Adjoa Andoh is the black Chekhov

Working with the best: "If Clint Eastwood has hired you, he trusts you. He’s also a lovely man who queues behind his extras for food," says Adjoa Andoh of her time making Invictus
10 April 2012

When I first became aware of Adjoa Andoh 20 years ago she was working with black or women's theatre groups. These days the austerely beautiful, commanding actress has become a familiar face at the National Theatre, on Casualty and Doctor Who (she was Martha's mum) and is about to head the cast of Joe Turner's Come and Gone at the Young Vic.

"There's been progress, definitely," says the 47-year-old amiably. "It's good that a play that might have been done by Gay Sweatshop is now done at the National or the Almeida. But we need more black playwrights and television commissioning editors from different backgrounds. I'd love to do Ibsen or Chekhov. But these are never areas that are going to be available to me."

Still, she puts August Wilson, the author of Joe Turner, who died in 2005, on a par with Chekhov. "I don't know how well he's known in Britain but in America he's a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway success. He wrote a 10-play cycle set in Pittsburgh about the black American experience, post-slavery, one play for each decade since 1900. Ours is the second one, set in 1911."

Joe Turner takes place in a rooming house run by Andoh's Bertha and her husband Seth (Danny Sapani). The people who wash through are the first or second-generation diaspora of slavery, coming up from the rural south to the industrial north, second-class citizens still carrying the culture and beliefs of Africa with them.

"The microcosm of the domestic situation reflects the wider experience of people for whom slavery is still a huge shadow," says Andoh. "And he writes about it so beautifully and with such texture."

Not that the play is aimed solely at a black audience. "No, it's universal, because it's about loss, about how you find and re-make yourself after you have been forced to be something other."

Andoh was born in 1963 in Bristol to a white English mother who taught modern dance and history, and a black father who had been a folk musician and journalist in Ghana ("Adjoh" is Ghanaian for "Monday"). "So performance was in my life from the start," she says. "I was the kid who forced all the neighbours' children to put on plays in our living room, torturing our parents for hours on end."

The family moved to a tiny village in the Cotswolds when her father got a job with British Aerospace in Bristol. Her childhood was straight out of Cider with Rosie — "blackberrying, scrumping, building tree houses by the river" — except that she, her brother and her father were the only black people in the village. "You were unusual if you came from five miles away, so it was like we'd parachuted in from Mars," she says. "I had to learn to fight pretty quickly at school. And by the time I hit my teens I was gagging for something else. Fortunately punk rock came along."

For a long time she wanted to be a bass player in a punk band, but enrolled on a law degree at Bristol Poly "basically to please my dad". She did legal aid work and marched with Lawyers Against Nuclear Weapons to Greenham Common. But in her second year she also got involved with a black women's group and auditioned for a play in London funded by Ken Livingstone's GLC. Since then, she has been a rarely out of work actress.

After a dearth of film roles in her early career, she shone recently in Noel Clarke's Adulthood and as Nelson Mandela's chief of staff in Clint Eastwood's Invictus. "He's Clint Eastwood, so he loves actors, and if he's hired you, he trusts you. He's also a lovely man who queues behind his extras for food," she says. "I would like to have done more films. But then, I have three children and I live in London, so you mix and match."

Her eldest daughter, Jessie, is 24 and teaching English in Chile: Lily is 14 and Daisy was born on election day, 1997. Andoh and her husband, lecturer Howard Cunnell, canvassed locally for Labour in Herne Hill in the last election. As if determined to confound expectations, this politicised punk has also become a lay reader in the Church of England.

I ask if she thinks her children have come into a more equitable world. "Well, young gay men are still getting attacked, the standard of living in Ghana is lower than it was in 1976, and there are still too many poor black men in prison or in mental institutions," she says. "But my kids are very lucky. London is the best and most varied city in the world, but they also have access to my dad's house in the Cotswolds, to Shropshire where my mum lives, to Howard's mum in Sussex and to Ghana: we have a place in Accra. The world is so much smaller for them. When Obama was elected my eldest rang a friend and said, shall we just go over for the inauguration?'" And might any of her daughters go into the theatre? "Over my dead body," she growls.

Joe Turner's Come and Gone is at the Young Vic (020 7922 2922; youngvic.org) until July 3.

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in