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A play by the Black Panther star Chadwick Boseman, who died of cancer aged 43 in 2020, is to receive its UK premiere next year.
Deep Azure was written by Boseman in response to the death of Prince Jones, his fellow college student at Washington DC’s Howard University, who was killed in 2000 by a police officer. The play was first performed in 2005 in the US and will be staged at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in London in February, directed by Tristan Fynn-Aiduenu.
Fynn-Aiduenu described the play as “incredibly poignant in speaking about the injustices of police brutality and the unwinding nature of grief, but also the gorgeous brilliance of our Black Souls and exploring every hue they can express on a stage”. He said that Boseman’s love of Shakespeare and hip-hop combined in a “layered, ghostly epic that I have been given the privilege and duty to fully realise”.
Boseman was best known for his performance in the title role of Marvel’s Black Panther, and was posthumously nominated for an Oscar for his performance in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, based on August Wilson’s play. But before he rose to fame as an actor, he had shown himself to be a promising playwright.
The director Derrick Sanders, another Howard University alumnus who commissioned Deep Azure, told the Guardian in 2020 that Boseman took the elements of hip-hop culture – graffiti, DJing, rapping, breakdancing – “and combined them into a narrative form. The storytelling would move it in and out of hip-hop, almost as a precursor to Hamilton.”
Boseman studied Shakespeare at Oxford University with the British American Drama Academy in 1998. He had wanted to make a film of Deep Azure before his Hollywood career exploded. Daniel Banks, who directed the play at the Folger theatre in Washington DC, said that it was “written as a ritual of community healing”. The killing of Jones by an undercover police officer in Virginia in 2000 was also covered by the author Ta-Nehisi Coates in the 2015 book Between the World and Me. In 2006, after a civil trial, damages were awarded to Jones’s young daughter for his wrongful death.
Deep Azure will run from 7 February to 11 April in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, the indoor candlelit venue run by Shakespeare’s Globe. It will be performed alongside a new production of The Tempest (17 January to 12 April) directed by Tim Crouch, who will play Prospero alongside Naomi Wirthner (How to Train Your Dragon) as Ariel.
Crouch is the creator of a series of acclaimed Shakespearean dramas presented from the perspective of the plays’ minor characters, including I, Caliban and I, Banquo. He said he had “been given the keys to the most interesting theatre in London. The spaces at the Globe are not anonymous black boxes that try to disappear as soon as the play begins. They are companions to any work that happens in them; good companions which support and contribute to the stories that they house.”
