(Alison McCann’s article appeared in The New York Times, 9/18; Photo from The New York Times: Theresa Ikoko; via Pam Green.)
“There’s so much more that comes with being Black apart from dealing with racism,” says Theresa Ikoko, a Londoner whose movie “Rocks” opened this week.
LONDON — The first play Theresa Ikoko wrote wasn’t necessarily meant to be a play — not yet, anyway.
At that point it was simply a story she had written for herself after years of collecting characters and scenes in her head, all of them rooted in the communities she knew as a Nigerian-British woman. When she read parts of it over the phone to a friend several years ago, he was taken by the way she had captured the experience of being Black and British.
“After I finished, he said to me, ‘Theresa, there’s no difference between this and Shakespeare as far as I’m concerned,’” Ms. Ikoko said with a laugh while sitting on a park bench in East London.
It has since been a remarkable rise for the playwright turned screenwriter, who until last year was working as a case manager at a youth violence organization, pretending to compose long emails and writing scenes instead.
Ms. Ikoko eventually submitted her writing to the Talawa Theatre Company, Britain’s renowned Black-led theater group, which jumped at the chance to produce it as a play. The work, “Normal,” ran as a stage reading in 2014, and a year later she wrote “Girls,” a play about three girls abducted by a terrorist group. That earned her the Alfred Fagon Award for Best New Play of 2015 and the George Devine Award for Most Promising Playwright in 2016.
On Friday, her first movie, “Rocks,” which she wrote with Claire Wilson, opened in Britain. It centers on the joy and resilience of young women of color — a group rarely given mainstream attention in British film — and positions Ms. Ikoko as a major new voice.
