‘The first Nigerian Musical to hit London’s west end’,1 Wàkáá (Show, 2016) is only an example of the varied performances written and produced in the capital by African artists or British-born artists of African descent in the past ten years.2 Productions include Levi David Addai’s House of Agnes (Ovalhouse, 2008) and I Have a Dream (Polka, 2011), Femi Oguns’s Torn (Arcola, 2008), Ade Solanke’s Pandora’s Box (Almeida, 2008; Arcola, 2012) and East End Boys , West End Girls (Arcola, 2014), Two Gents’ Vakomana Vaviri ve Zimbabwe (Ovalhouse, 2008) and Kupenga Kwa Hamlet (Ovalhouse, 2010), Janice Okoh’s Egusi Soup (Sir John Mills, 2009; Soho, 2012), Wole Soyinka ’s Death and the King’s Horseman (National Theatre, 2009), Oladipo Agboluaje ’s Iya-Ile (Soho, 2009), The Garbage King (Unicorn, 2010) and New Nigerians (Arcola, 2017), Inua Ellams’s The 14th Tale (Arcola, 2009), Untitled (Soho, 2010) and Barber Shop Chronicles (Dorfman/National, 2017), Anthony Abuah’s Another Biafra (Cockpit, 2010), Zulu Sofola’s Wedlock of the Gods (Cochrane, 2011), Chuck Mike , Antonia Kemi and Tonderai Munyevu’s Zhe: [Noun] Undefined (Arcola, 2012), Bola Agbaje’s Belong (Royal Court, 2012) and The Burial (Albany, 2013), Ola Rotimi’s Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again (George Wood Theatre, Goldsmiths, 2012) and The Gods Are Not to Blame (Lost Theatre, 2015), Mojisola Adebayo’s Desert Boy (Albany, 2011) and I Stand Corrected (Ovalhouse, 2012), Athol Fugard , John Kani and Winston Ntshona’s The Island (Young Vic, 2013) and Sizwe Bansi Is Dead (Young Vic, 2014), Denton Chikura’s The Epic Adventure of Nhamo the Manyika Warrior and His Sexy Wife Chipo (Tricycle, 2013),3 Yael Farber’s Mies Julie (Riverside, 2013), the multi-authored Feast (Young Vic, 2013), Gbolahan Obisesan’s How Nigeria Became: A Story, and a Spear That Didn’t Work (Unicorn, 2014), Diana Nneka Atuona’s Liberian Girl (Royal Court, 2015), Lola Shoneyin and Rotimi Babatunde’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives (Theatre Royal Stratford East, 2015; Arcola, 2018), Mongiwekhaya Noma Dumezweni’s I See You (Royal Court, 2016), Cont Mhlanga’s Workshop Negative (Gate, 2016), Michael Williams and Cape Town Opera’s Mandela Trilogy (Royal Festival Hall, 2016), Theresa Ikoko ’s Girls (Soho, 2016), Jonny Steinberg and Isango Ensemble’s A Man of Good Hope (Young Vic, 2016), Zodwa Nyoni’s Nine Lives (Arcola, 2016), and Kgomotso Khunoane’s The Fall (Royal Court, 2017).
Bringing together academics and theatre practitioners currently active in London, Africa on the Contemporary London Stage is the first collection of essays and interviews to focus specifically on this ‘African’ corpus—a theatre that stems from the collaboration of playwrights, directors, and producers who were born and/or trained in Africa; from the influence of African theatre practices; from a background of African premières; from the involvement of African companies; in short, from the specificity of African cultures, languages, and theatrical contexts. In examining the artists and companies that have made (not always in unquestioned ways) Africa ‘visible’ on the London stage, this collection discusses whether the Africa that emerges from the London scene is stereotypical, or whether it has, on the contrary, contributed to an understanding of the continent and its arts. Following in the steps of volumes such as the recent Modern and Contemporary Black British Drama, which makes ‘the case of a black dramatic canon’ (Brewer et al. 2015, 1) distinct from the Asian and the African American, but which combines West Indian and African artists in its scope,4 Africa on the Contemporary London Stage argues for a further specificity of African theatre, to the exclusion of playwrights from the Caribbean or of Caribbean descent. Important productions about Africa such as debbie tucker green’s Truth and Reconciliation (Royal Court, 2011) and random/generations (Minerva, 2018) or Charlene James ’s Cuttin’ It (Young Vic, 2016), are therefore not included in our examination.5
This is not to deny the common challenges that black theatre (and communities) face in contemporary Britain. The reality of economic and social disadvantage, as well as the racism and prejudice that continue undermining relations in the UK are such that it is ‘not surprising […] that the most visible black playwrights in recent years have been those whose work explicitly addresses the urgent social issues of our times’ (Goddard 2015, ix). Furthermore, while the appointment of Kwame Kwei-Armah as artistic director of the Young Vic in late 2017 is a ‘major step forward for diversity in British theatre’ (Ellis-Petersen 2017), the funding issues discussed above all in Part II of this volume, as well as issues of under-representation of black communities in theatre and film, and the disinformation and/or racial prejudice in the expectations of audiences and critics mean that effective equality on stage is yet far to be achieved.
Nor is our intention here, in excluding Caribbean (diasporic) writers, to imply a monolithic interpretation of what ‘Africa’ is (or should be) on the British stage. Rather, this is to share with previous criticism an increasing uneasiness with the use of the umbrella term ‘black’ for cultural backgrounds as diverse as the African, the Caribbean, and the black British. If, on the one hand, the term ‘black’ has become, in the words of Yvonne Brewster, ‘synonymous with underdeveloped, underprivileged, under-represented’ (2009, 65), on the other it has also turned out to be ‘a convenient’ definition ‘given to those in search of relatively small amounts of earmarked funding or attention, [a] kind of neo-colonisation’ (ibid.) that may, in Keith Peacock’s analysis, ‘encourage a ghettoisation of their [black playwrights’] work’ (2015, 153). In her study Contemporary Black and Asian Women Playwrights in Britain (2003), Gabrielle Griffin has similarly observed that whereas ‘[t]he “blackification” of women from diverse communities in Britain facilitated the adoption of the term “black” as the signifier of a political allegiance of people who suffer/ed racialized oppression in Britain’ (10), this term may not reflect the work of the many playwrights that ‘thematise the issue of differences between Black people coming from African countries and Black people coming from the Caribbean’ (12)—a point that has also been stressed by more recent criticism (Ponnuswami 2015, 83). If, in the words of Michael Pearce (2017), ‘[t]oday black tends to refer to people of African ancestry only’ (ebook, Notes on Terminology), general definitions like ‘black British’ still refer to both the African and African-Caribbean heritage, hence our argument for a closer focus on Africa. While ‘black British’ is used in this volume to hint to the wider context of BME theatre in the UK when playwrights are British citizens, Africa on the Contemporary London Stage also wishes to represent a point of departure from studies of black British theatre, the perspective of which the chapters in this collection aim at complementing by offering a specific focus on the African component of this theatre.
Two factors in particular—the ‘mainstream recognition’ (Goddard 2015, 3) enjoyed by black British theatre in the twenty-first century, a...