LONDON — The primary play Theresa Ikoko wrote wasn’t essentially meant to be a play — not but, anyway.
At that time it was merely a narrative she had written for herself after years of accumulating characters and scenes in her head, all of them rooted within the communities she knew as a Nigerian-British girl. When she learn elements of it over the cellphone to a good friend a number of years in the past, he was taken by the best way she had captured the expertise of being Black and British.
“After I completed, he mentioned to me, ‘Theresa, there’s no distinction between this and Shakespeare so far as I’m involved,’” Ms. Ikoko mentioned with fun whereas sitting on a park bench in East London.
It has since been a outstanding rise for the playwright turned screenwriter, who till final yr was working as a case supervisor at a youth violence group, pretending to compose lengthy emails and writing scenes as an alternative.
Ms. Ikoko ultimately submitted her writing to the Talawa Theatre Company, Britain’s famend Black-led theater group, which jumped on the likelihood to provide it as a play. The work, “Regular,” ran as a stage studying in 2014, and a yr later she wrote “Women,” a play about three ladies kidnapped by a terrorist group. That earned her the Alfred Fagon Award for Finest New Play of 2015 and the George Devine Award for Most Promising Playwright in 2016.
On Friday, her first film, “Rocks,” which she wrote with Claire Wilson, opened in Britain. It facilities on the enjoyment and resilience of younger girls of coloration — a gaggle hardly ever given mainstream consideration in British movie — and positions Ms. Ikoko as a serious new voice.
This yr she joins a wave of younger Black writers, producers and administrators carving out area in an trade that has been liable to both exclude them or crush them with expectations demanding that their work cowl solely problems with race.
“It’s like my film has to dismantle racism,” Ms. Ikoko mentioned. “And it has to supply reparations. It additionally has to dethrone the monarchy and restore the stolen artifacts back to Benin. Nevertheless it’s 90 minutes on a low finances!”
But for Ms. Ikoko, “there’s a lot extra that comes with being Black aside from coping with racism.” And that has meant creating work that additionally focuses on Black pleasure.
Rising up, she by no means knew any writers, or that writing was one thing individuals had been paid to do. The youngest of 9, she was raised by a single mom who got here to Britain from Nigeria a number of years earlier than Ms. Ikoko was born. Her household moved round a number of council estates, a type of British public housing, all within the Hackney neighborhood of East London.
Her mom labored a number of jobs, and Ms. Ikoko mentioned there have been occasions after they noticed one another solely in passing, Ms. Ikoko leaving for college and her mom coming back from an evening shift. “She all the time checked that I brushed my enamel and my tongue,” Ms. Ikoko mentioned.
Regardless of having little cash rising up, Ms. Ikoko mentioned she had by no means felt poor. Saving cash on the water invoice was disguised as a possibility to take a bucket bathtub — a scrub adopted by rinsing off with a bowl of water, frequent in her mom’s native Nigeria. She shared a twin mattress along with her older sister, however the crowded sleeping association meant gossiping long gone bedtime.
“It didn’t really feel like ‘Woe is us,’ though we lived on an property,” she mentioned. “It was all the time loud. It was all the time enjoyable.”
She developed an early love of studying and storytelling, thanks partially to the work of Black authors like Malorie Blackman, Sister Souljah and Eric Jerome Dickey. However she pursued a extra sensible path, learning psychology at Royal Holloway college and later incomes a grasp’s diploma in criminology and prison justice from Oxford.
It was by means of prison justice work that she began to see firsthand the expectations positioned on individuals from communities like her personal. “There was a survey that included the demographics of prisoners together with some predictive elements,” she mentioned. “I noticed that every one of their predictive elements had been mine — single-parent family, low revenue, from a high-crime space — and I didn’t agree with that.”
In a program she labored on that organized drama workshops in London prisons, she began to see the ability of storytelling — and whose tales acquired to be informed. “I used to be falling in love with giving individuals the ability to be no matter they wished to be,” she mentioned.
In 2014, she took a job with Islington Integrated Gangs, a London group that focuses on gang violence in youth communities, and wrote on the aspect — at nights, on weekends, at work. It wasn’t till final yr, when she couldn’t get the day off work to attend the “Rocks” premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, that she determined she may not do each. She stop her job final September.
Nina Steiger, the top of play growth at London’s Nationwide Theatre, describes Ms. Ikoko’s work as “banter and brutality,” a nod to the lighthearted gossip that slips seamlessly between moments of bleakness.
“You’ll in all probability snort and cry with equal measure,” Ms. Ikoko mentioned.
However getting her writing profession off the bottom hasn’t been with out its challenges. She mentioned she had as soon as pitched a present to a British tv govt a few group of Somali sisters, just for him to ask the place in Britain there have been Somali viewers. “Is it not adequate that it’s only a good story?” she mentioned.
And though her work typically facilities on the Black British expertise, Ms. Ikoko tries to keep away from focusing solely on racism or positioning Blackness as a foil to whiteness. “This concept that Blackness solely exists in racism and oppression simply doesn’t sit effectively with me,” she mentioned.
The Black expertise can be about pleasure, she famous, pointing to current viral photos on Twitter of a younger Black man’s discovery of frolicking, full with serene pictures of him clicking his heels in an empty subject. “In fact we have to dismantle systemic racism and structural oppression, however I would like my work to remind Black individuals to snort, to frolic,” she mentioned.
Ms. Ikoko is presently at work on her third play, for the Nationwide Theatre, and is creating a film for the BBC. She’s additionally intent on creating alternatives for first-time actors, writers, producers, designers — anybody attempting to interrupt into the film and tv trade — by means of a corporation, Bridge, that she helped arrange through the manufacturing of “Rocks.”
Greater than something, although, she’s decided to raise the undue burden on writers of coloration — herself included.
“Is it magic? Does it change the world? Does it communicate to the Black expertise? Does it communicate to the Black expertise for non-Black individuals? Is it additionally not white gaze?” she mentioned of the ideas that run by means of her head when she sits down to write down.
“Hopefully,” she mentioned, “I’ll be a part of the people who find themselves going to do all of that sticky unpacking work.”
