Six Plays by Black and Asian Women Writers
Edited by Kadija Sesay

A landmark collection of plays for stage, screen, and radio, Six Plays by Black and Asian Women Writers has become a seminal collection for libraries, drama schools, and educational institutions.

(Revised Edition, 2022)

Includes Playwrights: Rukhsana Ahmad, Maya Chowdhry, Trish Cooke, Winsome Pinnock, Meera Syal, Zindika

Essays and contributions by: Bernardine Evaristo, Valerie Small, Deirdre Osborne, Sita Ramamurthy, and Stella Oni

This new edition of Six Plays by Black and Asian Women Writers includes a revised introduction together with the original essays from the 1993 edition.

The collection features writers who have since gained national recognition with works produced for film, television, radio, and stage, working with some of the most distinguished actors, directors, and producers of African and Asian descent in Britain. When first published, this collection was an important milestone in British theatre, being the first book to offer diverse female role models both by the playwrights themselves and through the characters in their plays.

Since the original 1993 publication, Meera Syal has become an international name as an actor, writer, and producer, with credits including the popular West End musical, Bombay Dreams. Winsome Pinnock has written numerous plays, many staged at the National Theatre, and is now regarded as the ‘godmother of Black theatre’ in the UK. Maya Chowdhry has explored multimedia formats and co-edited Acts of Passion: Sexuality, Gender and Performance. Zindika has written for dance theatre and co-edited When Will I See You Again with Natalie Smith. Rukhsana Ahmad co-founded Kali Theatre and has published novels and plays, including Mistaken and Homing Birds. Trish Cooke has had a successful career as a children’s book author and TV presenter. Bernardine Evaristo, who contributed essays to this edition, won the Booker Prize for Girl, Woman, Other in 2019.

Moving from the margins to the theatrical mainstream has been slow for playwrights from ethnic minorities. More than twenty years since the first publication of this anthology, the case for a Black-owned and managed theatre in Britain is still being made, with funding yet to be secured.

Come to our Black History Month book signing event on 27th October – book on Eventbrite.

“The essence of theatre, according to Stuart Griffiths, lies not in the word so much as its ability to affect us, touch us so that we feel pleasure or pain, forcing us to identify with it by reflecting something significant to our life… Black theatre in Britain is surviving. Though few plays have made it to West End stages, productions on the fringe have had continuing success. These plays attract a predominantly Black audience and contain all the elements of the greatest drama: symbolism, language, conflict, rhythm. This is popular theatre at its best using every means necessary to awaken residues of oral traditions buried in the depths of the race memory.” —Valerie Small, The Importance Of Oral Tradition To Black Theatre (1993)

“The new writing initiatives of the late 20th century grew out of a need to haul white elitist (male-dominated) theatre into a multi-cultural world wherein the plays staged were more accurately reflective of surrounding society, demographically and culturally… Black drama exposes mainstream (predominantly white) theatre-goers to aspects of Black British cultural input that is as indigenous to contemporary British cultural identity as that provided by white playwrights.” —Deirdre Osborne, A Recent Look At Black Women Playwrights (2005)

Contents

• Introduction | Kadija George
• The Importance of Oral Tradition to Black Theatre | Valerie Small
• The Write Stuff | Sita Ramamurthy
• Black Women in Theatre | Bernardine Evaristo
• The Theatre of Black Women: Britain’s First Black Women’s Theatre Company | Bernardine Evaristo
• Interview with Yvonne Brewster | Stella Oni
• A Recent Look At Black Women Playwrights | Deirdre Osborne

The Plays

• A Hero’s Welcome by Winsome Pinnock – A tale of misplaced loyalty, longing for escape, and early love.
• Monsoon by Maya Chowdhry – A poetic account of a young woman’s sexual awakening.
• Leonora’s Dance by Zindika – Four women share the house of a ballet dancer, whose contact with the supernatural lays the ghosts of the past to rest.
• My Sister-Wife by Meera Syal – A taut thriller about two women who discover they are both married to the same man.
• Song for a Sanctuary by Rukhsana Ahmad – Explores the painful dilemma of an Asian woman forced to seek help from a women’s refuge.
• Running Dream by Trish Cooke – Tells the story of three generations of West Indian women with warmth and humor.