Author: folaamuludun

When Black people and non-Black people alike speak about the ‘Black community’, I feel conflicted. Although there are shared experiences brought about by being the same skin colour, and although I can express solidarity with Black people across the world, there is no one Black community, but rather communities. To homogenise Black people into one group, to deny that there are differences between how even two Black people living in the same country, the same city, or the same road, might understand their Blackness, is reductive and flattens intersecting issues of class, ethnicity, gender and sexuality in favour of ‘easy’ racial categorisation.

With The P Word, Waleed Akhtar turns the tender romance between two gay Pakistani men living in London into a timely conversation about race, politics, and (internalised) prejudices. Akhtar, who plays Billy (a purposeful Anglicisation of his full name, Bilal), also explores issues of self-hatred and fatphobia with his character. Bilal is a London boy and gym buff, but his workouts are always punishments for being unlovable, a way to control something in his life when he cannot control the affections of others. Akhtar’s portrayal of this inner turmoil isn’t always the most convincing, especially when compared to Esh Alladi, who with incredible sensitivity and earnestness, plays Zafar, a Pakistani asylum seeker who inspires Billy to go on a journey of self-reflection and growth. Alladi’s wide-eyed naivete makes for a tour-de-force of a performance here. 

Zafar’s story – a gay man who’s fled Pakistani after his father killed his partner and is now surviving in Hounslow, subject to the malicious and draconian rules of the Home Office forces – makes Bilal’s story unfortunately weak in comparison. This is especially clear in the beginning when the two men’s monologues about their backstories intertwine – Zafar’s devastatingly sombre, Bilal’s (where he speaks about his Grindr hook-ups) played for laughs. 

When both storylines intertwine, during London’s annual Pride parade, director Anthony Simpson-Pike offers us a beautifully-staged story about two very different experiences of being Pakistani and gay, and how while the two characters overcome these differences here, most asylum seekers aren’t afforded such chances to have a Bollywood-style love story and ending. Simpson-Pike and sound designer Xana work the voiceovers of various off-stage characters into the narrative seamlessly – in Zafar’s story, the oppressive voices of policemen, Home Office employees, and others boom through the auditorium, which Alladi plays off with affecting realism (he cowers, left bewildered by British and Pakistani homophobia and cruelty). In comparison, Bilal is given the luxury of controlling his narrative, acting out his off-stage characters (including Fat Jason, often the butt of his jokes). 

It is only until the end when the character of Bilal is really put in Zafar’s shoes, a scene in which Akhtar truly shines and which is a perfect dramatisation of Zafar’s line,  ‘I’m not in your Britain. I’m in another Britain’. Despite the similarity between their two worlds, these two characters will never really understand what it’s like to be each other – Bilal will never understand how it must feel to walk the streets of London, unsure whether that will be the day that you’re deported at any moment to Pakistan or even Rwanda. 

The play may tend to over-explain, and its set leaves a lot to be desired for a play with two fashion-obsessed characters, but the lack of subtext isn’t a problem when this play is offering the kind of education for British audiences that is sorely needed. But this is simultaneously a show for Pakistanis, who’ll have first-hand knowledge of how harmful the titular slur is as well as the cultural references peppered throughout. On a larger scale, The P Word connects to the discourse around the strata that exists within all communities of colour, which allows Priiti Patels, Kemi Badenochs, Rishi Sunaks of the world to enact insidious policies on members of their own race because they choose not to put themselves in their shoes. 

Essentially Black follows two History undergrads at the University of Oxford: a mixed-race student called Jess and a Black student called Lydia. Both of them are part of the student body-led campaign to take down the statue of Cecil Rhodes overlooking Oriel College. Both of them, in different ways, are confronted with Oxford’s racist infrastructure. Jess has to reconcile the fact that she is the public face of the Rhodes Must Fall campaign with the fact that she is half white and has a white football-playing boyfriend, whose cancel-culture-hating friends alienate her. Meanwhile Lydia, a dark-skinned Londoner, struggles with hypervisibility and microaggressions, such as a white porter demanding identification from Lydia (and none of the white students) that she goes to the university. 

