged dirty butterfly over the new year of 2007–2008 under the direction of Michael Longhurst, for example, nearly five years after its first production. Internationally, her reach includes a production of dirty butterfly in Toronto (Bound 2 Create Theatre, 2012), and born bad has been staged in New York (Soho Rep, 2011). Revivals are unusual in both black and women’s theatre; in fact, as Janelle Reinelt notes, ‘a second production of [any] contemporary play is an infrequent event, even for established male writers’ (Reinelt 2010, p. 554). tucker green’s status is remarkable, then. tucker green made her first move into directing in 2008, with a rehearsed reading of Caryl Churchill’s Three More Sleepless Nights at the Royal Court. Since 2011 she has directed all of her own plays.5 This can

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be understood as a natural extension of her scriptwriting style. As a playwright she has always exercised a strong influence over the staging of her work: her use of ellipses, parentheses, hyphens, and line breaks predetermine directorial decisions about the rhythm and pace of dialogue, while named silences direct attention towards specified yet unspeaking individuals, inscribing a cinematic gaze that anticipates her later forays into screenwriting. tucker green reportedly worked as a stage manager for a decade before beginning to write (Sierz 2003), giving her lengthy experience of overseeing the practicalities of production. Whereas early black British playwrights and performers fought for opportunities and recognition in an industry that was ill-equipped to understand their work, tucker green has been much garlanded: born bad (Hampstead Theatre, 2003) was shortlisted for the Susan Smith Blackburn Award 2003, and won her the 2004 Olivier Award for the Most Promising Newcomer, and hang (Royal Court, 2015) was shortlisted for the Alfred Fagon Audience Award. At the inaugural Black Theatre Awards in 2019, she won the Book and Lyrics Recognition Award for her published body of work to date. tucker green has also written successfully for screen and radio.6 The Hillbilly/Film4 television adaptation of random won a BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) award  in 2012, for Best Single Drama, and as writer and director of the feature film Second Coming (2014)—an eccentric family drama starring Nadine Marshall and Idris Elba—tucker green was nominated for the 2016 BAFTAs in the category of Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer. That same year her radio play Lament (BBC Radio 4, 2016) won the Radio Academy’s Audio and Radio Industry Award (ARIA) for Best Audio Dramatisation. The nature of tucker green’s success directly affects the material record of her work: audio-visual recordings are not routinely made of professional theatre productions, and her television and radio plays were not produced for sale, although the British Library does hold past BBC radio drama for onsite public consultation, and Box of Broadcasts—the on-­ demand service of the British Universities Film and Video Council—makes tucker green’s radio plays and the television adaptation of random available to staff and students at subscribing institutions.7 Papers and publicity materials for tucker green’s stage plays are spread across the archives of the relevant producing company or venue. For instance, the prompt book for Sacha Wares’ 2004 production of trade is held by The Royal Shakespeare Company, while The National Theatre Archive collates comprehensive

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production files for nut (The Shed, 2013), including prompt scripts, promotional posters, and production photographs.8, 9 This dispersal contrasts starkly with the principles and practices of specialist collections like Future Histories—Black Performance and Carnival Archive and the Unfinished Histories archive of alternative theatre. Both literally and figuratively tucker green’s material record situates her within the wider scope of British theatre, and outside of a specifically black British tradition. There is one exception. tucker green’s first known playscript—attributed then to ‘Debbie Green’—was completed in the autumn of 1997. Titled She Three, it follows three black female Londoners from their childhood friendship to maturity, maternity, and, for one, to an untimely death. Although She Three was never produced, this was the play that first brought tucker green to public and industry attention when it was shortlisted for the 1998 Alfred Fagon Award.10 These annual awards were launched in 1997 in memory of the Jamaican boxer, poet, and playwright after whom they are named, to celebrate Anglophone plays by writers with African and Caribbean connections. At the time of the 1998 Alfred Fagon Awards the ceremony was hosted by the Royal Court—confirming the venue’s significance for black British theatre, and beginning what would become a sustained relationship with tucker green.11 Administrative support for the award was at that time provided by Talawa Theatre Company.12 Talawa had been founded in 1986 by Yvonne Brewster, Mona Hammond, Carmen Monroe, and Inigo Espejel in response to the lack of opportunity for black actors and theatre-makers; still operating today, it is now the oldest black theatre company in Britain. In 2007–2008 the Victoria and Albert Museum (VAM) acquired Talawa’s records on a long-term loan, as part of the Heritage Lottery Fund ‘Future Histories’ project and in line with the museum’s strategy to develop its Theatre and Performance Collections by acquiring company archives of national and international significance. Then, in 2015–2016, the Talawa company archive was made a permanent gift. This was one of VAM’s first substantial cataloguing projects, and is still actively receiving deposits. The inclusion of papers relating to the Alfred Fagon Award ensured that tucker green’s first known typescript was preserved. The archived copy is marked as a second draft and dated in pen to October 1997, and is catalogued at VAM with reference TTC/5/1/119. tucker green’s next known script was the twice-titled Stratford/Two Women. This piece was commissioned by Paines Plough theatre company in response to the extension of the Jubilee line on the London Underground, as part of a season named ‘Jubilee: Plays from Underground’—the title,

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‘Stratford’, refers to the station in east London, which was substantially rebuilt as part of the underground extension works.13 The play is formed from parallel monologues: black women Roni and Sweet alternately speak their own life stories, until a climactic event precipitates their convergence. Stratford was given a script-in-hand production on 26 May 2000 at the Bridewell Theatre in London, the last slot of nine in the fourth Paines Plough ‘Wild Lunch’ lunchtime showcase. Actor Clare Perkins—who had previously performed in Winsome Pinnock’s 1996 play Mules at the Royal Court—read the part of Roni, Kim Oliver read Sweet, and the production was directed by Rufus Norris. According to production records, Stratford had the highest audience attendance of the nine lunchtime readings, at fifty-three. The Wild Lunch series gave a platform to participants in the Paines Plough’s Writers’ Group, and the 2000 session took place in collaboration with the BBC New Writing Initiative. The nine plays featured in this season included North Greenwich for the Dome by Mark Ravenhill. A previous Wild Lunch event had showcased Crave by Sarah Kane. Later that same year tucker green’s play—by then decisively re-titled Two Women, shedding reference to its originary context—was given a week’s run as part of Soho Theatre’s lunchtime season ‘Soho Bites’, from 16 to 21 October 2000. The same cast continued from the script-in-hand reading, as did director Rufus Norris. Given its daytime scheduling Two Women played on top of the set for the Soho Theatre’s main production: Ted Hughes’ Alcestis, presented by Northern Broadsides theatre company. VAM acquired the records of Paines Plough theatre company in 2010. The collection includes the text used for the May ‘Wild Lunch’  showcase—filed along with the other scripts for the season, and already bearing the subtitle ‘Two Women’ (tucker green 2000a,  VAM reference THM/372/3/2/37)—as well as a publicity file for the showcase, containing a promotional postcard and photocopied production programme (THM/372/5/3/59); a production file, containing writer biographies  and a set of floppy discs and CDs (THM/372/2/1/40); and a file containing a cutting of a single press preview from the ‘MetroLife’ section of London’s free daily newspaper the Evening Standard (THM/372/5/2/56). Various typescripts for the Soho Theatre ‘Soho Bites’ run are also held at VAM: one dated by hand to September 2000 (tucker green 2000c,  THM/372/3/2/39, folder 1 of 2), and another used in rehearsals (tucker green 2000d,  THM/372/3/2/39 folder 2 of 2). There are some changes to the script across these different versions. A duplicate of the September 2000 typescript is held by the British

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Library (tucker green 2000b, reference MPS 9391), in compliance with the Theatres Act of 1968: section 11 of this legislation obliges the deposit of a copy of every new script that is publicly performed. Supplementary materials for the October run include a production file containing a contract and press release (THM/372/2/1/42), and a publicity file containing a promotional postcard, photocopied programme, and Soho Theatre listings brochure (THM/372/5/3/61). I had the pleasure of studying tucker green’s unpublished plays at VAM’s London reading room, witnessing on paper the developing style and subject matter of a writer whose work I had already seen and loved onstage. Later, with this book taking shape, I sought permission to quote from those early works in print.14 My communications with tucker green’s agent revealed that the playwright had not known these materials to be present in the archive. This is not unusual: though copyright for a work subsists with the author, the producing company owns the physical scripts and other production materials and so is free to deposit them. However, tucker green preferred these scripts not to be publicly available, and requested their removal. Such action was not available: section 6.3 of the National Heritage Act 1983 mandates that ‘[t]he Board [of VAM] may not dispose of an object the property in which is vested in them and which is comprised in their collections’ unless certain conditions pertain, such as duplication, unsuitability, or physical deterioration’. The VAM archivist has instead responded to tucker green’s request by closing the playscripts She Three and Stratford/Two Women from public access for the foreseeable future. In parallel tucker green has also requested and been granted the removal of an entry on Two Women from the National Theatre’s Black Plays Archive, an online record of the first professional production for African, Caribbean, and black British plays in the UK.15 This can be read as indicative of a significant shift in the relationship between black British theatre-makers and the establishment. Early companies like Theatre of Black Women and Munirah Theatre Company performed in festival contexts and at community venues rather than in established theatres, and were not aware of the obligation to deposit scripts of performed plays with the British Library. Neither were they thinking of preservation or posterity at the time; their creative practice was urgently concerned with reforming the present. Members of both companies did wisely keep some papers and audio-visual materials, but these are yet to be deposited for public access. Now, on the other side of the millennium and with calls to ‘decolonise’ resounding around academia and the arts, the heritage institutions that curate the nation’s story of itself are actively seeking to

