In the summer of 2019 a tiny south London theatre staged a play by an unknown writer, directed by an actor who had never taken charge of a show before. Set two years earlier, J’Ouvert followed three young women through a day at the Notting Hill carnival. Like the carnival itself, that sweltering weekend just two months after the Grenfell Tower disaster, it released a geyser of pent-up emotion, selling out within days. “It reminded me that it’s our right to skin out, be joyous, be angry, to remember our queen of carnival Claudia Jones, and spend two whole glorious days as the majority,” enthused gal-dem reviewer Niellah Arboine.
Now it’s back, in a parade of shows winding into the West End after a year of shuttered silence. It has also been filmed for BBC iPlayer, reuniting its 29-year-old author Yasmin Joseph with director Rebekah Murrell and two of the three actors who originally performed it.
“It’s been a mind-blowing experience,” says Joseph. “I knew when I made it that I wanted it to be something that I revisited, but I never expected those opportunities to come up so quickly. At a time when everything else has been stagnant, it has just kept having new bits of life breathed into it.”
The play takes its name from the French Creole for dawn, the traditional starting time for carnivals in the Caribbean as far back as the 18th century. Part play and part street party, its soca-saturated soundtrack is played live by a DJ, as the three women lose themselves to a reckoning with the best and worst of the carnival experience: they are judged by their elders and jostled by men as they fight their way through yuppie purveyors of organic lychee juice in search of an experience that is authentic and free.
Joseph, a lifelong carnival devotee, traces the play’s origins back to a period living in New York, when she went to a Labor Day Parade. “And it was amazing. I felt I’d found home: it’s soca music, it’s Caribbean people, but lots of people were telling me, ‘You have to be really careful when you go there’, which made no sense to me because that’s where I’m meant to be completely safe.”
As she looked into it, a darker side started to emerge: a 22-year-old student gunned down at New York’s J’Ouvert festival for declining the advances of a man; a 30-year-old masquerader whose murder at Port of Spain in Trinidad was blamed by the city’s mayor on her provocative outfit. “So I started using these experiences of women all around the world, and thinking about what it means for me as a black woman to occupy space in carnival, daring to be free, daring to be scantily clad, expressing myself,” says Joseph.
Importantly, the Notting Hill carnival was founded by women. “Carnival came from a place of oppression, and sometimes a doubling-down for women within that space, though they were the pioneers who continue to push the event forward and uphold the tradition.”
The trio are guided through the day by the spirit of Claudia Jones, who unites their conflicting beliefs in activism or abandon into a philosophy of “anger and joy”. When Jones staged the first London carnival at St Pancras Town Hall in 1959, partly as a response to the previous year’s Notting Hill riots, Joseph’s own grandparents had recently converged on the UK from three different Caribbean islands, as part of the Windrush generation.
One of her grandmothers became a nurse, and it is this other tradition that has kept Joseph busy for much of the pandemic, after she was commissioned by Bedford’s Place theatre to write a play based on testimony collected by the Retired Caribbean Nurses Association. “They’re an amazing collective of women who have basically gone around archiving their living history,” she says. The original intention was to present it as a work-in-progress at live readings around the Bedfordshire region, but after Covid struck it was performed by nurses online as a first step towards a full production.
Joseph grew up in the north London borough of Camden, where her schoolteacher mother got her and her siblings involved early on in the year-long business of planning, building and decorating carnival floats and “playing mas” – taking part in the costume parade. At first she thought she wanted to be an actor, but while at university, studying English and drama, she “massively fell out of love with performing and became increasingly intrigued by writing stories I wanted to see.”
So began a period of holding down multiple jobs so she could pay her own way through a succession of interning jobs. “My journey to be a writer has not been the simplest, in that a lot of my most career-defining experiences have been for no money, and it would have been a lot easier to give up,” she says. “So I’m glad that the conversation has shifted, and that’s actually frowned upon. Now people need to at least get expenses.”
She’s aware of being part of a cohort of young black writers who managed to get their first plays on before the pandemic shut everything down. “There’s definite luck in that. I feel I’ve reached a point in my career where I have really strong relationships and a belief in the buildings I am writing within, which is a major part of creating anything, and I will do whatever I can to make it easier for any black writers coming up behind me.”
There is still a long way to go, she points out. “I think what is a bit challenging is that [institutions] are learning to speak the acceptable and expected language of the moment, but whether that actually leads to tangible change is something that we’re just going to have to keep a close eye on. So yeah, I’m happy to see some shifts, but it’s work that we will only see some of in our lifetime.”
With its critique of gentrification and plea for a free space for women of colour, it might seem ironic that the play will open in the pricey, predominantly white West End when the carnival itself was cancelled last year. But cometh the hour, cometh the play: there’s a magic in the economy of scale that J’Ouvert brings to capturing the sort of exuberant festival experience to which so many of us long to return.
“It’s really important to me to stress that, though I’m looking very specifically at a space that I come from and belong within, the violence that occurs can be transposed to other contexts. It happens at Glastonbury, it happens in any place, any space where women dare to express themselves,” says Joseph. “Most of all I wanted to capture the joy of carnival.” As Claudia Jones puts it in the play: “It’s not my people exist to struggle, let them see joy.”
J’Ouvert is on BBC iPlayer and at the Harold Pinter theatre, London, 16 June to 3 July.
• This article was amended on 4 May 2021. The carnival was cancelled in 2020 but has not been cancelled this year as an earlier version suggested. A decision has yet to be made.
