What are the themes of your play?
At the heart of the play is love. Whether it be Black love, love of music, love of home, of pirate radio culture and youth culture. I think that’s the theme I really wanted to highlight and explore through the lenses of the protagonists.
Why did you write it and why now?
The phrase “resistance as a springboard for joy” was one that I thought about as I began to write the play in 2021, a year after the Black Lives Matter movement arose in the public consciousness. It was in having conversations with friends and family, where I started questioning more about how rites of passage for young Black people differed from their white counterparts and how racism, and with it, adultification, affected how often young Black kids aren’t able to just exist. One of the plot points is Afia and Jama getting rejected from a nightclub. I wanted to use that as a catalyst to flip a sad event into a point of celebration. Specifically when looking at the ritual of Black people in Britain during 1980s creating and curating a space of joy and refuge and have these two working class young Black kids not only be witness to it, through their mention of pirate radio culture and watching their parent’s house parties when they should be in bed, but also know they are actively participating in this ritual by transforming their council estate into an adventure playground as kids and going to a house party themselves. Coming back to ‘rite to party’ feels particularly relevant to me, as there is something special about acknowledging that you’re building on the creative legacies and communal gatherings of your elders, whether it be through parties, jam sessions, or spoken word events that happen today.
Which playwrights are you influenced by and why?
Seeing Tristan Fynn-Aiduenu’s direction on Arinze Kene’s Little Baby Jesus in 2019 was definitely a transformative experience for me as a creative! It felt really immersive, animated and relatable. As a writer and audio-maker, I always want to try and infuse that feeling when I write. I’m also very influenced by Michaela Coel, debbie tucker green, Sabrina Mahfouz, Rianna Simons, Jasmine Lee-Jones and Martin Crimp. It’s the lyrical nature of their work for some, and the humour and playfulness in others, that I’m really inspired by and gravitate towards.
What do you hope to achieve as a playwright?
As a writer, I am really interested in how music, spoken word and even audio can be used in theatre and live performance to create work in more interdisciplinary ways. To what extent can West African storytelling traditions be employed in stories about Black-British or, in my case, Ghanaian-British identity? Can theatre be perceived as a live concept album, and what impact does it have on both forms? What does a performative essay look like, and can that ever exist in theatre? Overall, I’m really interested in exploring what different forms of writing and storytelling can teach me about what my definition of theatre is and has the potential to be in different contexts, and I’m looking forward to experimenting with that even more!