Через 50 лет после премьеры в Лондоне возобновляется легендарная пьеса Нтозаке Шанг «Для цветных девушек»

In a rehearsal room in east London, the women of for colored girls are in constant motion: stretching, laughing, singing, making shapes with their bodies. Around them, the walls are adorned with a constellation of references: a photograph from the Black Sex Worker Liberation march, a picture of Serena Williams, another of an ancient West African griot. It is week four, and the cast are rehearsing a work that has been challenging the conventions of theatre for half a century. Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, first performed in 1974, is a kaleidoscopic sequence of 20 poems following seven women through love, sex, violence and survival. When the work reached Broadway back in 1976, Shange became only the second Black woman to have a play produced there. Now, 50 years on, the award-winning theatre director Diane Page is helming its return to east London’s Yard Theatre. “I can’t believe that this play was written 50 years ago,” Page tells me during the rehearsal lunch break. “Some things could have been written yesterday, which is testament to its brilliance. It deserves to be reintroduced.” For colored girls has become a touchstone for generations of Black women artists – it was revolutionary not only for putting Black women’s interior worlds centre stage, but for inventing an original form to contain them: Shange’s “choreopoem”, in which poetry, dance, music and theatre exist in tandem. Its reach would go on to extend beyond the stage: in 2010, the filmmaker Tyler Perry adapted it into a star-studded film featuring Janet Jackson, Whoopi Goldberg, Thandiwe Newton and Kerry Washington. Page is acutely aware of that lineage. “It’s the most pressure I’ve felt working on anything in my career,” she admits. “I know how much this piece means to so many people.” Shange’s writing emerged from a particular African-American context, but Page sees its emotional truths travelling much further. “Regardless of whether it’s Black women in the ’70s, or Black women here now, she has somehow found some sort of universal experience that has spoken across time,” she says. She was keen not to bowdlerise any of the original text for the benefit of a British audience, but has updated the music – “there’s some grime and garage in there”, she says. While Shange’s work was briefly performed in London in 1979, her influence in Britain has perhaps been most visible in another landmark piece of Black theatre. Ryan Calais Cameron’s 2021 play For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy, which took inspiration from Shange’s choreopoem, became a sensation in London, transferring from the Royal Court to the West End after multiple sold-out runs. Page is full of admiration for the play, but is careful not to position her production as an answer to it. “I’m always inspired by the success of For Black Boys,” she says. “But I think this is its own occasion.” In the rehearsal room, the cast are working through two poems – “Touissaint” and “One” – their voices and bodies continually folding into and out of one another. Movement seems to rise directly out of the language, as though the words themselves have acquired limbs. At times, it is hypnotic; at others, the room erupts into laughter or seemingly spontaneous song. “We really need that joy because the material we’re working on can be very heavy,” says Nadine Higgin, who plays Lady in Blue. Tatenda Matsvai – Lady in Green/Yellow – echoes the sentiment. “There’s been a real sense of support amongst us all really quickly, even when we were just doing table work,” they say, “a sense that the room is safe for you.” Shange’s own life was marked by some of the darkness that reverberates through the choreopoem: while in her early 20s, she attempted suicide several times. The title is drawn from that experience, and its poems move through subjects including rape, abortion, and domestic violence. For Ibilola Rossi, who plays Lady in Brown, the play has been a companion for much of her adult life. She first encountered it at 24 and describes returning to its poems as she grew older. “It really lives within me – it’s almost like a Black girl bible,” she says. “It feels like Ntozake is kind of opening the door and saying, ‘don’t be quiet. Speak.’” Looking around the room, it is notable that the cast spans different ages, backgrounds, shades and gender identities. This was a deliberate choice from Page. “I couldn’t honestly have a conversation about Black womanhood without having that diversity within the cast,” she says. “It felt important that it recognised all of us.” Alex Thomas-Smith, who plays Lady in Purple/Orange, is a trans femme actress of colour, and this will be their first theatre production since coming out. “I took such a huge step back from theatre because there was no space for me,” they tell me. “It felt like I was pushed out. This will be my first theatre moment standing alongside my fellow castmates as myself.” There is a sense among the cast that this is a rare work that allows Black actresses to play characters as a whole, in an industry which often offers Black women roles at the edges of the story, or asks them to perform versions of Blackness that are legible and palatable to a predominantly white audience. “It allows all corners of me to exist without prejudice,” Higgin says. “It’s so healing. A lot of us are in rooms where we are constantly playing roles that weren’t written for us –” “Squeezing into trousers that don’t fit your bum!”, Ibilola interjects, laughing. There is a sibyl-like quality to Shange’s women: they seem to speak both from their own lives and from some deeper arcana of Black female experience, passing knowledge between generations. Cherrelle Skeete, who plays Lady in Red, first encountered the play at drama school and has carried her copy around for years. “I’m approaching this piece already with reverence,” she says. “Every day the piece is humbling me.” That may explain the extraordinary response to the Yard production before it has even opened – as I write, five of the opening nights are already sold out. “I’ve had old school Black women, Black femmes being like, ‘Oh my God, I grew up on this but I never got the chance to see it’,” Higgin says. For Page, that is ultimately why she is bringing the play back to London. “Women are often not afforded the flowers they deserve, and specifically Black women,” she says. “They deserve to have ownership of their own stories.”