Writer: Ntozake Shange
Director: Diane Page
The Yard Theatre, as it was, has been demolished. In its place is a new, larger venue on the same Hackney Wick site. Its front of house now feels more deliberate in its minimalist brutalism, while its auditorium’s shape and gently arcing seating feel like a more plush continuation of its previous form.
As part of the new venue’s first season, the Yard brings Notzake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf for what is, unbelievably, its first major London outing since its Broadway run 50 years ago in 1976. Since then, it has been profoundly influential, inspiring playwrights including Ryan Calais Cameron, whose modern response, For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy, shone a light on Black British masculinity the same way Shange’s work did for African American women five decades earlier.
Director Diane Page’s interpretation eschews any set, allowing us to revel in the expanse of the Yard’s new auditorium. But the five actors never feel lost in the space: Ali Hunter’s beautiful, sensitive, ever-changing lighting design helps cocoon and ground them, bathing them in a variety of hues that accentuate the play’s rainbow theme.
That theme moves into the characters themselves. Shange’s original piece has seven characters, each named after a colour. This production reduces the cast to five, but retains the colouring theme through Cat Fuller’s beautiful costume designs and each performer’s make-up.
That also allows the writing of Shange’s “choreopoem” to shine. A series of disparate stories set around various US cities, the monologues Shange has written for the women have the rhythm of beat poetry, several relying on repeated lines and motifs to deliver slices of life that reveal the joys and pains of life for Black women in America. Most of the stories feel timeless, although references to modern wars and HIV diagnoses reveal aspects of Shange’s 2010 updates.
The ensemble is almost uniformly strong, although Nadine Higgin’s Lady in Blue has the most personable, humanistic, authentic delivery in a work which can occasionally feel mannered and controlled. Each actor gets a chance to shine, though, and with that, a chance to connect. That is especially evident in one of the piece’s later, and longer, monologues, as Cherrelle Skeete takes centre stage in a tale of a violent husband who uses access to his young children as a weapon against his distressed wife.
Throughout, the tales are interspersed with work from choreographer Ingrid Mackinnon, performed to original music by Jammz, reinforcing Shange’s original desire to pair her poetry with movement and dance. Such performances enhance the play’s atmospheric highs and lows, enabling the audience to participate in the joy and sorrow of the onstage characters to sublime effect.
The emotional impact, from devastating loss and pain to joy, laughter, and dance, shows that the power of Shange’s work has not diminished in the 50 years since its first performance. It may have taken half a century to arrive in London, but it feels like a powerful statement with which to open the Yard’s new venue and its new era: one eye to the past, but profoundly contemporary.
Runs until 17 October 2026
