ADJOA ANDOH: ‘Black people are always tasked with solving a problem we didn’t create’
‘When we know the truth about people’s stories,’ says Adjoa Andoh, ‘we navigate human beings accordingly.’ It’s a powerful statement from a woman who became an actor because she was interested in ‘telling the truth’. Andoh is the daughter of a white English mother and a Black Ghanaian father who fled into exile in the UK, settling in Bristol – where she was born – and later moving to a small village in the Cotswolds to avoid racism and poor educational expectations for Black children in the city. In Ghana, her father had been ‘upper middle class’; in England, he disappeared into a ‘brown, homogenous lump’, at a time when Black people were not seen as individuals. Thanks to storytellers (and truth-tellers) such as Andoh, progress has been made, because we have increased the range of the stories being told. Andoh ditched law because she wanted to be an actor not a lawyer, disappointing her father’s lifelong belief in education. Most recently, Andoh has directed a cast of women of colour in Richard II at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2019, playing the title role herself.
Writing for The Guardian, theatre critic Michael Billington hailed the production as a reminder ‘that Shakespeare is available to everyone’, praising Andoh’s performance as ‘a brilliant study of a whimsical tyrant wreathed in the luxury of inherited power’. Yet, remarkably little attention was paid to the fact that Andoh was the first woman of colour to mark such an achievement. In response she’s characteristically forthright: ‘We have to mark these moments ourselves. No one else even gets that it is a moment.’ Andoh adds: ‘Our production was a historic acknowledgement of the vital contribution the colonised people of colour (from whom we are descended through the Commonwealth) made to the England we celebrate.’ The set was inspired by her grandmother’s house on the Cape Coast and adorned with photos of the cast’s own mothers and grandmothers.
Andoh has (like many of us) consistently done battle with the expectation that Black people ‘are always the ones tasked with putting forward solutions to a problem we did not create’. People should be finding out for themselves, she points out: ‘Go online. Do some research.’ In a word, it’s ‘tedious’. In an interview with The Stage in 2017, Andoh was quoted as saying she was ‘bored of talking about diversity’. I asked her to revisit the question, and her answer. ‘It’s as if I’m on the floor,’ she says, ‘and someone is kicking me in the head. Then someone else crouches down beside me and says, “What can we do about the person kicking you in the head?”’ How tragic it is, she asserts, that ‘someone had to die, yet another Black person, during a pandemic’ to lead to this ‘tiny chink of opportunity’, this potential for a global moment of reckoning.
Adjoa Andoh will play the Dowager Duchess, Lady Danbury in Shonda Rhimes’s adaptation for Netflix of the Bridgerton books by Julia Quinn, her character a matchmaker who rules the social world of Regency London. I will relish the opportunity to see an actress of her talent in the role.
It is tragic that someone had to die to lead to this reckoning