Talawa Theatre Company is one of the UK's foremost Black theatre companies.
In this Interview with Deborah Sawyerr, Executive Director, and Patricia Cumper, Artistic Director, they talk about reaching new Black theatre audiences and Unzipped Unchained - Talawa's season of new writings.
PC - The company is 21 years old, and for 17 of those years, Yvonne [Brewster] was the director. It was moving towards having its own space and it really was, and is still, the foremost Black theatre company.
There was a time when we wanted a theatre of our own, and we had to rethink from scratch what the company was about. We are about the Black British experience in its full range, not just British stories, not just earth mother stories, but all the complexities of the Black British experience. We want to give opportunities to Black and Asian talented practitioners. Not just actors or writers, but designers, marketers, producers and everything.
The difficult one is that we are interested in developing new Black audiences for the work that we do, but also audiences for Black work. This is one of the main challenges that we have set ourselves.
We have revamped the company and begun to work towards this new vision. We have put in place three years’ worth of programming and a very clear pattern of annual activities so that we know what we are doing.
We have honed our activities so that they fit in with our ethos.
In December of last year, we learned that we had our funding restored until the review, which everyone is very keen on. It will be in April, the beginning of the next financial year.
Everyone is under review for 08/09. There will be a comprehensive spending review. By October, everyone will know how much funding they have – it’s not just our funding.
I think we have a really strong relationship with the Arts Council. I think we had to shake ourselves out of old habits and I think the Arts Council had to shake itself out of a certain complacency. I think both things have happened.
Z – What happened with the Cochrane Theatre? At one time, that was meant to be a permanent home for Talawa.
DS - That was a long time ago.
PC – That was about being resident in the building, but the building itself and theatre in the building goes along with the university next door.
Our present Board still very much has the ambition that within the next decade, we will be in our own theatre. What we are doing is strengthening the company and making sure that, when these things happen, we are absolutely in the right place to do what we need to do.
Z – What do you mean by ‘new Black audiences’?
PC – What it means to be Black British is becoming increasingly complex. Apart from there being second- and third-generation
The numbers have grown, but also, there is a very strong middle class aspirational aspect to what it means to be Black British. Those are the audiences – the people who are very comfortable going to see standup comedy, who go to hear music, who occasionally go to an Angie Le Mar show, who like their poetry slams and that kind of thing – those are the audiences that we are going after. We become one of the things in Time Out that they can choose from, not necessarily as a political act of supporting Black theatre, but rather that they are –
DS – An alternative.
PC – Yes, a quality alternative. The more I am around
Z – A younger generation.
PC – Yes, people who were born here, they have created homes and careers and they’ve got property and everything else, and one of the things I don’t think theatre has done for them is to say, this is where you are welcome. This is where your stories are going to be told.
Z – When and how did you first learn about the Maafa?
DS – I learned about it in that classic way that a young person who is educated in the
PC – I was born and grew up in the
Z – But it wasn’t here.
DS - No. It was something you learned about in school. We all drew that picture of the ship. And then we revisited it a couple of years later in another guise, but essentially, it was in school.
PC – I was very lucky, I had a father who understood quite early that, if we were to take pride in who we were, that had to be part of how we saw ourselves. My son - in bringing him up, the one thing I have always said to him is that, if you survived the Middle Passage, you were strong. And if you lived on those estates and you still managed to stay sane and keep an identity, you were smart. So that’s your heritage – you’re tough, you’re smart, and that’s who you are.
I was not having anybody saying to him that somehow because you have been victimised by a system, that has made you less than you are. And that came to me from my father as well. And with that came an understanding that slavery was about economics and that racism was the way they justified economic exploitation.
Z – Do you remember when you first heard about slavery?
PC – It probably would have been when I was about six or seven. My awareness of how huge it was probably would have come at about 10 or 11, when we went to high school and we had to study it.
Z – Do you remember how you felt when you first heard about slavery?
PC - No, I have no real recollection.
Z – Can you say how this knowledge affects you now?