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diversify their collections, and scholars enjoy funding and publication opportunities that open up new ground.16 It is within this current context of being claimed and championed by the establishment that tucker green has expressed her authority over her work and exercised her right of refusal. tucker green’s decision reminds me of Hazel Carby’s statement articulating black women’s double struggle for representation. In her 1982 essay ‘White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood’, Carby declares: The black women’s critique of history has not only involved us in coming to terms with ‘absences’; we have also been outraged by the ways in which it has made us visible, when it has chosen to see us. (Carby 2000 [1982], p. 178)

By giving interviews and sharing unpublished materials, the earlier playwrights and performers sought to correct their underrepresentation: to insert themselves into theatre history, to secure their visibility, to honour those with whom they worked, to ‘break the silence’. Indeed,  this term was something of a mantra at the time: it titled a 1984 collection of writings by Asian woman published by Centerprise, for example (Mukherjee ed.  1984). tucker green’s position can be understood, by contrast, as a response to the problem  of misrepresentation, the  problematic ‘ways in which [history] has made us visible’. It is, to quote Heidi Safia Mirza, a refusal of the ‘pathological appearances of a collectivity of women assigned as the “other”’ (Mirza 1997, pp. 20–21, emphasis added). tucker green’s decision to withhold her early work from scholarly scrutiny can—like her avoidance of media interviews, and as is imaged in the idiosyncratic rendering of her own name in lower case—therefore be understood as a different act with the same aim: to represent herself on her own terms. This should, I argue, be thought as gain: what was once silenced or sidelined by cultural gate-keepers is now subject to the will of its authors, who may express their authority precisely by choosing not to speak or be read, to make newly absent what was—albeit unknowingly—present.

Future Possibilities The five playwrights and companies covered in this book are exemplary but not exhaustive; there is much more in the archives to be examined for its participation in what I have termed an intersectional aesthetic. The undated (c.1983) Scenes by Trish (then Patricia) Cooke—held among the records of Nitro Theatre Company at the Future Histories—Black

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Performance and Carnival Archive—makes use of music and song in its depiction of the splitting of characters (Cooke n.d.). In Barbara Burford’s play Patterns (Drill Hall, 1984), abstract drama likewise works to interrogate ideas of identity. The poetic Where Do I Go From Here (Drill Hall; Priory Centre; Oval House, 1984), scripted by Deb’bora, was mounted by Akimbo Theatre Productions (Deb’bora and Andy Wilson) with a cast of five. The company ReSisters Theatre—founded by white women Cordelia Ditton and Maggie Ford (Saunders 2015, p.  10)—produced innovative plays by Liselle Kayla and Bonnie Greer in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Deborah Yhip’s production Soul Sisters Melody (Everyman, Liverpool, 1993) featured four black women performers—Victoria Evaristo, Miriam Hussein-Mussa, Lena Stamper, and Joan Carol Williams—each playing multiple roles (Liverpool John Moores University 2008).17 Susan Lewis’ dance-based live art productions Walking Tall (ICA, 1993) and Ladies Falling (ICA 1994) negotiate between the individual and the many with their innovative choreography and use of interview recordings as a compelling soundscape. In Getting it Straight (Birmingham Rep, 1994) by Jon Trevor and Lorna Laidlaw, Laidlaw performs a number of characters differentiated only by wigs (Trevor and Laidlaw 1994). Juliet Ellis’ An Autobiography in Five Chapters (Greenroom, Manchester, 2005–2006) doubles the body through audio-visual loops. And Amantha Edmead incarnates multiple characters in her Backside Monologues (Pegasus Theatre, Oxford, 2011) and Sankofa Stories (Women’s Festival, Oxford, 2012). Similar techniques feature in African and Caribbean drama, too: for example, Trinidad Theatre Workshop and Stage One Theatre of Barbados produced the play Lights 2 at Trinidad’s Little Carib theatre, Port of Spain, in 1986, which reportedly had seven actresses play a single character called ‘The Woman’ (Blood 1986). More recently, some non-naturalistic works have enjoyed the privilege of publication. This facilitates scholarship and extends the plays’ reach beyond their theatre audiences into classrooms and homes. Mojisola Adebayo—who performed with Black Mime Theatre and credits debbie tucker green as an influence (Adebayo 2009, p. 102)—explored the performance of identity using an exaggerated style of mime in Moj of the Antarctic (Lyric Hammersmith, 2006), Muhammad Ali and Me (Oval House, 2008), and I Stand Corrected (Oval House, 2012). Cush Jumbo’s one-woman show Josephine and I (produced at Bush Theatre, London, 2013, and Public Theatre, New York, 2015; published in 2013) memorialises singer Josephine Baker while also dramatising the artist’s own childhood. These recent plays confirm the continuation of techniques used by

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earlier practitioners. Clearly, much analysis remains to be done—and surely there is more relevant material still to be written or performed. Sadly, some potential avenues of interest have been foreclosed due to issues of preservation. A recording of Mourning Song, the final production by Black Mime Theatre, is currently inaccessible at the Victoria and Albert Museum for conservation reasons. And for some theatre companies and arts collectives, the research trail seems to chill after a single mention. For example, the activities of a Black Women’s Theatre Workshop ‘set up to examine the experiences of black women in Britain’ are remembered only by a newspaper clipping held in the records of Temba Theatre Company, promoting their 1985 production Hence Awakening at the Tom Allen Centre in Stratford (Anon. 1985); no further record seems to remain. Many others have apparently been similarly obscured: Imani-Faith, a company founded in 1983 by Jacqueline Rudet; the Bemarro Sisters, who featured in a celebration of African Caribbean women’s creativity at Stoke Newington Town Hall in September 1989; Assati, formed in 1990, a black women’s theatre company based in Liverpool; Siren, who debuted with a production of Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls at Battersea Arts Centre that same year; Wild Iris, a company formed by Polly Irvin and Adjoa Andoh in 1991, whose debut production Ibsen’s A Doll’s House was followed by the eighteenth-century comedy Love at a Loss at Battersea Arts Centre in May 1993; Options, a company formed by Jan Blake and Carol Russell; and Leda Serene, who mounted a dance and docu-drama production based on the poetry of Grace Nichols at Centerprise on 25 April 1991. Across the archives a scattering of press previews and publicity materials hint at the relevance of these groups, yet full investigation is curtailed since there are no playtexts, production recordings, or descriptive accounts available. This book is haunted by their absence. Recent years have, though, seen a lively and increasingly urgent impulse to remember the black British past as it inflects the present: notably, the publication of several works of non-fiction that blend personal memoir with historical account, political analysis, and polemic, such as Reni Eddo-­ Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race (2017), Akala’s Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire (2018), and Afua Hirsch’s Brit(Ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging (2018). Similarly, archival initiatives like Unfinished Histories, Future Histories—Black Performance and Carnival Archive, Making Histories Visible at the University of Central Lancashire, and the online Black Plays Archive all seek to remember a silenced past and make it available today.  Public

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communications activities like the documentary film Margins to Mainstream: The story of Black Theatre in Britain produced by the Octavia Foundation and Nu Century Arts and the Collage Arts project, exhibition, and accompanying e-book They Came Before Us: The History of BAME Women in the UK (2020), further serve to bring those histories to life. Deirdre Osborne’s Hidden Gems volumes of black plays (2008, 2012) are likewise motivated, as well as being similarly titled by the recurrent rhetoric of making visible. This book joins in their endeavour. Black British Women’s Theatre: Intersectionality, Archives, Aesthetics looks back over three decades of black British women’s theatre, exploring archives of various kinds to reveal a shared though not inherited aesthetic. It is my hope that—in the spirit of Sankofa—these acts of retrieval might demonstrate the value of documenting the past. As Hazel Carby affirms by excerpting Gayl Jones’ 1975 novel Corregidora in her instructive essay ‘White Woman Listen!’, it is vital to ‘leave evidence’, to ‘bear witness’ (Carby 2000 [1982] p. 177, cites Jones 1975, pp. 14, 72). The herstories documented in this book—of black British women’s spirit, creativity, and connectedness— illuminate the present, and inform and enrich our shared future.

