(String music playing)
- Hello, I'm Winsome Pinnock and I'm a playwright.
- And I'm Ola Animashawun, and I'm a dramaturg,
and an Associate at the National Theatre.
(music continues to play)
- Every Friday throughout Black History Month,
we're going to be talking about our favourite plays
from the Black Plays Archive.
- We're going to be talking about a whole host of plays
from acclaimed classics, right through to some hidden gems.
- My pick of the week is "London Calling" by Una Marson.
A pioneering work in which
a group of young black intellectuals
turn the tables on oppression.
Una Marson was not only a pioneering playwright, poet.
She was also a broadcaster and she was, I think,
the first black woman to broadcast, to work, for the BBC.
She had her own show during the second world war,
where she would broadcast to the Caribbean.
- Hello West Indies.
This is Una Marson calling you from London.
- Una Marson was also the first black female playwright
to have a play presented in the West End.
It's written in the 1930s.
And it's a dark comedy
where these young students in London
are invited to the home of someone very well-to-do.
But they're invited to perform in fact, and to perform
a kind of blackness that does not represent them.
It's a really important play.
And she is an important figure.
- That's the key word, is it's important.
And it's important to give us an understanding
of who, who we are.
- It's a shame that a writer like Una Marson,
many people haven't heard of her.
- No, I never heard of her until last year.
- We think of ourselves as being the pioneers
and we forget that there are these people
who went before us. Doing this extraordinary work.
- My hidden gem is a play called
"Weathering the Storm" by Dona Daley, which is set in Leeds.
And it's about a Jamaican couple
who live on a council estate.
And it's a love story
just about their relationship at a breaking point.
They're first generation Jamaicans
living in Northern England.
They've been through a lot, you know,
to make that journey from the Caribbean.
I've only read this play,
but it is terrific. It is fantastic.
It's never been properly produced or seen the light of day.
- I have a story,
a little story about that play.
At the time Bernardine Evaristo
asked me to teach some workshops for people
who'd never written for theatre before.
And one of the people who turned up for this workshop
was Dona Daley.
And she started writing that play.
- That's amazing.
- Well, it was a damn good workshop, Winsome.
Because it's such a good play.
As I say, it stayed with me.
Dona, you know, died prematurely
and had a great future ahead of her.
But you know, this was,
if not her first play, one of her earliest plays.
- If it's not published, then it can disappear.
Which is again,
why the archives are so important to keep these materials.
- The Black Plays Archive is an online catalogue
of every first professional production
of African, Caribbean and black British plays in the UK.
- If you'd like to have a browse yourself
and discover all the incredible plays
written by black playwrights,
go to blackplaysarchive.org.uk
- On the explore page,
you can search the archive by different criteria,
including date of production,
name of the playwright or name of the play.
- Can't wait to share
a couple of new plays with you next Friday.