EXCLUSIVE: Faith Omole, one of the stars of Nida Manzoor’s Peacock/C4/Working Title punk comedy series We Are Lady Parts, will have her debut play produced on the London stage next month starring BAFTA Award winner Rakie Ayola.
My Father’s Fable will run at West London’s Bush Theatre from June 15-July 27. Omole, a British-Nigerian born in London, said in an exclusive interview with Deadline that the play’s main character, Peace, has learnt a year after her father’s death that he had another son in Nigeria who’s now coming to visit in London. “She has a boyfriend who is pushing her to meet him and a mother [played by Ayola] that doesn’t want her to meet this strange boy from Nigeria.” The thespian, nominated for an Olivier Award for her performance in the glorious Sheffield Theatre, National Theatre and Various Productions musical Standing at the Sky’s Edge, by Richard Hawley and Chris Bush, stated that My Father’s Fable “is about identity, and the more they get to know each other the more people’s world’s start to break a bit. … I found it really cathartic to write.” The idea for the play, which is not autobiographical, was forged out of “everything that happened” in 2020, the pandemic and the unrest sparked by the murder of George Floyd. “I found a lot of people were trying to understand how people felt — particularly Black people, people of the African diaspora — and not everybody could understand.” Omole found that the best way to make people hear something “is to put it in a context they can understand.
Everybody understands family, everybody understands love, so what we have is a woman who is getting to know herself again in the form of this secret, in the form of her father’s other son.” She wants the play to
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