Notes 1. The term ‘Sankofa’ gave its name to a filmmaking collective inaugurated in 1983, consisting of Isaac Julien, Martina Attille, Maureen Blackwood, Nadine Marsh-Edwards, and Robert Crusz. It also titles a section in R. Victoria Arana’s edited collection ‘Black’ British Aesthetics Today (2007). More recently, the symbol featured in the television series Taboo (BBC1, 2017). 2. See Michael Pearce (2017) on the ways in which black British theatre is infused with influences that originate beyond the boundaries of the nation. 3. Recent Artistic Directors of the Royal Court include Max Stafford-Clark (in post 1979–1993), Stephen Daldry (1993–1998), Ian Rickson (1998–2006), Dominic Cooke (2007–2013), and Vicky Featherstone (2013 to present). Paines Plough was formed in 1974. 4. The relatively large number of scholarly studies of debbie tucker green include Abram (2014), Fragkou (2013), Goddard (2007, 2009), Osborne (2007, 2014), Pearce (2017) and Adiseshiah and Bolton eds. (2020). 5. tucker green directed the productions of truth and reconciliation (Royal Court, 2011), nut (National Theatre, 2013), hang (Royal Court, 2015), a profoundly affectionate, passionate devotion to someone (-noun) (Royal Court, 2017), and ear for eye (Royal Court, 2018), as well as the film

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Second Coming (2015) and the 2011 Hillbilly/Film4 adaptation of her play, random. 6. Several articles explore the importance of television plays to black British writers, including Shaw (2017) and Liarou (2012). 7. Box of Broadcasts is available at https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ ondemand. 8. Sacha Wares also directed generations, a sideways glance at the horrors of humanitarian crises in Africa. It was first produced at the National Theatre on 30 June 2005 as part of a series of plays commissioned in relation to the 2005 inter-governmental ‘G8’ summit. It then appeared at the Young Vic studio in March 2007. 9. For the National Theatre Archive holdings on nut, search its online catalogue: http://catalogue.nationaltheatre.org.uk/. 10. There are various accounts of tucker green’s Alfred Fagon Award nominations. In an early interview, the playwright reported that she submitted She Three (Gardner 2005), and this is confirmed by archival research (VAM THM/372/2/1/40). Deirdre Osborne reports that Two Women was shortlisted (Osborne 2010, p.  37), while Lynette Goddard records the same for dirty butterfly (Goddard 2005, p. 377). In 2015, hang was nominated for the Alfred Fagon Audience Award—a new category in which winners are decided by a public vote. 11. The Royal Court hosted the Alfred Fagon awards between 1997 and 2007. The theatre has proven a vital sponsor of a number of black British women playwrights, giving a first production to Bernardine Evaristo (Moving Through, 1982) and Patricia Hilaire (Just Another Day, 1982) of Theatre of Black Women, and producing work by Winsome Pinnock (A Rock in Water, 1989; A Hero’s Welcome, 1989; Talking in Tongues, 1991; Mules, 1996) and Bola Agbaje, a graduate of its Young Writers Programme (Gone Too Far!, 2008; Off the Endz, 2010). The theatre also produced plays by African American playwright Adrienne Kennedy in the 1960s, including her choreopoetic tribute to Malcolm X, Sun (Pearce 2017, p. 41). 12. In 2013 administration of the Alfred Fagon Awards passed to Tiata Fahodzi, a company founded in 1997 by British Nigerian actor and director Femi Elufowoju Jr. 13. For its naming and claiming of a London location, tucker green’s Stratford might be compared with Mustapha Matura’s play Bakerloo Line (1972, Almost Free Theatre), which takes a London party as its setting, and may also  be seen in the tradition of Sam Selvon’s 1956 novel The Lonely Londoners, where migrant characters occupy and at times rename the city. 14. Currently enshrined within UK copyright law is a specific exception that allows quotation from any work that has already been made available to the public, including through performance, provided the amount used is

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reasonable and appropriate (section 30 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988). This would seem to permit quotation of Two Women, since it was performed at Soho Theatre in October 2000. Additionally, it is lawful to critique and review any text without quotation of that text: copyright law pertains specifically to the copying of a part or the whole of a work. 15. See www.blackplaysarchive.org.uk. 16. Work to decolonise Higher Education Institutions and their curricula have traversed the University of Cambridge (www.flygirlsofcambridge. com/2017/06/14/decolonising-the-english-faculty-an-open-letter/), the University of Oxford (www.rmfoxford.wordpress.com/), and University College London (www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dscx4h2l-Pk), among others. 17. According to documentation on Black Mime Theatre contained within the Arts Council of Great Britain records, Deborah Yhip had served as Assistant Trainee Director on Black Mime Theatre Ensemble’s production Heart, from July to October 1992 (Anon. n.d.).

References Abram, Nicola (2011). Interview with SuAndi, 14 October, Manchester. Abram, Nicola (2014). ‘Staging the unsayable: debbie tucker green’s political theatre’. Journal of Contemporary Drama in English. 2 (1), 113–130. Adebayo, Mojisola (2009). ‘The Supernatural Embodied Text: Creating Moj of the Antarctic with the Living and the Dead’, in Susan Broadhurst and Josephine Machon (eds.) Sensualities/Textualities and Technologies: Writings of the Body in 21st Century Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 92–102. Adiseshiah, Siân and Jacqueline Bolton, eds. (2020). debbie tucker green: Critical Perspectives. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Akala (2018). Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire. London: Two Roads. Anon. (1985). Review of ‘Hence Awakening’, Walthamstow Guardian. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Temba Theatre Company, Press cuttings about Theatre of Black Women, THM/77/4/4. Newspaper clipping. Anon. (n.d.). Records of Black Mime Theatre. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Arts Council of Great Britain, Black Mime Theatre company file, ACGB/34/11. Arana, R. Victoria (2007). ‘Black’ British Aesthetics Today. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press. Black Mime Theatre Women’s Troop (1990). Mothers. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Commercial Video Collection, 054036/A. VHS production recording.

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Black Mime Theatre Women’s Troop (1991). Drowning. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Commercial Video Collection, 054033/A. VHS production recording. Blood, Peter (1986). Review of Lights 2. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Temba Theatre Company records, THM/77/2/123. Newspaper clipping. Carby, Hazel (2000 [1982]). ‘White Woman Listen! Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood’, in James Procter (ed.) Writing Black Britain, 1948–1998: An Interdisciplinary Anthology. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 177–183. Collage Arts (2020). They Came Before Us: The History of BAME Women in the UK. London: Collage Arts. Cooke, Patricia (n.d.). ‘Scenes’. Goldsmiths University of London. Future Histories—Black Performance and Carnival Archive, Records of Nitro Theatre Company, NTC/P/T/2/013. Eddo-Lodge, Reni (2017). Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race. London: Blomsbury. Ellis, Juliet (2005–2006). ‘An Autobiography in Five Chapters’. http://julietellis. com/performance-art/autobiography-in-5-chapters/ (accessed 26 June 2016). Evaristo, Bernardine and Patricia Hilaire (1983). Silhouette. Evaristo personal collection, London. Typescript. Evaristo, Bernardine and Patricia Hilaire (1984). Pyeyucca. Evaristo personal collection, London. Typescript. Fragkou, Marissia (2013). ‘Precarious Subjects: Ethics of Witnessing and Responsibility in the Plays of debbie tucker green’. Performing Ethos. 3 (1). Gardner, Lyn (2005). ‘Interview with debbie tucker green: ‘I Was Messing About’ [Guardian, 30 March]’. Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2005/ mar/30/theatre (accessed 19 February 2013). Goddard, Lynette (2005). ‘Backpages: debbie tucker green’. Contemporary Theatre Review. 15 (3), 376–381. Goddard, Lynette (2007). Staging Black Feminisms: Identity, Politics, Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Goddard, Lynette (2009). ‘“Death never used to be for the young”: Grieving Teenage Murder in debbie tucker green’s random’. Women: A Cultural Review. 20 (3), 299–309. Hirsch, Afua (2018). Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging. London: Jonathan Cape. Jones, Gayl (1975). Corregidora. New York: Random House. Jumbo, Cush (2013). Josephine and I. London: Bloomsbury. Lewis, Susan (1993). ‘Walking Tall’. Live Art Development Agency, London. V0133. VHS production recording. Lewis, Susan (1994). ‘Walking Tall / Ladies Falling’. Live Art Development Agency, London. V0119. VHS production recording.

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Liarou, Eleni (2012). ‘British Television’s Lost New Wave Moment: Single Drama and Race’. Journal of British Cinema and Television. 9 (2), 612–627. Liverpool John Moores University (2008). ‘Soul Sisters Melody’. http://digitool. jmu.ac.uk:8881/R/K8CER1UE1PTJQ4MI1SHTRV5SPDBRUL87KHM9 BXAMX16CHXJNKR-01598?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=16710&local_ base=GEN01&pds_handle=GUEST (accessed 18 September 2017). Mirza, Heidi Safia (1997). ‘Introduction: Mapping a genealogy of Black British feminism’, in Heidi Safia Mirza (ed.) Black British Feminism: A Reader. London: Routledge, 1–30. Mukherjee, Manjula, ed. (1984). Breaking the Silence: Writing by Asian Women. London: Centerprise. Osborne, Deirdre (2007). ‘Not “In-Yer-Face” But What Lies Beneath: Experiential and Aesthetic Inroads in the Drama of debbie tucker green and Doña Daley’, in R. Victoria Arana (ed.) ‘Black’ British Aesthetics Today. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 222–242. Osborne, Deirdre, ed. (2008). Hidden Gems, vol 1. London: Oberon. Osborne, Deirdre (2010). ‘debbie tucker green and Doña Daley: Two Neo-­ millennial Black British Women Playwrights’. Antares. 4, 25–55. Osborne, Deirdre, ed. (2012). Hidden Gems, vol 2. London: Oberon. Osborne, Deirdre (2014). ‘Resisting the Standard and Displaying her Colours: debbie tucker green at British Drama’s Vanguard’, in Mary F. Brewer, Lynette Goddard and Deirdre Osborne (eds.) Modern and Contemporary Black British Drama. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 161–177. Oyelowo, David (2016). ‘Keynote speech’, at Black Star Symposium, BFI Southbank. Parmar, Pratibha (2000). ‘Black Feminism: The Politics of Articulation (1990)’, in James Procter (ed.) Writing Black Britain, 1948–1998: An Interdisciplinary Anthology. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 293–299. Pearce, Michael (2017). Black British Drama: A Transnational Story. London: Routledge. Reinelt, Janelle G. (2010). ‘Creative Ambivalence and Precarious Futures: Women in British Theatre’. Theatre Journal. 62 (4), 553–556. Royal Shakespeare Company (2004). trade. The Shakespeare Centre, Stratford upon Avon. Royal Shakespeare Company, RSC/SM/1/2004/TR11. Prompt book. Saunders, Graham (2015). British Theatre Companies 1980–1994. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. Selvon, Sam (2009 [1956]). The Lonely Londoners. London: Penguin. Shaw, Sally (2017). ‘Uncovering Forgotten, Unseen and Contested Representations of ‘Black Britain’: Gloo Joo (1979) and Meadowlark (1982)’. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. 37 (1), 113–127. Sierz, Aleks (2001). In-yer-face theatre: British Drama Today. London: Faber.

