{"id":607476,"date":"2026-04-26T13:22:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-26T13:22:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/607476\/"},"modified":"2026-04-26T13:22:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-26T13:22:08","slug":"adjoa-andoh-on-shakespeare-bridgerton-and-dei-i-dont-have-to-be-the-only-one-in-the-room-adjoa-andoh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/607476\/","title":{"rendered":"Adjoa Andoh on Shakespeare, Bridgerton and DEI: \u2018I don\u2019t have to be the only one in the room\u2019 | Adjoa Andoh"},"content":{"rendered":"

Addressing an audience at the Folger Shakespeare Library<\/a> in Washington, Adjoa Andoh acknowledged that some of her work might look \u201cBlack or colour-centric\u201d but that is only because of the silos the world forces us into. She could just as easily be Leeds United football club-centric, she added.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am missing two crucial matches to be here with you this week,\u201d the 63-year-old exclaimed, prompting laughter in the theatre. \u201cI have tickets!\u201d<\/p>\n

Any football fan will empathise. Andoh, a Shakespearean actor and director<\/a> and star of the Netflix series Bridgerton, had made the noble sacrifice of missing an FA Cup semi-final to be take part in a new director\u2019s residency programme at the Folger, a Shakespearean shrine \u2013 with scenes from the plays carved in marble \u2013 on Capitol Hill since 1932.<\/p>\n

Her week\u2019s itinerary included consulting the Folger\u2019s collection, public programmes such as last Sunday\u2019s lecture (which effortlessly wove together the Gospel of Luke, the transatlantic slave trade, punk rock and the Artemis II moon mission), visits to Washington schools and a screening of her 2019 production of Richard II<\/a> at Shakespeare\u2019s Globe in London.<\/p>\n

Andoh\u2019s week culminated with a staged reading commemorating the 90th anniversary of the Federal Theatre Project\u2019s production of Macbeth, one of the first to feature an all-Black cast in the US, directed by a young Orson Welles. Funded by President Franklin Roosevelt\u2019s New Deal to help yank America out of the Great Depression, the original production was a hit that provided vital jobs for unemployed artists.<\/p>\n

The residency also included an interview with the Guardian in one of the Folger\u2019s ornate, wood-panelled rooms, a couple of days before Shakespeare\u2019s birthday. \u201cI had a bit of a cry yesterday,\u201d she confesses, reflecting on her viewing of the world\u2019s biggest collection of Shakespeare\u2019s First Folios and her tour of the vaults. \u201cThere\u2019s something fantastically, energetically interesting about the Folger being where it\u2019s placed,\u201d in the nation\u2019s capital, she says.<\/p>\n

Politics were at the heart of her Richard II at the Globe<\/a>, a study of what Shakespeare\u2019s love letter to England could illuminate a time of \u201cviolent national paroxysms\u201d in the aftermath of the Brexit vote to quit the European Union. The poster showed Andoh, a shaven-headed Black woman, against the backdrop of the flag of St George. She conceived, co-directed and starred in the first all-women-of-colour version of the play staged in Britain.<\/p>\n

Adjoa Andoh in Washington DC Photograph: Shoot Authentic\/Bee Too Sweet<\/p>\n

It was a deliberate statement that there is no dearth of talent, only a dearth of imagination among the hirers and firers in the industry. \u201cWe all cried because it was like, I don\u2019t have to be the only one in the room,\u201d she recalls. \u201cImagine that all the work you\u2019ve ever done as a journalist, you\u2019ve always been in newsrooms with writers of colour every day or you\u2019ve been in the newsrooms where you\u2019re the only man. You have to think of yourself in a slightly different way, because you can\u2019t just go in and be a journalist.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have think about, \u2018Oh, am I being too blokey?\u2019 Just stuff that you don\u2019t need in your head, and so I wanted us to have the opportunity to not have that in our heads. We could just go and be, and be a great stage manager, or be a great assistant director, or voice coach, or actor, or composer, or whatever it was you were doing, and also know that you were working on a project where your excellence, your stagecraft, your comedy, your line delivery, your design absolutely would be scrutinised but there would be a whole gang of you and you were all working to be great.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the politics of identity-conscious casting have never been more complex. In 2023 Andoh directed and starred in Richard III at the Liverpool Playhouse<\/a> and the Rose Theatre Kingston with little controversy. A year later Michelle Terry, the artistic director of the Globe, faced a critical backlash when it was announced she would play Richard III, with actors and disability groups objecting that the role of the \u201cdeformd, unfinish\u2019d\u201d king should go to a disabled actor.<\/p>\n

What are Andoh\u2019s thoughts? \u201cRichard III is somebody in Shakespeare\u2019s original conceiving with a physical disability to which is ascribed all sorts of malicious qualities. If you punch down on somebody for something that is not of their own choosing, what happens when they punch up? All we did with our production was we said the thing that is going to be singled out is the quality which they can attach mal-intent to is going to be race rather than a curved spine.<\/p>\n

