Playwright Diana Nneka Atuona: ‘You should write what moves you, as long as it’s sincere’

When Diana Nneka Atuona sat down to write her second play, a love of songs from the 1960s and 1970s meant she “really wanted to do a musical”. That would have marked a sure stylistic break, if nothing else, with her first.

Liberian Girl won the 2013 Alfred Fagon award for best new play and opened at London’s Royal Court Theatre two years later. Exploring the experiences of child soldiers during the west African country’s 1989-2003 civil war, it was praised for its dissection of violence against women and immersive feel.

In the end, the musical wasn’t to be. Instead, Atuona’s new work, Trouble in Butetown, is another drama that reaches even further back into history. Set in Tiger Bay, one of Britain’s first multi-ethnic communities, in Cardiff, Wales in 1943, the play tracks Nate, an African-American GI who arrives at an illegal boarding house run by local matriarch Gwyneth Mbanefo, having fled his barracks in search of a refuge from segregation.

Speaking on a video call as rehearsals draw to a close, Atuona, 39, is excited to see how audiences will respond, not least because the play has been an eight-year labour of love. She is full of praise for the team at the Donmar Warehouse, where it will premiere this week, saying they have offered “great dramaturgical support”. She laments the fact that artistic director Michael Longhurst will next year leave the theatre, which in November lost all its Arts Council funding, but adds: “I’m so glad he didn’t leave before commissioning me!”

If Trouble in Butetown owes its final form to collaboration, its genesis lies in a single photograph. Searching online for “1960s Britain”, Atuona initially found the standard images of chimney tops and cobbled streets. “And then I saw this image of an elderly white lady with a mixed-race child,” she recalls. “You could tell they were poor — the child was quite grubby — and I just thought: Tiger Bay.

“I didn’t know loads about it at the time,” says the playwright, who grew up in Peckham, south-east London. “I just knew of it as the place where Shirley Bassey was born. But I did some preliminary research, and I was hooked. It just felt right. It was one of those rare moments when I find a certain world or subject matter I’m so interested in that it keeps me up at night.”

From there, Atuona dived in, reading books about Butetown and meeting longtime residents. Both helped her decide on a premise, while works such as Brendan Behan’s 1958 play The Hostage, which similarly takes place in a boarding house, informed her management of a “motley crew of characters”.

Tiger Bay, close to the Cardiff docks, welcomed immigrants from across the world in the early decades of the 20th century, and military personnel from then-British colonies after the second world war. But when US forces arrived in the latter part of the war, the army’s segregationist policies came with them, which often led to tensions and even violence when black GIs experienced a different world in their free time outside barracks.

“What appealed to me was that you had this really multicultural but tiny town — not more than a square mile — in Wales,” she says. “When we think of multiculturalism, we tend to think of it as something new and something that started in England.

“At school I wasn’t taught that when American GIs came over, they were segregated. And I certainly wasn’t taught about the participation of people of colour in Britain’s war effort.”

While Atuona was growing up, her Nigerian parents “weren’t people who really cared about going to plays”. She wrote one as a child for her church but credits a production of Willy Russell’s Blood Brothers, which she saw as a teenager, with really sparking her interest. “It was the first time I thought: ‘There’s something here.’” 

Nevertheless, it wasn’t until her late twenties that she decided to pursue drama full time, after studying politics at university and spending “about five minutes” training to be a barrister. A pivotal moment came while she was interning at the Royal Court and saw debbie tucker green’s truth and reconciliation, which touched on post-apartheid South Africa while tracing an international history of violence.

“It was then that I thought: ‘Oh my gosh, you can really tell any story you want to on stage. It doesn’t have to be a Shakespeare or a Chekhov’,” she says. “Don’t get me wrong: their work is still relevant today for a reason. But [I realised] you could also write about what’s going on today, about things that really matter to you.”

Atuona is alive to debates about writing from “lived experience”, which were growing at the time of her debut and have intensified since. Yet she believes that storytelling ought to remain open to all.

“I fully expect people to have something to say about the fact that I’m not from Wales, but you should write what you’re interested in,” she says. “Inevitably, within that, there will be something you know.

“With Liberian Girl, I wasn’t a child soldier. With this play, I didn’t grow up in the 1940s, but I do know what it is to grow up in a part of town with a negative reputation, one that’s not completely deserved or undeserved. I understand today that there’s a need for people to tell their own stories, but I maintain that you should write what moves you, as long as it’s sincere.”

Trouble in Butetown brings together established actors including Sarah Parish, who plays Mbanefo, alongside new faces, such as Samuel Adewunmi and Rita Bernard-Shaw. To Atuona’s delight, it also features original music, courtesy of composer Clement Ishmael.

Now at work on a project for TV, she hopes the production will achieve the “double win” of entertaining and educating audiences.

“This play has surprised me. You don’t want it to feel like a lesson, but more people should know more about Tiger Bay. It’s such a sexy piece of history — and by that I mean super interesting!”

‘Trouble in Butetown’, Donmar Warehouse, London, February 10-March 25, donmarwarehouse.com

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