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Sierz, Aleks (2003). ‘Interview with debbie tucker green: “If you hate the show, at least you have passion”‘. Independent on Sunday. http://www.inyerface-theatre.com/archive9.html#d (accessed 19 February 2013). SuAndi (1994). The Story of M. Live Art Development Agency, London. V0238. VHS production recording. Trevor, Jon and Lorna Laidlaw (1994). Getting it Straight. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Talawa Theatre Company, TTC/5/1/48. Typescript. tucker green, debbie (2003). dirty butterfly. London: Nick Hern Books. tucker green, debbie (2005). stoning mary. London: Nick Hern Books. tucker green, debbie (2008). random. London: Nick Hern Books. tucker green, debbie (2011). truth and reconciliation. London: Nick Hern Books. tucker green, debbie (2013). nut. London: Nick Hern Books. tucker green, debbie (2014). Second Coming. Hillbilly/Film4. 105 mins. tucker green, debbie (2018). ear for eye. London: Nick Hern Books. tucker green, debbie [Debbie Green] (1997). She Three. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Talawa Theatre Company, TTC/5/1/119. Typescript. tucker green, debbie [Debbie Green] (2000a). Stratford/Two Women. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Paines Plough Theatre Company, Wild Lunch IV file, THM/372/3/2/37. Typescript. tucker green, debbie [Debbie Green] (2000b). Two Women. British Library, London. MPS 9391. Typescript. tucker green, debbie [Debbie Green] (2000c). Two Women. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Paines Plough Theatre Company, THM/372/3/2/39, Folder 1 of 2. Typescript. tucker green, debbie [Debbie Green] (2000d). Two Women. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Paines Plough Theatre Company, THM/372/3/2/39, Folder 2 of 2. Rehearsal draft. Zindika (1990). Paper and Stone. Goldsmiths University of London. Future Histories—Black Performance and Carnival Archive, Records of Nitro Theatre Company, NTC/P/T/1/21/5/001. VHS production recording. Zindika (1996). The Day Mother Took Us To The Seaside. Goldsmiths University of London. Future Histories—Black Performance and Carnival Archive, Records of Nitro Theatre Company, NTC/P/T/2/144. Typescript.

Index1

A Abuse alcohol, 131, 143, 148, 151 domestic, 210, 233 emotional, 102 racial, 207, 217 sexual, 44, 181, 187, 233 Activism black nationalist, 31 community, 25, 86, 89, 96 feminist, 233 Actors, see Cast Addai, Levi David, 162 Adebayo, Mojisola, 6, 135, 231, 240 I Stand Corrected (2012), 240 Moj of the Antarctic (2006), 240 Muhammad Ali and Me (2008), 240 Adzido Pan African Dance Ensemble African Skies (1994), 49 Akwaaba (1994), 169, 193 Oya’s Choice (1994), 133

Secrets of Makaleng (1999), 169 Shango the God of Thunder (1996), 133 The Spirit of Okin (1998), 49 Thand Abantwaana (1995), 133 Aesthetics, 2–18, 27, 33, 38, 46, 54, 57, 60, 70, 87, 95, 114, 115, 137, 140, 154, 173, 203, 210, 222, 231, 233, 239, 242 Africa Adinkra symbols, 229 Akan people, 173, 229 Ghana, 169, 173, 174, 229 Namibia, 110 Nigeria, 69, 202 South Africa (Azania), 109, 110 Yoruba, 65, 69 Zimbabwe, 110 See also Afrocentrism; Apartheid; Pan-African Africa Centre, Covent Garden, 88

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 N. Abram, Black British Women’s Theatre, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51459-4

249

250 

INDEX

African American literature, 12, 26, 27, 70, 87, 88, 95, 96, 232 theatre, 243n11 African Caribbean Educational Resouce (ACER), 162 Black Young Writers Award, 162 African Dawn (performance troupe), 88, 95, 205 Afrikan, see Identity, Afrikan Afrocentrism, 115 Afro Sax (theatre company), 44 Agbabi, Patience, 96, 142, 223n7 Agbaje, Bola, 162, 196n22, 243n11 Gone Too Far! (2007), 155n5, 162, 243n11 Off the Endz (2010), 243n11 Agbebiyi, Adeola, 142 Fo(u)r Women (1996), 142 Agyemang, Kofi, 26 Urban Afro Saxons (2003), 26 Ahmed, Sara, 3, 207 Akimbo (performance duo), 88, 149 Akira Press, 87 Alderson, Jude, 32 Ali, Jamal, 162, 194n7 Andi, Susan Maria, see SuAndi Angelou, Maya, 27, 95 Apartheid, 29, 88, 109, 110 Apples and Snakes (performance poetry organisation), 16, 85, 88, 91, 95–97, 116n2 Archives, 1, 5, 9–11, 38, 39, 47, 124, 128, 130, 132, 134, 144–146, 161, 164, 171, 208, 211, 236, 241 Black Plays Archive (website), 11, 238, 241 British Library, London, 5, 9, 31, 164, 235, 238 Future Histories-Black Performance and Carnival Archive, 10, 161, 164, 165, 171, 172, 175, 236, 239, 241

Live Art Development Agency, London, 10, 206, 211, 215 Record of Live Art Practice, University of Bristol, 9, 216 Special Collections, Goldsmiths, University of London, 10 Special Collections, Middlesex University, London, 10 Theatre and Performance Collections, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 38, 211, 231, 236 Theatre Collection, University of Bristol, 208 Unfinished Histories, Bishopsgate Institute, London, 39, 164, 236, 241 Women’s Theatre Collection, University of Bristol, 9, 164 artBlacklive, see Black Arts Alliance (BAA) ArtRage magazine, 29, 41, 47, 56 Arts Britain Ignores, The (1978), 18n1, 72n4, 123 Arts Council England (1994–)/Arts Council of Great Britain (1946–1994) Arts Officer (Yvonne Brewster), 10, 91 National Officer for Performing Art (Lois Keidan), 206 Trainee Director programme, 135 Arts Media Group, 73n14, 89 Arvon Foundation, The, 205, 222n4 Asian theatre, 23, 25 Assati (theatre company), 241 Aston, Elaine, 27, 36, 55, 99, 125, 213 Audience audience address, 52, 153, 183 demographic, 89, 212, 220 discussion (post-show), 3, 127, 219 participation, 14, 218

 INDEX 

recruitment (targeting), 55 survey, 124, 129, 220 as witnesses, 171, 179 Aurora Metro (publisher), 168 Autobiography, 207, 210 Awards Alfred Fagon Award, 236, 243n10, 243n11, 243n12 British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA), 235 Burt Award for Caribbean Literature, 98 London International Street Entertainer of the Year, 126, 131 Member of the British Empire (MBE), 48, 49, 98 Meyer-Whitworth Award, 167 Olivier Award, 235 Order of the British Empire (OBE), 212 Susan Smith Blackburn Award, 235 B Bailey, Moya, 3 Baku Productions, 86 Baldwin, James, 87, 194n5 Baptiste, Roselia John, 162 No Place Like Home (1987), 162 See also Cooke, Trish Bardsley, Barney, 42, 56, 64 Bartal, Leah, 33 Beagley, Lee, 125 Beauty, 63, 67, 68, 102, 177 See also Hair Beauvoir, Simone de, 195n21 Beckett, Samuel, 135 Bemarro Sisters, The (theatre company), 241 Bennett, Gwendolyn B., 19n13, 107 Bereavement, 134 Bernays, Philip, 125 Billington, Michael, 43, 131, 149, 153

