On 2 October 2025, Skin Deep and Brixton House produced ‘In A New Light’, a retrospective on plays written by Black British women in the 1980s as part of its Uprising season. Inspired by Skin Deep’s Anthology magazine reprint of a 2018 article I wrote on Winsome Pinnock, I curated extracts from three brilliant plays. They were directed by Bashiie, and performed by Babirye Bukilwa, Coral Wylie, Kandy Rohmann and Dejuan Desiree. One of those plays was Maria Oshodi’s Blood Sweat and Fears.
Maria wrote her sophomore play in 1986 and it was first produced by Olusola Oyeleye for Harmony Theatre in 1988, touring nationally. It was a gift to have Maria present on the night in October, and an additional blessing to learn during the Q&A that Olusola was in the audience! The two have known each other since their days at Charles Edward Brooke Grammar School in Camberwell. And now, after experiencing this latest iteration of Blood, Sweat and Fears, they meet to chat about it all. I lightly edited their conversation.
Maria Oshodi: For me, experiencing ‘In A New Light’ at Brixton House was quite profound. It was during a busy summer, where I was in Edinburgh working at the festival after just submitting my PhD thesis, that I received a request for permission to present extracts from my old play. For the first time I stipulated I wanted a disabled actor to play the protagonist Ben. I’d never made a request like this before, and maybe it came out of my being fresh and fiery from my doctoral research. Disability in Blood, Sweat and Fears does not act as merely a metaphor. This idea is analysed in Önder Çakırtaş’ 2025 paper, where they write: “disability often serves as a tool for advancing plots, deepening character complexity, or symbolizing broader abstract ideas, rather than being represented authentically.” My play vividly explores and unflinchingly centres the lived experience of my Black, disabled main character.
So I arrived at the event on the evening of 2 October with intrigue. I was astonished to find it was sold out, and I was really curious to understand who the audience were. I was surprised to learn it was full of mostly Gen Z individuals, and I wondered why they would want to come and see three plays from the 80s by these old Black women?
I felt so many things collide as soon as the performances of the other pieces began, plays I didn’t know, but that were very much of that time, and contextualised so sensitively by the all female presenting actors. I did wonder how this might work for my piece, as two of the main characters were male. But when my play started after the interval, suddenly I was hearing my old words through young mouths, words that I had almost forgotten writing. Words that created scenes which emerged again from a time-tunnel. As my work landed in front of me, I was thinking, “Oh gosh, yes, this opening scene is so cool, isn’t it!” There was also some embarrassment about dated terms that the audience probably didn’t have a clue about! But in turn, hearing shop names like “Warehouse”, and talk of orange badges that have been replaced by blue ones, and even the fact that the characters could take access to housing for granted, resonated the work so precisely as a period piece.
I also appreciated that it was still really good dramatic writing and dramaturgy that stood the test of time. The audience were all listening intently, responding throughout and laughing. I was really moved and wowed by this, and had a visceral sense of pride and incredulity that my play was still found funny, and its themes still relevant. The script-in-hand presentation of the excerpts, with narrated plot in between, served to explain the play as a whole. And the company’s socio-political, historic framing of each play helped contextualise a current analytical filter for each one. For mine, navigating the stigma of invisible disability, within the commodification of fast food and its workers, was all the more particular through enactment by a cast of female presenting actors, who were able to bring an element of parody to the heavily genderised interpersonal relationships within the play… a nice surprise. Also, there were connections made in the analysis of the themes of the body, blood and ignorance of health services, and how this was a reflection of what was going on more widely in the 80’s.
“Why would a bunch of Gen Zs want to come and see three plays from the 80s by these old Black women?”
Afterwards, I was honoured to be invited to join a panel onstage for a rich discussion. But towards the end, there was this question from you, Sola. It felt so complex, I wasn’t sure how to answer it in the time we had left. I think I gave the right answer, which was to answer it in writing with your input.
Olusola Oyeleye: First of all, I was really delighted that you invited me to this event. Of course, anything that you’re doing, I always try to attend. It felt overwhelming to some extent, to see these young people engaging with this material, and then there was a little bit of me that felt sad that they didn’t know it existed. So, in the whole process of the evening where we were celebrating, exploring and reconnecting with this writing, there was just a sense that this happens in Black theatre, that every generation feels that it’s being remade and renewed.
When people were asking you questions, there was a discussion about current support and lack of support that reminded me that people do not know the world in which you came up, the creative and political world, and what it was like for our generation. So I asked you, “can you paint a picture of the creative environment through which writers like yourself emerged at that period of time?” And I thought about it and, actually, as challenging as it was, we had the GLC. There was the Lambeth Council Arts department, which funded Harmony Theatre. The London Arts Board…
MO: And there was ILEA, the adult education evening classes where I stepped into drama for the first time…
“The relationship with the benefit system wasn’t questioned; you just went on the dole and did your art alongside that. Or you got a grant and went to art school. We were able to sustain our creativity.”
OO: Yes. I’d always been interested in writing, and after coming back from university, I actually went into the Royal Court Young People’s Theatre. At that time, they used to meet in a cabin at the back of the main theatre, and I joined the writers group there. I think I was the only Black person in that cohort. Winsome Pinnock came after and I went on to direct her first play there, and through that, became part of The Activists…
MO: That’s right, The Royal Court’s Young Activists, which some of my friends also belonged to. The Royal Court also ran the Young Writers Festival, which my first play was selected for. And that’s when I met David Sulkin. I remember when he told me I could be commissioned by the Arts Council to write my next play… I thought he was crazy! Next thing I know, we are having a meeting at the Arts Council of Great Britain with an officer called Charles Hart about writingBlood, Sweat and Fears. I got the commission, but the next time I ran into Charles was years later at Waterloo station, where he had become a guard, and told me he found it easier letting people through the ticket barriers there than the ones set up by the Arts Council.
