BY FABIENNE DIAS

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“We should hunt him down and kill him.” Andoh responds when I ask for her thoughts on former Prime Minister David Cameron. She’s not being serious, of course, but I can sense an irritation that lies behind her light tone. Her eyes widen as she says it, the bright white irises startling against her skin, which still glints gold with remnants of stage makeup as we sit in a pizzeria overlooking the grey and groaning Thames below. Throughout our conversation Adjoa Andoh, director and lead actor in the Globe’s current production of Richard II, and I, touch on racism, sexism, Brexit and the elitism of Shakespeare.

The Brexit parallels that the press have found in this Richard II are not what she intended for the play, nor are they the most important thing about her production. This Shakespeare interpretation is not about Europe, she seems at pains to convey, it is simply about ‘Us lot from the Commonwealth.’ This is the first major Shakespeare production entirely made up of women of colour which appears to be unique in more ways than one. Andoh describes the two days of ‘cultural sharing’ that began the rehearsal process, in which the women brought in artifacts that were significant in their life, as a unique experience in theatre.

Wedding dresses, family heirlooms, keepsakes and floods and floods of tears and repressed anguish were exchanged.

Nobody ever seems to talk about the women, Adjoa Andoh laments, who built Britain, nor the empire that underpinned it.

At the climax of the play, there is an eerie beauty as the women gather on stage whilst the flag of St George unfolds behind them. They stand, proud and unapologetic, some with fists clenched and some with silver tears streaking their gold make-up. When I comment how striking this image was, Andoh nods fervently: ‘We own the flag of St George because we built this England.’

 ‘Shakespeare didn’t write for white, middle class men’ Andoh continues. ‘He wrote for everybody.’ And her production reflects that, by casting an exhilaratingly fresh light on Shakespearean history by way of stage and costume design and more.

Richard wears a traditional Indian prince’s robe while embracing her femininity with bold eyeliner and no attempt to conceal the contours of her chest. John of Gaunt allows her long dreadlocked hair to tumble down her back, a particularly poignant image in death.

And yet, despite this proud display women actors are still a minority in UK theatre.

The amount of male to female actors in British theatre (specifically Shakespearean theatre) stands at 2:1, while the figure for women of colour is an even smaller minority. Common arguments attribute this to Shakespeare himself and the fact that only 13 percent of his characters were women. However, if anything is to be gathered from this production, it is that tradition should not prove a hindrance in building more a more progressive realm of theatre. The production challenges the orthodoxy because despite the fact that they are playing traditionally white, male characters the performances on stage, every single woman onstage is admirably and undeniably themselves in ethnicity, gender and culture.

And it’s not just the stage that trembles with the prowess of these magnificent women, instead Andoh insists they are everywhere. Stage directors, set designers and sound technicians. I ask how she found such an impressive array of talent. She snorts, “We were told there weren’t any.”

But these women are challenging all that and Andoh herself, a working woman of colour actor for thirty-plus years, is a trailblazer, persevering notwithstanding the dismal statistics. In the National Theatre only 33 percent of directors are female; the number of BAME female directors a meagre 16 per cent. Thus populating and costuming her cast, her advance guard of rebels, was a complex undertaking. Andoh notes that they could not find a traditional Ghanaian, or even African costume of any kind in the wide depths of the Globe storage, so she asked her own (thoroughly chuffed) aunt to create one herself.

As a 17 year-old girl of dual heritage, this production spoke directly to me: it was inspiring to see, powerful to hear and felt like a tender love song to all women of colour. This play burns like hot candle wax or malt whisky in the back of the throat. It’s not necessarily an easy consumption, it’s even shocking at times, but it has not ceased to linger in my thoughts ever since.

As the pizzas finally arrive, Andoh rails again about the critics’ facile Brexit allusions while ignoring the evidence right before their eyes: this is truly revolutionary theatre for a multicultural Britain with a chequered history of gender equality. There has been nothing like it before. Whether there will be again will reveal the extent to which patriarchy and the legacy of Empire still hold sway in what John of Gaunt famously describes as ‘This other Eden’.

At Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London, until 21 April