Challenges

Q: What aspects of your role have you found most challenging?
A: Once On this Island is a very celebrated, award-wining piece of musical theatre, so it isn’t something that you want to mess around with. However, what I really wanted to bring to it, particularly after talking to the performers and choreographer, was that I wanted to celebrate black culture, in a way that was a little bit more ‘rootsy’ than it had been done in the past. It was important that in 2009 that we didn’t represent Haiti as a mystical island and that the audience could tell where it was set. Having said that an audience will look at the set and could say it is St Lucia or Jamaica and that’s the whole point – it could be anywhere. It could be Birmingham – it’s just a scene from where we tell the story.