PC – It does affect me in the sense that it was a huge event in history that I think people are refusing to face. I think there is an honest dialogue about the Transatlantic slave trade that has not happened.
For example, when I hear people trying to equate modern-day slavery with the Transatlantic trade, it makes me extremely angry because one was not only legal, it was the foundation of the economic and social system, whereas the other is a completely illegal activity.
It also means, in terms of Talawa, that what we have tried to do is not respond per se to the idea of this Bicentenary of an act that made things worse for the slaves rather than better, and may have perpetrated a myth that Wilberforce was the man that changed things and not talk about the rebellions and everything else.
What we have done in terms of the work that we have done in response to this year is to contextualise the Black British presence so that people understand that we are not here on sufferance, we have been part of the fabric of this society for 2000 years. And that actually, everything we have contributed has made the country stronger. That is the kind of thinking that has informed the choices we have made.
We are not going to be the theatre company that puts images of slavery on the stage and things like that. What we will do is talk to you, in many ways, about how slavery has informed the reality that we are living today. How history resonates now.
DS – As Pat says, if you survived the Middle Passage, you were strong, if you survived the plantations, you were clever. So it’s knowing that that strength and those smarts are part of my heritage. And you can see it today. You can see people who are clever and smart and doing the best that they can do. I strive to be as clever and smart and as proactive and forward-thinking as I can be.
PC – This is why I think the name of the company is so apt. Because I think if awards were given for chutzpah, the company would get them. We simply get up there and say ‘We would like to do this, please’. It is exactly the confidence that we feel from that heritage that allows us to do this. That anger that anyone should look at it any differently that drives us and makes us say, we are going to do it. We are going to do it.
DS – I spent the last seven years being the only Black female production manager in
Z - Tell me about Unzipped/Unchained.
PC - Unzipped stems from the writers’ group that we run here. Unzipped/ Unchained was a challenge that we set for the writers, which was, give us your reaction to slavery. Tell the story of your reaction to slavery. The responses we got were fascinating. There was a completely allegorical story set in
We had somebody who talked about the oppression of postcolonial polite society and how anybody who tried to be rebellious was put down.
We had a young Sikh talking about what it was like to be on the run from a family because a Sikh girl married a white boy.
So it’s all the different kinds of slavery. About the slavery of coping with daily life, how do you get out of that bind.
So it was really interesting the responses that we had. There were none that actually directly responded to the slave trade.
Ashley talked about what had happened at the point where slavery had ended and the Asian indentured labour was coming in, and saw this as another type of slavery. And then how were these two races pitted against one another by the people who still controlled the estates? And how did they find their way through that, in order to fall in love?
So there are all sorts of responses and I think they contextualise the whole idea.
Z – So I am a bit curious because you just said you get very angry when people try to equate what happened with different kinds of slavery.
PC – With what they call modern-day slavery. Trafficking is illegal. Child prostitution is illegal. Slavery was completely legal.
DS – And that’s the difference. We are not denigrating what is happening now. We are saying that they are difficult to equate because one is completely illegal and one was legal.
Z – Everyone was complicit.
PC – And one went on for hundreds of years. And people made a lot of money from it.
Z – Everyone who possibly could made money from it.
PC – Including the Church.
Z – Yes, everyone who possibly could. Christians, Jews, Muslims.
PC – And, to a certain extent, we are still living with the legacy of their guilt as well. And it is interesting that we sometimes have to take on board their guilt for their actions.
Z – What were audiences’ responses to Unzipped/Unchained?
PC – They really enjoyed the pieces, but what is more interesting than that is the Theatre Royal’s response, in that almost every writer has been taken up either to develop a piece or to write something new.
DS – In essence, it was about the quality of the writing. And the variety of the stories.
PC – And the fact that they were not writing the angry young Black man story. They were writing everything else. We got good responses from media houses and from other theatres. So it was sort of an act of liberation - we got them past being seen as “a Black writer” and they are now seen as “a writer”. That was really important.
The first pieces were performed at Soho Theatre. We will be developing some of them at Hampstead and a few other places.