Although the characters are fictional, the Rhodes Must Fall campaign did actually take place throughout 2016. Despite the national coverage over this campaign, writer Naomi Denny relegates the actual goings-on of these historical events to the background – she also chooses to relax the portrayal of the University of Oxford. Losing the verisimilitude of the two girls’ university experience means losing vital plot-points which could have added dimensions to their stories and relationship. For example, neither Lydia nor Jess talk about the Oxford Afro-Caribbean Society which is a second family for most Black people who attend all-white, oppressive spaces like Oxbridge. 

The provocative title suggests this will be a play which interrogates what it means to be Black. What does it mean to speak on behalf of a Black country from which you don’t originate  based only because you share the same skin colour and not the same history or inherited trauma? What is the biological, social, and cultural essence of Blackness? Colorism is no undocumented thing, and at a university like Oxford, your proximity to whiteness is cultural capital. This is a cultural phenomenon which could have been explored through looking at Jess’s privilege through the point of view of Lydia. Instead, the play felt more invested in Jess’s journey, relationships, and interiority, which meant Lydia became sidelined. She spends half of the play in absentia, having decided to go back to London for the rest of the term. We don’t get to learn much of her experience of racism except for one outburst before her suspension. Even the scene that we see with the porter, where she is unable to get to her tutorial in time because she doesn’t have her ID on her, doesn’t have gravity to it – and this is despite how brilliantly Emily Olum plays Lydia’s frustrations. 

In this play, there are already more white characters than characters of Black descent and choosing to have Lydia be suspended only plays into colorism. Whose stories deserve the most time? Which Black people get to be heard and which Black people are silenced? Unfortunately, I know Black students who have had to leave Oxbridge for a few weeks, who have been at the brink of dropping out not just because of racist incidents but because of how poorly the College has dealt with it, and Lydia’s speech isn’t speaking for these people. She talks of going into shops and feeling stared at, which is only the tip of the overwhelming scrutiny one feels – and also ironically the overwhelming invisibility one feels in social and romantic settings – as a dark-skinned woman. While she is still on stage, Lydia objects to Jess being made the face of the campaign – why isn’t a Zimbabwean student spearheading it? However, this is only done in passing and neverly properly explored. 

Not only is Jess’s story told at the expense of Lydia’s, but Jess as a character (played, it must be noted, by the writer) is frustratingly contradictory. Instead of seeing Lydia’s struggles with feeling alienated and not heard, we watch Jess’s relationship troubles with her ‘blokey’ boyfriend. The second scene is devoted to their romantic-comicsque first date. While it garnered huge laughs from the audience, it fundamentally didn’t drive forward the action of the story. Throughout the play, Jess dismisses Lydia as histrionic, stating that her standoffishness is the reason she’s not fitting in – and then later monologues about how she feels left out in certain social circles. When Jess eventually breaks up with her boyfriend, it is not because of his affiliation with racist football and rugby lads but because he exasperatedly says that she is not Black, a sentiment which she herself espouses earlier in the play. 

Jess/Denny ends the play standing up in a Union debate about whether the statue should be taken down, saying the line, ‘we want to open up a conversation’. The problem is – we don’t. Black students who campaigned for the removal of the statue weren’t interested in deluging the process with bureaucratic procedures and meetings. This final line, along with the rest of the play, was differing, opting for a more whitewashed portrayal of what is an uncomfortable and painful reality. Sitting in that majority-white audience as one of three girls of Black descent in my Cambridge college year group, I felt unable to connect to the play. I didn’t see my experiences as a dark-skinned woman at that sort of university accurately and sensitively represented. 

With Trouble in Mind, a biting satire about the rehearsal process for an off-Broadway play, Alice Childress was set to become the first Black female playwright to have a play produced on Broadway. However, there was one caveat – the white producers wanted Childress to soften her tone so that the play would be palatable to white audiences. 