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OO: Now, I don’t want to create some fluffy vision of the past. We’re talking about the 80s, when the uprisings were happening in Brixton and The National Front was still rife. So, it’s not an idyll. But one of the reasons for asking that question of you in the first place, is that there were so many more outputs. For example, Harmony was based at St Matthew’s, the big church on a traffic island in the middle of Brixton, and there were all these different community theatres there. The Oval House, Bridge Lane, Inner City, Theatro Technis… and then all the pub theatres. Even if you had or hadn’t gone to drama school, there were all these opportunities where you could write, direct, produce and design as artists. It was a fundamentally integrated part of who we were. It no longer feels that way. Another thing to note is that people could sign on…
MO: Yes! I forgot about all that. The relationship with the benefit system wasn’t questioned; you just automatically went on the dole and did your art alongside that. Or you got a grant and went to art school. Or there was Theatre in Education. We were able to sustain our creativity. People would be doing lots of different things to earn their stripes, like building up 40 silly cabaret contracts to gain their equity card to get proper acting work.
And infrastructure! There were all sorts of buildings and spaces in which to create. There was a whole squat movement that offered access to affordable vacant occupancy, which meant there were many more venues. There was so much development happening in a low-grade way, the practice always had an opportunity.
OO: I began working with Harmony Theatre, then ended up being the community theatre director there, setting up a whole stream of workshop training in the theatre upstairs at St Matthew’s. We were able to perform and share the craft with established figures you couldn’t even get near now, and there was this energy, a proliferation of spaces and environments that hosted and wanted to nurture. The Oval House was such a space at the time, and that’s why we celebrate figures like Kate Crutchley, who was programme director then. Now, a lot of people have fallen by the wayside, and only a few people from then are left working in the profession.
“I am trying to make sure this work is archived… Because this happens in Black theatre, every generation feels that it’s being remade and renewed.”
We were just talking about the passing of the iconic Yvonne Brewster. One of the reasons Talawa Theatre is still known is because of her tenacity around keeping it going. And then I think of the fact that I have been commissioned as a writer by the Barbican, had poems published in anthologies with Jackie Kay and Michael Rosen, directed at the English National Opera, and independently toured Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas… Here’s what I noted when we were sitting in that theatre at Brixton House with creatives at least two or three generations younger than us. 1) I was aware it was the first time I’d been in that building where I actually felt that we were discussing, negotiating and navigating art. 2) I realised that I am on the other side of this youthful creative energy. I’m looking at these young people, and this disjunct between now and our so-called halcyon days, where we had the opportunity to play and fall down, or fail and fail better, and that opportunity to fail and learn is less now. We are both at a point where we can reflect, aware that people don’t know anything about our time and thank goodness there are people who are trying to keep that thread alive.
MO: The whole event was called ‘In a New Light’, and they brought this new facet, in their young energy and minds, to the work. I found it really fascinating and inspiring, the way they took it and made it their own… I mean, all the writers in our time were pushing boundaries around freedom of sexuality, intergenerational divides, and disability; things that were taboo then but are now generally given. It was wonderful to experience how things have moved on. It’s something that is part of the privilege of living this long, and the gift given to a writer to hear their words returning, to experience how relevant and irrelevant they are. Truly wonderful. That night I felt honoured, visible, and somehow a survivor. And when they kept thanking me, I thought, you are the ones that need to be thanked for doing this work, resisting erasure by exposing and critiquing the past with rigour and love.
OO: We’re here to hold testimony as witnesses to what we experienced. The onus is on us to celebrate that time and ensure it’s archived sufficiently, because people are interested to dig roots and nourish them and gain from it. We’re in a time when, once again, where young people, who are now three, four generations deep, are being asked whether they belong here. They’re still being asked those questions about their identity. So through teaching, through the Alfred Fagan Awards, and through Unfinished Histories, I am trying to make sure this work is archived, and the funding to make sure these things happen is vital. Because this happens in Black theatre, every generation feels that it’s being remade and renewed.
MO: It’s all about access for me, with a lower-case a and a capital A. Through my recent academic work, I’ve become aware of how theatre intersects all classes. As a working-class person, growing up in the middle of a council estate, I have chosen a way of speaking to the world, through theatre, which has let me in more than other forms might. Then acquiring a disability and understanding being marginal on other fronts, that gave me the desire to incorporate access in all sorts of ways. When working as a writer – and you’ll know this, Sola – decisions are always being made around you, until you decide: stop. I set up the company Extant out of determination and an ability to project manage, which I learned from another disabled people’s organisation, where Yinka Shonibare was working and doing the same, taking control of his career, learning about institutions and systems as well as doing the practice. Doing that was very foundational, and it made me realise that the power is not just in the making, but in the producing, in how you name your work, in where you name it, and who hears about it. And the more injustice that you experience, the more that you want to do. That’s been the driving force, the engine through all of this.
OO: You can’t be absent. You have to be present. Our art form requires us to be curious, to absorb, to nourish ourselves and then give it out as it’s a transformative process. I feel that I am still curious in this world that is ever changing, even though some aspects are becoming just like 1984. But pursuant on that is to keep on going. If you feel you have something to say, just keep going, and you’ll find a way. Nobody can shut you up.
MO: I think we have got the passion and all that, but also, I think we’re quite wily, and there’s an art to survival. And as Nigerians, we have an entrepreneurial, survivor spirit that has been going on underneath all of this.
OO: We thank our parents, indeed, thank our mums and our dads.
MO: And all the ancestors.
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