Z – What do you think is the role of an arts company, e.g. a theatre company, in addressing and exploring these historical issues?
DS – I think it’s as the company chooses. I don’t think there is an overall line that companies should or should not take part.
PC – I would not say there is a mission for every company to respond to [the Bicentenary]. But I think if you are going to respond to it, you need to have a really clear, reasoned stance that the company is taking, and then choose your responses in accordance with that. So that you are not going off scattershot. It’s not a kneejerk emotional response, you have a reason for the things you are doing
This is why we are invested in developing the theatre in education piece which is about how identity is structured. Which may eventually talk about aspects of slavery, and it’s about how it resonates today. This is why, in Unchained, we tried to get them literally to unchain their minds.
Different companies will respond differently. There is a huge temptation in terms of funds. You will get funding for specifically slavery-related projects and I think some companies quite rightly have invested in those. But we decided to say, quite calmly, that this is an issue that we engaged with in this way – how it resonates today is what we are going to respond to.
Zhana - What impact do you think the arts can have on people’s thinking around this issue? What would you ideally like to see happen?
PC – For me, it varies. Some stories you go to see to learn about. Some stories, you go to be entertained. It depends on the audience and what they want to see at which time.
I would like to see a balance to the stories – stories that are not just about Wilberforce. If I hear one more version of Amazing Grace, I may have to get the harmonica out.
I would like to see a balance about both Black and heroes who fought and put their eyes on the line and made who it their mission to ensure that the trade came to an end.
DS – One thing I feel quite passionate about is that stories are knowledge, and when we tell stories, what you do is enrich people’s knowledge. Sometimes you entertaining them, sometimes you are educating them. But always, you are building into this sense of what the world is.
What mainstream or white-based theatre is about is reassuring them that their world view is right. What we need to do is be equally confident and say, our stories are a part of that. We always have been a part of that and we continue to be a part of that.
The really, really long-term plan is for people to be aware and proud of the contribution we have made to this society and feel confident about our place here. If we can through theatre and through art and through music and all those other things, root people in so that they feel that they belong, the benefits are huge. You have kids who feel that they have a future here. You have people who are happy to invest here. You have a mainstream population who understand that the minority are not here to threaten them, but who actually have contributed. To me, that’s a long, long, long, long, long-term plan.
By knowing more about each other – even the painful things. This is why this bicentenary is interesting to me. There is a conversation to be had that says this society can say it was wrong, it should never have happened. If that happened, then the conversation could start with, yes, alright, it happened, now how can we move on from here?
We are busy acknowledging the end of the slave trade. Nobody has acknowledged the beginning. So it’s not going to heal until that has been done.
My dream for the whole thing would be that the study of African resistance and the events of those 300 years were studied, not necessarily just those of the slave trade, but all the things that happened around it. All the art forms that were created. What happened in
Since it’s 21 years between now and the actual end of slavery, wouldn’t it be nice to have a foundation for 21 years that actually studied that, so that we would have an intervention in the curriculum and so that we would have physical monument, something permanent. It’s not just the unknown slave.
At church, they made a tribute to the unknown slave. That slave was my grandfather’s grandfather and I am pretty damn sure my grandfather knew who he was. So it’s not unknown.
So we need some sort of monument or something that marks that and I think if you can do those things confidently, then you begin to make a real intervention and create institutions to say that we are here and we are here for a reason. In the same way that we hope to make plays that run on and on that tell stories of Mary Seacole and all the people, all the contributions that we have made over time.
And we don’t shirk the difficult things. We balance the picture.
That’s the ideal in the very long term. In the meantime, we are just trying to make really good theatre that just celebrates a bit of who we are.
Z – I would like to think that, in a year’s time, the general perception will be different from how it is this year. In 2008, people will have learned something.
PC – People have learned. In some of the conversations I have had, people have said, ‘Oh, my God. We didn’t realise. We never knew.’ White friends of mine who thought they knew, and then have seen a couple of programmes or they have read a bit of something. And there is shame on their part. And anger on ours. All of these things are going to have to be dealt with.