251

Birmingham Repertory Theatre, 206 Bishop, Jacqueline, 214 My Mother Who is Me (2006), 214 Black British, 1, 3–5, 8–10, 12, 14, 17, 18, 24, 25, 27, 28, 30, 39, 40, 43, 51–53, 63, 71, 91, 102, 127, 129, 136, 154, 155n8, 162, 163, 167, 168, 171, 179, 185, 195n21, 195n22, 201, 205, 207, 210, 213, 214, 229, 231, 233, 235, 236, 238, 241, 242 capitalisation of, 4, 202 history, 45; Black History Month, 209, 212 Black Arts Alliance (BAA), 208, 210, 211 artBlacklive, 208, 211 National Black Arts Alliance (NBAA), 211 Revelations of Black (1987), 203–205, 211 Revelations of Black II (1988), 205 Black-Art Gallery, The, 89, 91, 92, 95–96, 231, 233 Black Arts magazine, 1, 2, 29 Blackface, 25 Black Mime Theatre Chasing the Dragon (1985), 125 The Ensemble; Dirty Reality (1994), 133; Dirty Reality II (1996), 133, 135; Earliest Date of Release (1993), 133; Heart (1992), 133; Mourning Song (1997), 134, 135, 154, 155n5, 241 Goin’ Home (1988), 126 Mantrail (1986), 126 Personal Relationships (1987), 126 Rainbow (1989), 126 Really Street Show (1988), 126 Superheroes (1990), 126 Tall Stories (1984), 125

252 

INDEX

Black Mime Theatre Women’s Troop Drowning (1991), 6, 16, 63, 123, 131–134, 136, 138, 143–154, 167, 173, 182, 184, 219, 231 Mothers (1990), 6, 16, 123, 127–131, 134, 136, 143, 150, 152, 155n2, 179, 184, 187, 210, 213, 231 Total Rethink (1991), 113, 123, 131, 150 Black Power, 223n7 BlackScribe (writers’ group), 17, 205, 233 Black Theatre Alliance (1983–1985), see Black Theatre Forum Black Theatre Co-operative (BTC), 10, 16, 37, 43, 161, 162, 164–169, 172, 175, 177, 189, 201, 211, 232, 233, 239 Black Theatre Forum (1985–2001), 10, 12, 31, 47, 134, 164, 166, 169, 194n12, 233 Black Theatre Seasons, 25, 30, 31, 45, 94, 166 Writers and Directors Project, 166 Black Theatre of Brixton, 37, 96, 118n18, 194n7 Black Womantalk, 44, 222n2 Black Women’s Theatre Workshop, 241 Blair, Tony, 170 Boal, Augusto, 135 Booker Prize, 48 Bourne, Stephen, 47 Boxer, David, 125 Boyce, Sonia, 92, 93 Brah, Avtar, 221 Breaking Cycles (theatre company), 135 Brecht, Bertolt, 27, 135 The Threepenny Opera, 27 Breeze, Jean ‘Binta,’ 95, 96, 203

Brewster, Yvonne, 8, 12, 25, 26, 29, 31, 40, 46, 49, 168, 211, 236 Bristol, University of, see Archives Britain, 1, 3–5, 9, 12, 15, 16, 18, 23–27, 29, 38, 48, 55, 56, 59, 64, 70, 86, 94, 97, 99, 104, 105, 114, 115, 123, 127, 134, 135, 143, 164, 166, 167, 170, 183, 193, 201, 206, 213, 216, 222, 231, 233, 236, 241 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 49, 73n17, 207, 235 British Film Institute (BFI), 105 British Library, see Archives Brixton Black Women’s Centre, 28, 29 Brixton Black Women’s Group, 23, 28, 222n2 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 107 Brown, Ian, 45 Bubble Theatre, 24 Burford, Barbara, 8, 96, 240 Patterns (1984), 240 Burroughs, Margaret Goss, 19n13, 107 Butler, Judith, 5 C Cahn, Sarah, 125 Cancer, 151, 208, 213, 214, 217, 218 Caribbean sex tourism, 115, 190 theatre; Little Carib theatre (Trinidad), 240; Stage One Theatre (Barbados), 240; Trinidad Theatre Workshop, 240 Carnival Notting Hill, 164 Trinidad, 178, 240 Case, Gordon, 37, 163 Cast, 3, 4, 13, 14, 16, 26, 33, 38, 51, 59, 60, 62, 63, 65, 85, 87–89,

 INDEX 

96, 98, 99, 106, 107, 109, 111, 115, 125, 126, 133, 134, 137–154, 174, 176, 180–182, 187, 189, 191, 192, 201, 203, 205, 208, 214, 215, 217–219, 221, 229, 231–233, 235, 239, 240 cast/character relationship, 3, 137, 221, 222, 230 cast of one (see also ‘Monodrama’) cast of three, 137, 155n6, 171, 184 doubling, 4, 14, 16, 62, 144, 150, 176, 187, 190, 191, 232 multi-role playing, 7, 100, 141, 146, 149, 154, 155n6, 194, 201, 232 Ceddo Film and Video Workshop, 105 Centerprise, 31, 87, 239, 241 Chambers, Colin, 23, 25, 85 Channel 4, 105 Choreopoetry, 16, 38, 95, 106, 115 See also Shange, Ntozake Churchill, Caryl, 27, 31, 234 Churchill, Winston, 104 Citizenship, 66 City Limits (magazine), 44, 56, 65, 124, 183 Civil Rights, 13, 88 Cixous, Hélène, 195n21 ‘Aller à la Mer’ (1977), 195n21 Clarke, Elizabeth, 92, 94, 114, 115 Cockpit Theatre, London, 166 Collins, Merle, 27, 87–89, 91, 92, 95, 96, 100–103, 105, 109, 205, 206, 222n4 Colour, 24, 52, 71, 106, 143, 202, 214 Comedy, 13, 44, 65, 123, 131, 139, 149, 213, 241 Commonwealth, 55, 104 Commonword (writing development organisation), 17, 203, 205, 209

253

Community theatre, 24, 36, 86 Theatre Arts course (see Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama) Competitions Greater London Council Literature Competition, 87, 117n7, 162 London Writers’ Competition, 92 Royal Court Theatre Young Writers Competition, 30, 31 Conferences Black Women in the Arts (1986), 43 Eclipse (2001), 170 Future Histories: The First National Workshop Forum on Black Theatre (1995), 47 Where Do We Go From Here? The Future of Afrikan Caribbean Theatre in Britain (1998), 135 Cooke, Sam, 216 Cooke, Trish (Patricia Cooke) Back Street Mammy (1989), 72n9, 137, 162, 168, 196n24, 239 Scenes (n.d.), 239 Coping (1981), 28, 29 Cortez, Jayne, 88, 97, 231 Corthron, Kia, 124 Costume, 14, 57, 63, 92, 95, 99, 100, 138, 143, 150, 153, 173, 176, 185, 192, 193, 203 Crawshaw, Robert, 217, 218 Creation for Liberation (arts organisation), 95 Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 2, 26 Crocus (publisher), 205 Croft, Susan, 1, 14, 24, 26, 27, 30, 33, 41, 52, 85, 163 Cross, Felix, 169, 195n13 Cultureword (writer development organisation), 17, 203

254 

INDEX

D Dance, 203 Dayley, Doña, 47, 74n25 Dayley, Grace, 72n9, 136, 194n6 Rose’s Story (1985), 72n9, 136, 194n6 The Day Mother Took Us to the Seaside (1996), 6, 16, 161, 164, 169, 184–194, 210, 213, 232 de Veaux, Alexis, 19n13, 27, 28 Dedi, Shakka, 91, 96 Devising, 38, 134 Diaspora, 4, 45, 48, 51, 59, 91, 102, 104, 115, 188, 202, 229 Disability, 44, 97, 211 There Are No Limitations report (1994), 211 Diversity, 10, 51, 111, 123, 135 Double consciousness, 63 Drill Hall theatre, the, 114, 240 Drowning (1991), 6, 16, 63, 143–154, 173, 182, 184, 219, 231 Du Bois, W.E.B., 63 E Eclipse Report, the, 45 Edmead, Amantha, 240 The Backside Monologues (2011), 240 Sankofa Stories (2012), 240 Education, 25, 28, 66, 86, 89, 117n7, 124, 162, 170, 194n4 Elcock, Patricia, 26 Ellams, Inua, 4 Ellis, Juliet, 240 An Autobiography in Five Chapters (2005–6), 240 England Brixton, 29, 39, 89, 99, 104, 105, 194n7

Liverpool, 72n7, 131, 136, 202, 209, 213, 221, 240, 241 London, 8, 10, 11, 18n1, 24, 29, 32–36, 39, 42, 45, 47, 49, 56–58, 64, 70, 71, 72n3, 72n8, 75n29, 86, 87, 89, 95, 96, 99, 104, 113–115, 117n7, 135, 144–146, 155n8, 161, 164, 166–170, 194n5, 202, 206, 208, 222, 222n6, 231, 237, 238, 240 Manchester, 42, 53, 72n7, 89, 195n22, 202, 203, 205–207, 209, 212, 213, 219, 222n1, 223n13, 234, 240 Ephemera, 1, 8, 9, 11, 16, 36, 85, 164, 229, 230 Essentialism, 5 Ethics, 75n28, 102, 107, 109 Ethnicity, 3, 16, 51, 113, 134, 154, 164, 177, 191, 202, 232 Ephemera, 1, 8, 9, 11, 16, 36, 85, 164, 229, 230 Evaristo, Bernardine, 6, 11, 15, 23–28, 30–61, 63–67, 69–71, 71n1, 72n2, 72n3, 72n5, 73n11, 73n12, 102, 123, 125, 169, 191, 202, 213, 230, 232, 243n11 Come to Mama (1982), 50–56, 59, 213 Lara (2009 [1997]), 37, 44, 47, 48, 73n12, 102 Moving Through (1982), 30, 31, 50–56, 243n11 Tiger Teeth Clenched Not to Bite (1982), 31, 50–56 Evaristo, Victoria, 213, 240 Ma Joyce’s Tales From the Parlour (2004), 213 Everywoman (magazine), 47

