The return of pioneering playwright Winsome Pinnock: ‘New plays are always a risk’

Winsome Pinnock: 'I was interested in this country’s untold history' - (Matt Roberts)

If a soundbite is to cling to you for two decades, there are certainly worse ones to have. It’s been 23 years since Winsome Pinnock was described as “the godmother of Black British playwrights” by The Guardian, and the phrase can be found in nearly every profile that’s been written about her since. “I don’t really think about it,” the 64-year-old dramatist tells me now. “You wouldn’t, would you?”

Pinnock was only at the start of her forties when that epithet first made it to print, just a few years after she made her name with the 1988 drama Leave Taking – the first play written by a Black British woman to be produced by the National Theatre. But the intervening years have only ossified her standing. She has won a raft of accolades, including the George Devine Award; Leave Talking is now taught in schools as a GCSE text; and younger playwrights such as Chinonyerem Odimba and Natasha Gordon have cited her as influences.

“I’m asked about [the “godmother” tag] now and I don’t know what I’m supposed to say,” Pinnock tells me, speaking over video from the National Theatre. “You’re just writing. But being the age I am now, the thing I recognise is that it’s [useful] for younger writers to know there is a history here.”

Histories, both personal and intergenerational, are a familiar fascination for Pinnock at this point. Her latest play, The Authenticator, is one that explores our relationship to history, in ways troubling and far-ranging. Described as a “gothic psychological thriller”, the play is about an eccentric artist (Sylvestra Le Touzel) who inherits a stately home. After discovering a trove of hidden diaries, she recruits an academic (Cherrelle Skeete) and her mentor (Rakie Ayola) to authenticate them, and the trio end up uncovering painful, long-buried secrets.

The concept for The Authenticator arose when she was developing her previous play Rockets and Blue Lights, a time-hopping look at Britain’s history of slavery first staged in 2020. “I wanted to write about the legacy of enslavement,” she says. “The legacy you can see in various aspects of our material lives. We live with it in the statues that surround us; in antiques; in the materials that were made, maybe even carved by enslaved people. And things like racism. As well as more joyful things, like music. I was interested in this country’s untold history.”

The other thing that piqued her interest in this hidden history – “or not so hidden”, she adds – is her own ancestry. Pinnock, born in Islington to Jamaican emigrant parents, is “descended from enslaved people, on both sides of my family. It’s always fascinated me, to be the product of people who survived that history. And one of the things I want to do as a writer is just write about the experience of having that ancestry, that heritage.”

Rakie Ayola, Sylvestra Le Touzel and Cherrelle Skeete in 'The Authenticator' (Marc Brenner)

There are, she says, misconceptions around slavery’s exploration on the British stage. “When you say ‘oh, I’m writing about [enslavement],’ people say ‘oh, not that again.’ People seem to think there were a lot of plays on this subject. And I looked into it and found that, in the 10 or 20 years prior to Rockets’ first staging, there had been very few plays by Black British authors on the subject. Produced, anyway. Maybe they’d written them, but they’d not been produced. The plays on the subject were written by American authors. So it was really about American history, not the British involvement.”

When she’s not writing plays, Pinnock works in academia – most recently teaching playwriting at the University of London’s Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. She speaks with the confident, inquisitive erudition of someone who has built their life around words. “I really love it,” She says, “I think the thing people don’t talk about enough is when you teach, you’re learning so much yourself. And facilitating someone else’s process gives you a break from having to just work on your stuff all the time.”

If writing plays is a rewarding – but perpetually demanding – part of the process, then the actual staging of new plays brings its own challenges. “One of the things I worry about is it’s difficult for new writing at the moment,” Pinnock says. “People are maybe not aware of just what a risk a new play is.” It’s a fear that echoes the National’s director Indhu Rubasingham, who earlier this year warned about the consequences of a decline in new stage writing, saying the “crisis” risked “betraying” the ethos of William Shakespeare.

Cherrelle Skeete in 'The Authenticator' at the National Theatre (Marc Brenner)

“New writing is still recovering after Covid,” Pinnock continues, “because it seems like the riskiest kind of play to put on. People are favouring musicals and classic plays at the moment, because it’s a safer bet.” Nonetheless, she says, there are reasons to be optimistic about the state of new theatre in the UK – describing the National’s new works programme as “something to be commended”.

“New writing in the UK is prioritised to some degree,” she says, “and there are [specified] new writing theatres. I know there are some countries where it isn’t as valued.” Even over the past year, several of the most acclaimed and talked about plays have been original material, from Luke Norris’s Guess How Much I Love You?, to Suzie Miller’s Inter Alia, to Ava Pickett’s 1536 – transferring to the West End in a month’s time after a sold-out run at the Almeida.

The proud tradition of original new plays is an essential fibre of British theatre – and Pinnock one of its figureheads.

‘The Authenticator’ is on at the National Theatre’s Dorfman Theatre until 9 May

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