Tina Turner, racism, and me

In order to play Tina Turner in a new West End musical, Adrienne Warren felt she had to really understand the singing legend. Reading about Turner’s life – the poverty of her upbringing, the brutal abuse from her husband Ike – was gruelling, she told Julia Llewellyn Smith in The Daily Telegraph. Warren, 31, is from a more privileged background, but she and Turner have some things in common: they’re from the American south, where African Americans in particular are ingrained with the idea that when things happen, “you just stick your chin up and keep going”. Turner would have to go on stage still bleeding from one of Ike’s beatings, but she wouldn’t quit, because the audience had paid to hear her sing – and she wasn’t going to let Ike see her fail. Does Warren relate to that mentality? “Oh yeah! As an African-american woman, you’re the bottom of the totem pole. When I was growing up, my father always said to me, ‘You have to be twice as good as other people, because you are black and because you are a woman.’” The show, Tina, recounts a moment when Turner, in her 40s, single and with no record deal, was dismissed by a record company executive as an “old n***** broad”. The line elicits horrified gasps from the audience. “It’s very interesting to hear the British gasp,” Warren says. “Being from America, that word’s not that shocking; so to see how shocked people are by it here gave me a little hope.”