 INDEX 

F Family siblings, 184, 185 sisters, 17, 61, 62, 88, 91, 142, 176, 184–186, 189, 190, 192, 193 See also Intergenerational conflict; Mothers Feminism material, 154 Feminist, 2, 14, 28, 32, 36, 41, 52, 53, 56, 97, 111, 118n16, 124, 127, 154, 195n21, 219 Feminist Review (journal), 41, 52 Festivals Arts in Danger (1985), 39 Brent Black Theatre Festival, 33 Edinburgh Fringe, 86, 131, 213 Festival of Migrant Workers, 33 International Women’s Week, 39, 96, 97 London International Mime Festival, 129, 131 Wordplay (1992), 166 Film, 40, 41, 43, 66, 72n6, 73n17, 74n20, 94, 95, 98, 102, 105, 109, 110, 113, 115, 117n9, 118n16, 123, 131, 140, 155n4, 167, 174, 208, 211, 213, 214, 235, 242, 242n5 FilmFour, 235, 243n5 Flamboyant Ladies (theatre company), 19n13, 28 For colored girls who have considered suicide (when the rainbow is enuf) (1976), 28, 95, 143 Fraser-Munro, Ronald, 4 Fraser Solomon, Pam, 172 Friday, Nancy, 127 Frontseat (magazine), 47 Fuchs, Anne, 12, 202, 203, 205, 206, 211, 215, 220 Fugard, Athol, 135

255

Funding Arts Council of England (ACE)/ Arts Council of Great Britain (ACGB), 9, 18n1, 43, 74n23, 74n24, 124, 126, 206, 244n17 City of Westminster, 166 Greater London Arts Association (GLAA), 32, 40, 44, 45, 74n22 Greater London Council (GLC), 32, 39, 40, 43, 87, 88, 117n7, 125, 162, 163 Gulbenkian Foundation, 18n1, 40 Haringey Arts Council (HAC), 91, 94, 97 Heritage Lottery Fund, 210, 211, 223n12, 236 London Arts Board, 47, 91, 125 London Borough Grants Scheme (LBGS), 91, 105, 126, 131, 166 Southern Arts, 126 Fusco, Coco, 218 Future Histories, 10, 47, 134, 161, 165, 169, 171, 172, 175, 236 Black Performance and Carnival Archive (see Archives) See also Conferences G Gardner, Lyn, 243n10 Gardner, Lynel, 195n20, 214 Black Son, No Father (1994), 195n20, 214 Gay Sweatshop (theatre company), 41, 47, 73n16 Gaze audience, 3, 148, 212 male, 149 Gender, 3, 16, 51, 97, 100, 101, 113, 126, 134, 137, 139, 144, 146, 149, 151, 154, 163, 164, 166, 183, 189, 190, 221

256 

INDEX

George, Kadija (Kadija Sesay), 168 Gesture, 7, 60, 66, 85, 136, 138, 149–151, 174, 182, 185, 217, 232 Gideon, Killian M., 162 Gilroy, Paul, 3, 4, 57, 110 Goddard, Lynette, 4, 6, 13–15, 23, 42, 43, 47, 57, 64, 73n19, 118n13, 124, 125, 127, 129, 131, 133–137, 141, 143, 147, 150, 154, 155n1, 167, 168, 182, 195n14, 207, 210, 219, 222, 231, 234, 242n4, 243n10 Godiwala, Dimple, 23 Goldsmiths, University of London, see Archives Goodison, Lorna, 214 I Am Becoming My Mother (1986), 214 Goodman, Lizbeth, 41–43, 73n19, 74n22, 97, 124, 127, 129, 130, 137, 140, 154, 156n10 Grammar, 11, 14, 152 Greater London Arts Association (GLAA), 32, 40, 44, 45, 74n22 Greater London Council (GLC) Literature Competition, 87, 117n7, 162, 194n5 Women’s Committee, 88 Green, Debbie, see tucker green, debbie Greenroom, Manchester, 206, 209, 240 Greenwich Young People’s Theatre, 24 Greer, Bonnie, 64, 75n29, 96, 167, 168, 240 Dancing on Blackwater (1994), 167 Munda Negra (1995), 64, 75n29, 167 Grief, see Bereavement Griffin, Gabriele, 6, 14, 23, 155n7, 167, 168, 171, 193, 194n6, 195n21, 196n24, 220 Griot, 219

Groce, Dorothy “‘Cherry,’” 99, 104 Gulbenkian Foundation, 18n1, 40 H Hair, 57, 63, 67, 102, 111, 141, 167, 174, 177, 190 See also Beauty Hall, Stuart, 18n1, 70 Hampstead Theatre, 235 Hansberry, Lorraine, 27, 163 Hanson, Charlie, 37, 162 Haringey Arts Council (HAC), 91, 94, 97, 105, 117n11 Harris, Geraldine, 27 Harris, Ruth, 44–46 Cripple, The (1987), 44 Writers, The (1988), 45, 46 Hawkins, Maureen ‘“Talibah,”’ 16, 86, 87, 89, 92, 94, 95, 98, 100–102, 105–111, 113, 116, 116n3 Heddon, Deirdre, 57, 216 Hilaire, Patricia, 6, 15, 23–33, 35–41, 43–46, 54–57, 59–61, 63–67, 69, 72n4, 72n5, 72n9, 73n11, 89, 133, 169, 210, 232, 243n11 As Deep as the Ocean Sea (1982), 30, 38 Hey Brown Girl (1982), 31 Just Another Day (1982), 30, 31, 72n9, 243n11 HIV/AIDS, 115, 234 Holland, Endesha Ida Mae, 19n13 hooks, bell, 3, 60 Hoxton Hall, 24, 33 Hughes, Ted, 237 Alcestis (1999), 237 I Identity, 17, 203 Afrikan, 91, 105, 111, 114 identity politics, 207, 233

 INDEX 

257

Identity (writers’ group), 203, 205 Images Theatre Group, 87, 89, 117n6 Imani-Faith (theatre company), 241 Immigration, see Migration Independent Theatre Council, 125 Inner London Education Authority, 44 Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London Black Power season, 223n7 Director of Live Arts (Lois Keidan 1992–1997), 206 More Respect season (1994), 207 Respect season (1993), 206 Ripple Effect platform, 223n7 The Thin Black Line, 223n7 Institutional racism, see Racism Intergenerational conflict, 61, 115, 162, 194n6 Intersectionality, 2–18, 26, 51 In-yer-face theatre, 234 IRIE! dance theatre, 97, 114 Iyapo, Anum, 89, 90, 99, 117n9

Karavanta, Mina, 210 Karnak House (publisher), 166 Kay, Jackie, 29, 41, 42, 44, 62, 73n19, 74n20, 88, 178, 231 Kayla, Liselle, 162, 240 When Last Did I See You (1987), 162 Keidan, Lois, 10, 206, 207, 211 Kennedy, Adrienne, 27, 243n11 Keskidee (arts centre), 25 Khan, Naseem, 72n4, 123, 124, 126, 129, 136 The Arts Britain Ignores (1978), 72n4, 123 Kincaid, Jamaica, 214 The Autobiography of my Mother (1996), 214 Kinch, Don, 86 Kompany Malakhi, 135 Kwei-Armah, Kwame, 7, 57, 72n6, 162 Elmina’s Kitchen (2003), 162 Fix Up (2004), 57, 59, 162

J Jarrett, Cynthia, 99 Jarrett-Macauley, Delia, 63 Jazz (music), 65, 107, 183, 203 Jenako Arts, 86 Johns, Lindsay, 37, 155n5 Judd, Yazmine, 30, 167 Unfinished Business (1999), 30, 167 Jumbo, Cush, 6, 240 Josephine and I (2013), 6, 240

L Language Creole, 102 Standard English, 104, 176, 177 Law Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (1988), 244n14 National Heritage Act (1983), 238 Theatres Act (1968), 9, 31, 238 L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq, 125 Lecoq, Jacques, 125, 135 Leda Serene (theatre company), 241 Letts, Quentin, 43 Levy, Andrea, 166 Fruit of the Lemon (1999), 166 Lewis, Susan, 134, 207, 240 Lezard, Nick, 133, 153

K Kaboodle (theatre company), 125 Kadeena, Eve-I, 91, 95 Kamauesi, Zindika, see Zindika Kambona, Neema, 96, 98, 111, 113 Kane, Sarah, 237

