Benedict Lombe interview: Shifters (Financial Times)

 

For most of Benedict Lombe’s life, she has been consumed and fascinated by love stories. “But it was always very clear that people like me don’t exist in them,” she says. She is referring not only to her race but also her ethnic identity: “I’m Congolese and I don’t think I have ever seen a Congolese character in a story that wasn’t about some deep, deep suffering. It does something to you when you don’t get to see people with your history depicted as worthy of love.”

 

So when the Bush Theatre in west London approached her with the offer of a commission, it was obvious to her that a love story is what she should write. She quotes James Baldwin: “The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.”

 

Her play Shifters is the result. Starring Heather Agyepong from Amazon Prime’s The Power as Des and Supacell actor Tosin Cole as Dre, it portrays young lovers reunited several years after a dramatic break-up and is transferring to the West End after a sold-out run in the spring. It is Lombe’s second hit for the Bush: her debut play, Lava, about a young woman’s quest to renew her British passport, opened in the summer of 2021 and won the Susan Smith Blackburn prize for women writing for the English-speaking theatre the following year…..