Natasha Gordon in Conversation with Lucy Jeffery: 'It was around 7.27pm that suddenly diversity walked through the door'

Abstract

Award-winning playwright Natasha Gordon talks to Lucy Jeffery about her experience as a Caribbean-British actor and playwright whose debut play Nine Night (2018) made her the first black British female playwright to have a play staged in London’s West End. The discussion ranges from Gordon’s own experiences of gendered and racial injustices as a young actor to how these prejudices are evident in the audience demographic of theatres today. It focuses on Nine Night’s exploration of how second-generation, specifically Jamaican-British, immigrants experience tensions concerning identity, belonging, and displacement in the wake of the 2018 Windrush Scandal. As the conversation evaluates the importance of Gordon’s work and visibility on the National Theatre and West End stages, it contributes to the recent underrepresentation of black voices, a concern expressed in the widespread Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name protests that have taken place in America and the UK in 2020. The conversation, which took place at the University of Reading as part of the ‘Race and Performance Today’ series (organised by Jeffery and Matthew McFrederick), also responds to Michael Peters’s (2015) call to challenge the whiteness of curricula in British and American universities.