258 

INDEX

Libretti, 44, 210 Lighting, 59, 66, 176, 180, 182, 187, 232 Lioness Chant (performance duo), 88, 95 Live art, 71, 134, 205–207, 211, 240 See also Poetry; Performance poetry Live Art Development Agency (LADA), 10, 206, 207, 211, 212, 214, 215, 218, 222n6 See also Archives London Arts Board, 47, 91, 125 Lorca, Federico García Blood Wedding, 27 Lorde, Audre, 26, 27, 53, 95 Lyric theatre, Hammersmith, 196n23 M Macheol, Zindika, see Zindika Macpherson report (The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry) (1999), 45 Manuscript, 1, 15, 16, 23, 54, 63, 161, 203, 205, 230 Marshall, Nadine, 235 Masculinity, 4, 13, 149, 179, 188–190 Materic, Mladen, 137 Matherson, Gloria, 96 Matherson, Michelle, 16, 96, 98, 111, 113, 116, 116n3 Matura, Mustapha, 37, 162, 243n13 Welcome Home Jacko (1979), 162 Maynard, Joan-Ann, 26, 37, 42, 166–169, 195n13 McKenzie, Victoria, 205 McLeod, Jenny, 167 Raising Fires (1994), 167 McLeod, John, 12 McMillan, Michael, 8, 15, 23, 209, 211, 222n6 Medusa, 166, 167, 195n19 Melkweg, Amsterdam (cultural centre), 28, 32

Memory, 7, 38, 94, 104, 106, 114, 142, 150, 169, 184, 185, 187, 190, 192, 208, 213, 215, 219, 236 Mercer, Kobena, 38, 201 Metropolitan Police, see Police Migration, 4, 69, 86, 104, 170, 182, 202, 216, 231 See also Windrush, SS Empire Miller, Kara, 124, 126, 127, 163, 167 Hyacinth Blue (1999), 167 Mime (physical theatre), 16, 70, 125, 126, 131, 133, 135, 137–139, 142, 147, 148, 151, 154, 174, 201, 231, 240 Minh-ha, Trinh T., 148, 152, 153 Minority Arts Advisory Service (MAAS), 18n1, 29, 41, 72n4, 73n14, 86 MAAS Movers, 86 Mirrors, 16, 42, 73n18, 142, 148, 182, 186, 188, 191, 219 as prop, 148, 182 Mirza, Heidi Safia, 2, 7, 239 Misogynoir, 3 Mitchell, Sherelle, 214 and Dorothea Smartt, From You to Me to You (1994), 214 Monodrama, 213 Moors murderers: Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, 216 Morrison, Mem, 4, 214 Lilac (1999), 214 Morrison, Toni, 27 Mothers mother-daughter relationship, 179, 231 other-mothering, 152 pregnancy, 102, 187, 192 Mothers (1990), 6, 16, 123, 127–131, 134, 136–143, 150, 152, 155n2, 179, 184, 187, 210, 213, 231 Moving Picture Mime, 125

 INDEX 

Moving Through (1982), 30, 31, 50–56, 243n11 Munirah Theatre Company On the Inside (1985), 6, 16, 38, 88–90, 92, 95, 99–105, 231 Our Bodies are Our Maps (1990), 6, 16, 38, 96, 111–116, 231 thinkofariver (1987), 6, 16, 30, 92–94, 100, 105–110, 114, 196n24, 231 Women in Rhythm (1988), 94 Music, 14, 44, 46, 54, 65, 70, 72n6, 86, 88, 95, 110, 114, 117n7, 126, 173, 186, 190, 194n7, 203, 206, 240 See also Song N Naphtali, Amani, 25, 169 Nasta, Susheila, 14, 15 National Front, 29, 56 National Theatre, The Black Plays Archive (see Archive) Shed, the, 236 Naturalism, 70, 169 New writing, 1, 233 Nick Hern Books, 234 nitroBEAT, see Black Theatre Co-operative (BTC) Nitro Theatre Company, see Black Theatre Co-operative (BTC) Nka Iban (writers’ group), 161 Nkrumah, Kwame, 185, 186, 188, 190 Non-naturalism, 46, 169 Novels, 37, 44, 45, 47–49, 95, 98, 102, 117n7, 166, 170, 193, 242, 243n13 O Obeah, 167 Okoro, Elaine, 205

259

Omoboye, Pauline, 205 Onion Shed Theatre, Camberwell, 170 On the Inside (1985), 6, 16, 38, 88–90, 92, 95, 99–105, 231 Onwurah, Ngozi, 66, 167, 213 Flight of the Swan (1994), 43, 66, 167 Welcome II the Terrordome (1995), 214 Opera, see Libretti Options (theatre company), 241 Organisation for Black Art Advancement and ­Leisure/ Learning Activities (OBAALA), 89, 91, 92, 117n9, 231 Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent (OWAAD), 23, 41 Osborne, Deirdre, 6–8, 17, 26, 57, 168, 208–210, 213, 214, 219, 220, 242 Oshodi, Maria, 46 Other, 6, 7, 10, 14, 68, 139, 217, 221, 239 Our Bodies are Our Maps (1990), 6, 16, 38, 96, 111–116, 231 Outwrite (magazine), 36 Oval House theatre, 28–30, 33, 39, 42, 86, 89, 96, 102, 129, 162, 213, 214, 240 Owusu, Kwesi, 15, 173, 195n19 Oyeyemi, Helen, 73n18, 166 P Paines Plough (theatre company), 233, 236, 237 Pan-African, 49, 110, 133, 167, 169, 173 Paper and Stone (1989), 6, 16, 17, 61, 115, 140, 141, 161–166, 170–185, 187, 193, 194n6, 195n19, 195n21, 210, 213, 231

260 

INDEX

Parks, Suzan-Lori, 135 Parrish, Sue, 70 Pearce, Michael, 4, 9, 13, 15, 19n13, 27, 57, 95, 202 Pearse, Gabriela, 42–44 and Jean Pearse, Miss Quashie and the Tiger’s Tail (1987), 43 Pearse, Jean, 44 and Gabriela Pearse, Miss Quashie and the Tiger’s Tail (1987), 43 Peckham Black Women’s Group, 161, 194n2 Peepal Tree (publisher), 205 People’s Writing Group, see Identity Performers, see Cast Phillips, Caryl, 87, 162 Pinnock, Winsome, 15, 46, 47, 68, 136, 167, 168, 237 Poetry, 2, 18, 29, 33, 37, 40–42, 47, 49, 50, 65, 86, 87, 92, 95, 98, 104, 105, 109–111, 123, 170, 182, 202, 203, 205, 206, 209, 214, 231, 241 performance poetry, 16, 72n3, 85, 88, 95, 206 Police, 28, 45, 53, 99, 104, 105, 181, 183, 217 Polishing Black Diamonds (1988), 94, 102, 109, 110, 115 Ponnuswami, Meenakshi, 14, 166, 168, 171 Postmemory, 57 Powell, Enoch, 56, 101 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech (1968), 56 Prison, 52, 66, 68, 178, 183 Procter, James, 15, 101 Production recordings, 1, 9, 10, 17, 124, 171, 175, 215, 216, 218, 220, 241 Publication, 6, 7, 10, 12, 18n1, 29, 33, 39, 43, 72n4, 73n14, 73n19, 88, 92, 98, 124, 129, 168, 202,

203, 205, 206, 208, 210, 216, 232, 234, 239–241 Pyeyucca (1984), 6, 15, 16, 38–40, 56, 58, 63–71, 75n29, 102, 109, 153, 167, 177, 231 R Ra, Oma (Frederick Williams), 96 Race race riots (see Riots) racial justice, 114 Racism, 4, 13, 44, 45, 61, 87, 114, 115, 162, 166, 177, 181, 203, 217–219, 222, 229, 233, 234 institutional, 45 Radio, 48, 73n17, 186, 235 Rand, Jimi, 101 Randall, Paulette, 8, 15, 23, 24, 28, 30–32, 37, 38, 49, 54, 55, 72n5, 73n10 Chameleon (1982), 31, 73n10 Fishing (1982), 30, 31 random (2008), 7, 43, 51, 53, 66, 138, 181, 213, 217, 233–235 Ravenhill, Mark, 237 North Greenwich for the Dome (2000), 237 Reid, June, 91 Representation of black women by black women, 49 burden of, 38, 201 ReSisters (theatre company), 240 Revill, Vanessa, 25, 27, 38, 65, 71 Riots Brixton, 29, 89 Broadwater Farm, 89, 99, 105 Rose, J.B., 28, 30, 32, 38, 42 Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama, 24, 125 Community Theatre Arts course, 25, 30

 INDEX 

Royal Court Theatre, The Artistic Directors, 4, 5, 25, 32, 37, 49, 88, 97, 124, 125, 135, 155n1, 166, 168, 169, 233 ‘Talking Black’ workshops (see Workshops) Theatre Local, 233 Young People’s Theatre (the Activists), 24 Young Writers Competition (see Competitions) Young Writers Festival (see Festivals) Young Writers Programme, 243n11 ‘Royal Court Young Writers’ Competition,’ 30 Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, 203 Royal Shakespeare Company, 235 Royalty Theatre, London, 28, 70, 155n8 Rudet, Jacqueline, 26, 37, 117n7, 163, 167, 241 God’s Second in Command (1985), 167 Money to Live (1984), 37, 163 S Sadista Sisters (theatre company), 32 Sankofa (Adinkra symbol), 229–242 Saunders, Graham, 37, 46, 97, 163, 170, 240 Scafe, Suzanne, 28, 70 Screenwriting, 235 Seasons Black Theatre Seasons (1983–1990), 25, 30, 31, 118n14, 166 Camden Black Theatre Seasons (1987, 1988), 45, 94, 118n14 Second-generation migrant, 26, 177 Selvon, Sam, 52, 243n13 Lonely Londoners, The (1956), 52, 243n13