With this stipulation, Trouble in Mind would have become as diluted as the play which the cast is rehearsing – Chaos in Belleville, a play about a lynching which is written, directed, and produced by white men. The most experienced and most vocal Black cast member, Willetta Mayer, fights for the characters to be rewritten, to be more authentic. 

Just like Willetta, Childress refused to filter her voice, subsequently sacrificing the career mobility of being on Broadway. In fact, despite their overall submission to the infantilising white director Al Manners, many of the Black characters in Trouble speak out as surrogates for Childress’s lived experiences of racism as an African-American actress and playwright in an industry that claimed to be ‘race-conscious’ in the 1950s. Now, nearly seventy years later, at the National Theatre (following a recent Broadway revival), director Nancy Medina dares us to assess whether things have changed that much for Black artists in the theatre industry. 

The production begins with the sound of a heavy stage door swinging open and Willetta (Tanya Moodie) stepping onto the Dorfman stage, which has been transformed by Rajha Sakiry into a warm and dusty rehearsal space. This rehearsal room is in the margins of Broadway and the actors that move around in it are in the margins of the industry. While the Black actors, John (Daniel Adeosun), Sheldon (Cyril Nri), Millie (Naana Agyei-Ampadu) and Willetta, have all had some success, they’re currently stuck off-Broadway, trying to make ends meet, playing harmful stereotypes and yes-men to Manners with varying amounts of enthusiasm. 

Rory Keenan is particularly captivating as Manners. With grandiose gestures, he constantly competes with Moodie for dominance over the stage, infantilizes the other Black cast members, and insinuates more racist subtexts to his comedic words. In the second act, we get the privilege of watching his bizarre – and, at points, terrifying – direction. It’s just as fun watching Keenan indulgently watch the rehearsal run of Chaos as it is watching the chaotically staged play-within-a-play itself. 

Luckily, Medina handles the large ensemble more deftly than Manners. While she doesn’t have her actors prancing and flailing around the stage, she works with the movement director Rachael Nanyonjo to maximise the use of every corner of the intimate stage, as the actors interact with each other and move around fluidly. The first act feels like a game of musical chairs – at one point, John and Judy flirt noiselessly by sitting next to each other on the corner of the stage block; at another, Willetta gets relegated by Manners to the corner chair. By the third act, Willetta fights against the pecking order of the seating. Moodie’s herculean repositioning of Shakiry’s set attests to her fight to keep her voice – it is such an awe-inspiring moment of defiance and individualism, she (and the audience) doesn’t stop to ask, ‘at what cost?’ 

From the direction to the acting, the National Theatre’s production makes Childress’s words feel timeless, as if Trouble could have been set anywhere, at any time. While this speaks to this production’s thoughtful and sharp revival, it’s unfortunate that the racism in this 1950s play set in America still resonates so keenly in the 21st century on a British stage. 

The two teenage friends in Fair Play exchange dialogue with a fast pace which is characteristic of their shared passion – athletics, specifically the 800m race. These girls, Ann and Sophie, only ever meet during their training sessions at an athletics club, the running track of which forms the set. This track not only covers the ground of the stage but runs all the way up the walls. If Naomi Dawson’s design makes us, the audience, feel immersed in the world of training and athletics, we can only imagine how claustrophobic it must feel for these girls who face the never-ending pressures of performing well, beating their personal beats, and beating each other, as well as the pressures of school work, relationships, and puberty.  

At the beginning of the play, when Sophie, a White Brit played by Charlotte Beaumont (who brilliantly embodies the mannerisms of a girl who carries the weight of her adult-sized worries and ambitions on her teenage shoulders) asks Ann, a Nigerian-American played by NicK King, where she’s ‘really’ from, it’s clear that this play will also be about race. This question is a clever red-herring from writer Ella Road, because the real ‘race’ issue isn’t about migration and interpersonal microaggressions. It’s a play about racism in the sports industry and science. Road clearly draws from the real life experiences of South African 800m runner, Caster Semenya, for Ann’s story throughout her play. 

