‘Bold, new work for a bold, new world’ – the young writers pushing the West End forward

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Playwrights Amy Berryman, Yasmin Joseph and Joseph Charlton. Photos: Brittany Anikka Liu/Dan Carroll

After a year of shuttered stages, Sonia Friedman is taking a punt on three young playwrights by giving them their West End debuts. “There’s an element of fear that none of us have really done it before,” says writer Joseph Charlton. “I hope it’s not going to feel like three kids putting on their plays for the first time. It’s got to feel like the real thing.”

Opening at the Harold Pinter Theatre from May to August, the plays by Charlton, Amy Berryman and Yasmin Joseph grapple with the climate crisis, the construction of identity and the damage of gentrification. Friedman has described them as “bold, new work for a bold, new world”.

Berryman says: “It would be amazing at any time,” before adding: “But now, it feels sort of miraculous.” Her play Walden, which explores space travel and sibling relations, opens on May 22, just five days after restrictions started to lift. It is a world premiere, as plans to stage it at People’s Light, a regional theatre in Pennsylvania, were scuppered by the pandemic.

Setting her play in the “not-so-distant future”, Walden imagines that scientists have given up on Earth and started colonising other planets. “I was curious about the question of what we’re going to do when it’s too late to really turn things around,” Berryman says. “Are we there already?”

Directed by Ian Rickson, who is also artistic director of the season, Walden stars Gemma Arterton and Lydia Wilson as sisters Cassie and Stella, and Fehinti Balogun as Bryan, Stella’s fiancé. In the middle of the woods, in one of the few spots where the earth’s air isn’t polluted, the trio try to work out how to move forwards in a dying world.

By placing the story in the hands of this small group, Berryman makes the epic intimate. “I wanted to figure out how to write about such a big issue that’s so overwhelming,” she says, “by keeping the play as personal as possible.”

Despite its sci-fi setting, Walden’s world doesn’t feel distant. “Where we’re at now is in some ways similar to where these characters are,” Berryman says. “We’re just trying to live our lives, love each other, in a world in crisis.”

When considering why there isn’t a large body of existing work around climate disaster – though she predicts a steep rise in shows about the subject – she suggests it’s because pinning down an antagonist is difficult. “Who is the bad guy? Are we the bad guys? That’s not very fun to berate your audiences with. And it’s hard to grapple with the personal responsibility versus the huge systemic change that needs to happen in order to tackle the climate crisis.”

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Fehinti Balogun and Lydia Wilson in rehearsals for Walden. Photo: Johan Persson

While Walden didn’t get its first night, Yasmin Joseph’s explosive show J’Ouvert has been seen both on stage and screen. Set over one day at Notting Hill Carnival in 2017, J’Ouvert, which premiered at London’s Theatre503 and was recently filmed for BBC Lights Up, places celebration and oppression side by side under a vibrant soca-infused soundtrack.

Starring Annice Boparai, Gabrielle Brooks and Sapphire Joy, with DJ Zuyane Russell, J’Ouvert winds its way through the streets of west London, under the shadow of the Grenfell disaster, racism and the impact of gentrification, while also taking in the carnival’s legacy of joy, freedom and protest. “Part of loving a place is interrogating it,” says Joseph, who won the James Tait Black award in 2020. “[Carnival] is a cog in the wheel against the oppression of Black-British Caribbean people that stops turning once a year.” J’Ouvert, Joseph says, is a way for her to “hold on to that energy”.

The text describes the play as a “joyful act of resistance”. She wrote the play after a stint of living in New York and experiencing the Labor Day celebrations. She felt at home in the events while simultaneously being warned that they were dangerous. Investigating the violence against women that has occurred in carnival spaces, she wrote J’Ouvert to place the good and bad next to each other, the two jostling on the feather-covered streets. “I was thinking about what carnival means to me as a British-Caribbean person,” she says, “what it means to occupy that space as a Black woman and, more universally, what happens to women in spaces where they dare to be free.”

The final character in J’Ouvert, Joseph says, is the audience. “And that audience isn’t a well-behaved audience. That’s an audience that sings back, talks back and finishes the end of different Jamaican proverbs.” In the West End, she hopes the play can encourage a similar sense of lively conversation. The best version of this play is one that finds ways to engage with the people it speaks to. “Making sure they know they don’t need permission to engage, trying to find ways to chip at the reputations that precede these buildings. The credentials [low numbers] around how many Black artists have been in the West End are so scary, I don’t even seek to use that as a milestone or something to reach towards. I just see it as a wall to completely shatter.”