How playwright Chinonyerem Odimba turned a traumatic memory into musical Black Love

The playwright and director of acclaimed play ‘Black Love’ tells Nicole Vassell about its hurtful origins, the importance of representation in theatre and how sibling love can inform our lives

Chinonyerem Odimba: ‘We don’t see that many depictions of full Black family life’ (Camilla Greenwell)

Years ago, award-winning playwright Chinonyerem Odimba overheard a conversation that horrified her. It was in the supermarket, between two Black men, who were discussing the supposed drawbacks of dating Black women. She was nearly struck speechless by the intensity of their language, but felt compelled to confront them. “I remember not being able to articulate just how upset I had been by hearing that conversation, as a Black woman,” she says. “I remember saying to one of them, ‘Do you have any sisters? Do you know what this might sound like to Black women you’re related to?’”

When I ask her to share what the men said, she’s hesitant, but gives the gist anyway. “The long and short of it is – that Black women are hard work. That we’re hard to love, that we make loving us hard. And that when you choose a Black woman, you don’t choose an easy life.” She pauses briefly. “It was much more... explicit than what I’m giving you. But it shook me. I’m sure there was a part of me that understood that that was something that was maybe out there, but to hear it out loud from the mouths of two Black men in London? It shook me.”

So when Odimba was commissioned to write a play for Paines Plough seven years later, she knew early on that this encounter was something she wanted to use as inspiration. Where the men in the shop aisles had been an example of mutual affection gone wrong, she wanted to explore the ways that love for your siblings – biological and theoretical – can positively inform how we see love in other areas of our lives. The result was Black Love.

Many will assume from the title that the play will deal with a romantic relationship, savouring the joys and weathering the various issues of partnership in a combative world. I certainly did. Yet the musical play, which has just opened for previews at London’s Kiln Theatre, instead deals with the familial bond between siblings Aurora and Orion. Living together in their parents’ flat, they have a connection that seems unbreakable. But their relationship is threatened when Orion starts dating a white woman who doesn’t quite get it. The brother and sister have to work to find each other again.

When I tell Odimba what I had wrongly assumed, she seems pleased – it was always her intention to turn the idea of Black love on its head. “I like that the first surprise that people get is that it’s not about romantic love,” she explains with a knowing smile. “A big part of this whole thing for me has been about representation – how Black love in the fullest sense is represented in all media, and all of our cultural life as a society, and as a country. And realising that we don’t see that many depictions of full Black family life.”

Much of what we learn about love “is through how we experience love within the family”, she explains. “Let’s start from there. The collective imagination is that most Black people, most Black experiences, come out of dysfunctional situations. Those are pictures we’re painted about where we come from as people, in terms of those family homes and settings.

“It means that people don’t expect us to come from places that are wholesome, that are supportive, that are loving, that have a history, that hold us, that provide for us, that look after us, that nurture us. That’s not the story any of us are ever told.” Of course there are some whose lives look this way, but it’s not the case for everyone. “Where’s the balance?” Odimba asks. “Where’s the balance in that story we’re being told – not just about ourselves, but the stories that, culturally, are being told about us?”

Beth Elliott, Nicholle Cherrie and Nathan Queeley-Dennis in rehearsals for ‘Black Love’ (Camilla Greenwell)

Addressing those stories has always been a key motivator. As a writer of Nigerian heritage, she’s written from West African perspectives as well as relaying Caribbean experiences from the Windrush generation. Since 2021, she’s also taken on the role of CEO at theatre company tiata fahodzi, which has produced plays representative of multicultural Britain since the 1990s.

And the accolades from these years of work speak for themselves: for her play How to Walk on the Moon, she won Channel 4’s playwright bursary the 2018 Sonia Friedman Award. In 2020, she was a finalist in the Women’s Prize for Playwriting, while the initial run of Black Love last summer received widespread praise and won the prize for Best Musical Theatre Bookwriting at the 2022 Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Awards.

With so many achievements, it’s all the more surprising that her start in theatre came about through chance. As a working-class, single woman in her late twenties, she wasn’t looking for a career she’d love; she simply needed to earn money. When the opportunity to get paid while training as a stage manager in a small theatre arose, she grabbed it. “I was very much on the cusp of becoming homeless, so it was just a job,” she shrugs, remembering her ambivalence to the industry. “I didn’t see any of the stuff. When I finished training and finished with the show, that was the end of my relationship with theatre for years. I went on with my life.”

It wasn’t until she gave birth to her daughter a few years later that she gave some thought to what she might actually like to do: “Maybe there are other things I may want to do that are not just surviving.” Having moved from London to Bristol by then, Odimba signed up to a six-week playwriting workshop at the city’s Old Vic theatre, headed by Winsome Pinnock. Seeing her, a successful Black female playwright, for the first time lit a spark in Odimba. “I was like, ‘Oh, this is a playwright?’” she remembers. “Young, amazing, talented Winsome Pinnock was there teaching me how to write plays, and that was really the thing. We can talk about role models, and I don’t always think that just the idea of role models on its own is a way of tackling anything. But seeing someone who looks like me? That was the thing.”

Chinonyerem Odimba and Garen Abel Unokan in rehearsals for ‘Black Love' (Camilla Greenwell)

Still, it took another seven years before she seriously considered writing plays as a permanent part of her life. Her second piece, An Ode to Adam, centred around a Black teen boy dealing with grief and growing up. After a rehearsed reading of the play, a boy around the same age as Adam told her what the play meant to him. “He said, ‘I’ve never seen myself represented on stage,’ and was talking about what he’d just seen in quite an emotional way. I thought, ‘OK, this is what theatre can do.’ It’s taken a long time for theatre to convince me of what it’s doing. In that moment, that boy saying that he felt like he was seeing himself, then I knew what theatre’s meant to be to people and what I as a writer can do for people.”

With Black Love, Odimba wants to show that Black families don’t need outside intervention to be fulfilling. Complex and imperfect, the siblings’ love for each other, in the space where their parents shared their own affection, gives them enough strength to face the world. When I ask what Black love means for her, Odimba leans towards this sense of camaraderie and shared understanding.

“Black love is when we share painful things together,” she says. “It’s when we sit in silence, watching a show by other Black artists and being in awe of that work, and the fact that it’s out there, that it’s existing. Black love is when we see each other and we see each other for all our fullness, not for the bits that suit this person or the bits that we’ve polished up for others to see. You know, we’ve gotta stop striving to be perfect.” She nods softly to herself. “Just strive to be full.”

‘Black Love’ runs at Kiln Theatre until 23 April