Semenya, in 2018, was told by the International Association of Athletics Federations that she could not participate in any athletics events because she had higher than average levels of testosterone which gave her an ‘unfair’ advantage over women with ‘normal’ testosterone levels (read: white women). In order to be able to compete, she would have to reduce her testosterone levels. The IAAF maintained that they wanted to ‘preserve fair and meaningful competition in the female classification’. In this play, in which Ann is similarly banned from running due to a disorder of sexual development, Road exposes the implicit racism and misogynoir of this pursuit for ‘fair play’, and has, in no uncertain terms, adapted Semenya’s trial and tribulation for the stage.  

Road draws heavily on Semenya’s arguments that she had used to challenge the IAAF’s ruling as inspiration for Ann’s dialogue. For example, Semenya (and Ann) lists other athletes, like Michael Phelps and LeBron James, who are also genetically different but haven’t been banned from participating in their respective sports. 

However, 30-year-old Semenya was speaking to an interviewer whereas 17-year-old Ann was speaking spontaneously to her friend. Because Road copies Semenya’s words verbatim, Ann’s lines come across as incongruous compared to the rest of her realistic teenage dialogue and vocabulary. Road, in devoting the crux of the second half of the play to delivering Semenya’s debate points against the IAAF, neglects to show us how Ann is feeling. We never get to witness Ann’s mental torment beyond her shout-crying Semenya’s words. 

Another example is when, three years after the IAAF’s ruling, Semenya told the Guardian, ‘I trained like a slave to be the greatest’ and that taking the drugs to lower her testerone levels would be like ‘taking the soul out of my body […] they want me to take my own system down.’ Ann, in the play, says, ‘the empire may have died but they’re still colonising our bodies’. This line does border on didacticism but is memorable because Road has honed in on Semenya’s off-hand analogy here about slavery, and connected it to a wider discourse around imperialism and white supremacy. Throughout the play, Road probes the objectification and devaluation of Black humanity in a more subtle way – through Sophie’s relationship to Ann. When Ann delivers this line, we see Sophie’s physical and facial response. Beaumont deftly conveys the shock of seeing her friend break down, the discomfort of not really understanding the problem with the ruling, and the relief of finding out that the reason why she can’t beat her friend has nothing to do with her ability. Sophie’s multifaceted response, we can imagine, is the response of most people (athletes and non-athletes alike) to Semenya’s tribulation and we get to see it on stage in real time with all of its emotional complexity. 

Sophie’s love-hate relationship with Ann acts as a microcosm for governing bodies in the sports industry. Like sponsors and those financially invested in athletics, Sophie loves how Ann motivates her, and provides her with entertainment during the arduous training sessions. Yet Sophie hates how she can’t easily exert control over Ann – Ann has her own life and boyfriend, and Sophie (who is, it is suggested, a lesbian) is annoyed that she can’t ‘have’ Ann. Frustrated with Ann’s effortless first-places and feeling like a failure, Sophie copies Ann – she copies her eating and sleep patterns, and treats her as a manual. Sophie sees Ann as a slacker, who eats Burger King and neglects her long runs (although we do see her during scene intervals train as hard as Sophie, as hard as Semenya would have been). Sophie sees Ann as a specimen of interest which she can’t access and figure out. If, then, each scene is like a bleep test and each conversation Ann and Sophie has flirts between competition and bonding, then this is symbolic of Sophie’s innate competitiveness. Sophie, however, never thinks to just speak to Ann about her anxieties and worries. Sophie, subconsciously, is like the IAAF in that she also turns her friend into a ‘thing’. It’s hard, however, to feel as angry with Sophie as it is to feel anger against the athletics governing bodies, who also want to exert control over Ann. This is because Road, quite rightly, gives Sophie’s her own bodily ‘defects’ and disorders, such as osteoporosis and disordered eating, which elicit sympathy. 

However, while Sophie also has these disorders, her body is never objectified – and that is the crucial difference between the way Black women and white women are treated, not just in sport, but throughout life in general. Road shows us how Black women are constantly objectified, turned into ‘bodies’, which white people try to control and diminish.