261

Sexism, 4, 13, 37, 44, 123, 162, 177, 210, 222, 229, 233 Sexuality, 41, 42 Shange, Ntozake, 19n13, 27, 28, 38, 42, 51, 70, 72n3, 95, 143, 155n8, 231, 241 for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf (1976), 28, 95, 143 The Love Space Demands (1991), 72n3 Spell No. 7 (1979), 70, 72n3 Shaw, George Bernard Pygmalion, 27 Sierz, Aleks, 8, 74n20, 233–235 Silence, 7, 18, 56, 59, 65, 85, 136, 148, 149, 175, 217, 218, 235, 239 Silhouette (1983), 6, 15, 16, 33–36, 56–63, 65, 68, 149, 167, 179, 187, 210, 231 Simba, A-dZiko, 16, 33, 87, 89–107, 109–113, 116, 116n3, 117n12 Sissay, Lemn, 195n22, 203 Something Dark (2004), 195n22 Sistren (theatre company), 38 Slavery, 33, 48, 60, 63, 114, 185 Smartt, Dorothea, 32, 39, 41, 44, 71, 73n15, 142, 156n10, 207, 214, 223n7 and Sherelle Mitchell, From You to Me to You (1994), 214 Social realism, 5, 50 Sociology, 12 Soho Poly theatre, see Soho Theatre Soho Theatre, 42, 73n19, 88, 169, 234, 237, 238, 244n14 Song, 13, 14, 28, 54, 60, 65, 69, 95, 104, 106, 110, 113, 118n20, 123, 140, 143, 148, 171, 173, 175, 180, 196n24, 240 See also Music

262 

INDEX

Spare Rib (magazine), 32, 36, 124, 143 Spencer, Charles, 31 Spiderwoman Theater (performance troupe), 27 Spillers, Hortense, 3, 147, 191 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 5 Spotlighting, see Lighting Stafford-Clark, Max, 32, 242n3 Staunch Poets and Players, 86 Stereotypes, 232 Stop and search (‘sus’ law), see Police Story of M, The (1994), 6, 7, 17, 51, 53, 62, 66, 201, 207–209, 212–222, 223n8, 232 Storytelling, 89, 134, 203 Streets Alive (theatre company), 135 SuAndi, 4, 6–8, 10, 12, 17, 23, 51, 53, 62, 66, 71, 96, 126, 134, 154, 201–222, 230, 232, 234 The Calling (2005), 207, 210 I Love the Blackness of My People (2003), 209 In My Father’s House (2001), 12, 209, 211 Mary Seacole (2000), 210, 223n9 Nearly Forty (1992), 206 The Story of M (1994), 6, 7, 17, 51, 53, 62, 66, 201, 207–209, 212–222, 223n8, 232 Style in Performance (1990), 205, 222n5 There Will Be No Tears (1995), 207 This Is All I’ve Got To Say (1993), 206, 207, 210, 219, 222n6 Subjectivity, 3, 16, 51, 150, 186, 189, 232 Sulkin, David, 24 Sulter, Maud, 27, 36, 40, 57, 65, 66, 73n11, 117n9 Sustained Theatre, 11 Sweet Honey in the Rock (a capella ensemble), 27, 95 Sylvestre, Cleo, 24

T Talawa Theatre Company, 26, 164, 168, 236 Tamsho, Tina, 205 Taylor, Lib, 60 Technology, 7, 12, 215, 232 Television, 32, 40, 42, 49, 98, 105, 207, 229, 235, 242n1, 243n6 Temba Theatre Company, 25, 73n10, 88, 92, 114, 241 Terracciano, Alda, 164 Thatcher, Margaret, 88, 109, 170 Theatre company administration, 166 management, 41, 94, 166 Theatre in education, 89 Theatre of Black Women Chiaroscuro (1986), 41–43, 62, 88, 178, 182 Coping (1981), 28, 29 Miss Quashie and the Tiger’s Tail (1987), 43 Pyeyucca (1984), 6, 15, 16, 38–40, 56, 58, 63–71, 75n29, 102, 109, 153, 167, 177, 231 Silhouette (1983), 6, 15, 16, 33–36, 56–63, 65, 68, 149, 167, 179, 187, 210, 231 Theatre Royal Stratford East, 26, 168 thinkofariver (1987), 6, 16, 30, 92–94, 100, 105–110, 114, 196n24, 231 Tiger Teeth Clenched Not to Bite (1982), 31, 50–56, 191 Tompsett, Ruth, 30, 47 Topping, Graham, 153 Training, 25, 30, 86, 91, 125–127, 134, 151, 166, 212, 231 Trauma, 60, 114, 166, 178, 181, 185 Tribesman Community Arts Workshop, 92 Tricycle Theatre, 42, 74n23, 96, 155n4

 INDEX 

tucker green, debbie, 236 born bad (2003), 44, 155n9, 234, 235 dirty butterfly (2003), 234, 243n10 ear for eye (2018), 242n5 generations (2007), 115, 118n20, 243n8 hang (2015), 235, 242n5 Lament (2016), 235 nut (2013), 236, 242n5 a profoundly affectionate, passionate devotion to someone (-noun) (2017), 242n5 random (2008), 7, 43, 51, 53, 66, 138, 155n5, 181, 213, 217, 233–235, 243n5 Second Coming (2014), 235, 243n5 She Three (1997), 184, 236, 238, 243n10 stoning mary (2005), 115, 234 Stratford/Two Women (2000), 57, 61, 149, 167, 179, 236–238, 243n10, 243n13, 244n14 trade (2004), 115, 184, 235 truth and reconciliation (2011), 115, 233, 242n5 Tyson, Cathy, 26 Tyson, Jennifer, 41, 73n15 U Ugwu, Catherine, 10, 207, 211, 219 Unfinished Histories, see Archives University of Bristol Theatre Collection, see Archives Unpublished material, 1, 15, 239 V Victoria and Albert Museum, see Archives Violence racialised, 4, 18, 27, 30, 59, 60, 129, 138, 167, 183, 205, 217

263

sexual, 175, 181 See also Abuse Voice, 14, 25, 28, 38, 48, 49, 51, 54, 57, 59, 60, 62, 70, 71, 95, 100–102, 104, 106, 107, 109, 110, 131, 138, 139, 142, 148, 151–154, 167, 176, 181, 185, 188, 189, 202, 203, 206, 214, 219, 221, 222n2 W Walker, Alice, 27 Wallace, Michelle, 100, 101 Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (1979), 100 Wares, Sacha, 235 Watchers and Seekers: Creative Writing by Black Women in Britain (1987), 88 Weems, Carrie Mae, 206 West End Centre, Aldershot, 127, 131 Whiteness, 64, 68, 174, 221 Williams, Hazel, 16, 86, 87, 89, 92, 94–96, 98, 100, 102, 105, 107, 110, 111, 113, 116 Williams, Joan, 24, 28, 72n5 Williams, Roy, 155n5, 162 Windrush, SS Empire, 23, 66, 171, 191 See also Migration Women, 1, 23, 85, 123–154, 161, 201, 230 Women in Entertainment (organisation, 1980–1988), 43 Women’s Press, the, 92 Women’s Theatre Collection, University of Bristol, see Archives

264 

INDEX

Wong, Denise, 4, 16, 25, 124–127, 129, 133–137, 139, 152, 153, 155n1, 155n2, 168, 169, 202, 210 Workshops ‘Black Women Playwrights’ (2012),’ 208 ‘Talking Black,’ 30 ‘Write Sister!,’ 168 X X, Malcolm, 87, 216, 217, 243n11 Y Yaw, Sandra, 142 Zerri’s Choice (1989), 142 YMCA Centre, Finsbury Park, 87 Young, Lola, 63 Young Vic theatre, 131 Young Writers Festival (Royal Court Theatre), 31, 72n8 Youth, 13, 39, 51, 53, 94, 149, 178

Z Zephaniah, Benjamin, 104, 205 Zindika, 6, 9, 10, 16, 17, 37, 40, 61, 66, 115, 126, 133, 140, 141, 154, 161–194, 194n6, 195n19, 195n21, 201, 210, 211, 213, 222, 230–232 Akwaaba (1994), 169, 193 A Daughter’s Grace (1992), 166, 193 The Day Mother Took Us to the Seaside (1996), 6, 16, 161, 164, 169, 184–194, 210, 213, 232 Leonora’s Dance (1993), 66, 161, 164, 166–170, 174, 190, 195n19 Paper and Stone (1989), 6, 16, 17, 61, 115, 140, 141, 161–166, 170–185, 187, 193, 194n6, 195n19, 195n21, 210, 213, 231 Secrets of Makaleng (1999), 169 Valiant Women (2010), 170 When Will I See You Again? (2002), 170