Black British Womens' Theatre in the 1980s and the Politics of Representation

This article discusses Black women’s drama and theatre of African and Caribbean lineage against the backdrop of both 1980s identity politics and the emerging Black and Asian theatre scene in Britain. It engages with existing scholarship on Black British theatre and focusses on the work of playwrights and theatre practitioners and in particular on the company Theatre of Black Women (1982-1988), whose work intended to explore “identities, cultures and stories that placed the periphery in the centre – on [their] own terms” (Evaristo 2013). This article argues that Black British women’s theatre played a crucial role in both shaping Black British culture in the 1980s and affirming the presence of Black women on the British theatre scene, while significantly contributing to developing “postcolonial British theatre” (Dahl 1995)