Deirdre Osborne: No Straight Answers: Mojisola Adebayo and Valerie Mason-John discuss their writing for theatre and performance

New Theatre Quarterly (February, 2009)

Mojisola Adebayo and Valerie Mason-John are two distinctive voices in contemporary writing and performance - representing Afro-Queer diasporic heritage through the specific experience of being black, British and lesbian. Creating continuities from contorted or erased histories (personal, social and cultural) their drama demonstrates both Afro-centric and European theatrical influences, which in Mason-John’s case, is further consolidated in her polemic, poetry and prose. Like Britain’s most innovative and prominent contemporary black woman dramatist, debbie tucker green, they reach beyond local or national identity politics, to represent universal themes and to centralise black women’s experiences. With subject-matter that includes royal families, the care system, racial cross-dressing and global ecology, Adebayo and Mason-John have individually forged a unique aesthetic and perspective in work which links environmental degradation with social disenfranchisement and travels to the heart of whiteness along black-affirming imaginative routes.