\u201cKeep everything else the same. Don\u2019t change the language. Just have that person be the only person with that physical difference from the rest of the cast and interestingly, in our production, the actress playing my mum is deaf and has restricted sight. We had an actor who has a physically differently abled body and we had another actor who was very hard of hearing. But that wasn\u2019t the story that I was telling. They were just great actors so I wanted them in the show.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another current debate revolves around whether LGBTQ+ characters can and should be played solely by LGBTQ+ actors. Andoh continues: \u201cThe point is that for so long gay characters were not played by gay actors. It feels like it\u2019s a push into something much more stringent, but what it is, is just the effort to rebalance and then from there forward, everybody should be able to do whatever they\u2019re gifted to do. But I do understand that sense of rebalancing.\u201d<\/p>\n

The rebalancing is evident in Bridgerton<\/a>, the Netflix hit set during the Regency era in London with a more racially diverse cast than might have been found in such a show a generation ago. Andoh plays Lady Danbury, a sharp-witted feminist matriarch.<\/p>\n

As a history-lover, and the daughter of a retired history teacher, \u201cI always felt sad that there would be historical dramas and I wouldn\u2019t necessarily get a shout in them,\u201d she says. \u201cHooray for things like being able to do classical theatre, but it wasn\u2019t translating into contemporary iterations of historical drama. What Bridgerton<\/a> has done is change the zeitgeist of casting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Adjoa Andoh in Bridgerton. Photograph: Liam Daniel\/Netflix<\/p>\n

While fictional, Bridgerton is actually rooted in histories that were \u201chidden in plain sight\u201d, she continues. Andoh cites the example of Dorothy Thomas, an enslaved woman who bought her own freedom and that of 20 family members, eventually petitioning parliament over unfair taxation and having an affair with Prince William, the future King William IV.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s no judgment on it. It\u2019s just information. We need to know all the history so we\u2019re not freaked out by the bits of history we thought weren\u2019t history, so we don\u2019t feel like, \u2018Oh, it\u2019s the woke brigade just slamming us with their blah blah blah.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

But a \u201cwar on woke\u201d is under way on both sides of the Atlantic. The election of Donald Trump in 2024 signalled a backsliding. The US president has purged diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes in the federal government and put pressure on companies and museums to do likewise. The Black Lives Matter Plaza outside the White House has been torn up and erased. Trump continues to hammer transgender rights at every opportunity.<\/p>\n

Andoh says: \u201cDEI has been rescinded in lots of areas in the state but also in the corporate world and in lots places. While we\u2019re wringing our hands about Jeffrey Epstein, as well we should be, there are areas where that DEI would have been supportive of women in the workplace and maybe they\u2019re not being so supported.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you live in a world where there\u2019s winners and losers, if you\u2019re asking for equality, you\u2019re asking for winners to be less winny and that\u2019s going to hurt some people and they will have difficulty with that. People always want to be in less difficult circumstances and so if the opportunity arises to ease that burden on them, they will take it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Andoh is co-director of the production company Swinging the Lens<\/a>, which seeks to uncover marginalised histories and present familiar narratives through fresh, inclusive perspectives. Her keen awareness of the \u201csilo of race\u201d \u2013 what she calls a frustrating \u201caccident of my birth\u201d \u2013 is deeply rooted in her childhood.<\/p>\n

Born to a white British mother and Ghanaian father, she grew up in Leeds before her father moved the family to a small village in the rural Cotswolds in the late 1960s.<\/p>\n

Adjoa Andoh and Liz Kettle in Richard III. Photograph: Manuel Harlan<\/p>\n

Life in Wickwar in Gloucestershire was like living in the pages of Cider With Rosie<\/a>, Andoh recalls \u2013 self-sufficient, quiet and deeply communal. Her father served on the parish council and played in local folk bands, but for a mixed-race girl with a thick Leeds accent, it required resilience. \u201cYou had to be a tough nut out there,\u201d she notes, adding she survived by being \u201cbiffy\u201d and making people laugh.<\/p>\n

Salvation, and a vision of a future she had not dared imagine, arrived on a wet, midweek afternoon in 1979. As a 16-year-old dealing with anorexia and the painful fallout of her parents\u2019 divorce, Andoh attended a Bristol Old Vic matinee of David Hare\u2019s Plenty<\/a>, starring Kate Nelligan.<\/p>\n

Watching Nelligan portray a former French resistance fighter suffocating in postwar London, Andoh sat in the dark and sobbed. At last Sunday\u2019s lecture, she recalled: \u201cThere was a magic happening in that theatre space, a conversation between the writer, the actor and me that had transported and transformed me. I came to understand that perhaps the theatre was the place I could exercise my gift, be myself, lost in other characters.<\/p>\n

\u201cKate Nelligan\u2019s performance that wet midweek afternoon matinee signalled the future course of my life and lifted me out of my deep sadness. When I teach drama students I often ask them to think of the transformational power of their gift. Never phone it in. Engage seriously in their playing because they might never know which wet midweek afternoon a soul in need may sit in front of them, in the dark, longing to connect.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Addressing an audience at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, Adjoa Andoh acknowledged that some of her work…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":607477,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[88],"class_list":{"0":"post-607476","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=607476"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607476\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/607477"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=607476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=607476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=607476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}