Itw with playwright Mojisola Adebayo

Mojisola Adebayo in Muhammad Ali & Me

Mojisola Adebayo jokes that although her name means ‘wakes up to wealth’, it has not come true yet. However, with her play Muhammad Ali & Me currently enjoying success at the Oval House Theatre, and a rich body of work behind her – as a writer, performer and director – she certainly lives up to her name in an artistic sense.

Muhammad Ali & Me, which is about a young girl who forms a fantastical relationship with the great fighter, is her most autobiographical work yet. The protagonist, like the writer, is Nigerian-Danish, grows up in the 70s and studies theatre at university. However, Adebayo points out that although the play is “truthful, in the biggest sense of the word, it is not all fact.” The drama deals with hard-hitting issues such as racism, physical and sexual abuse, all of which Adebayo admits; “I have had to deal with in some way, but the details are different.” “Performing the play has been cathartic, although I didn’t set out for it to be. When I first performed the scene where she goes to the police station and asks the officer to write her story down, I was sobbing.”

Writing stories as a way of reclaiming the past is a theme in Adebayo’s work. Her current play is as much about the biography of Muhammad Ali as her own autobiography, and her previous play Moj of the Antarctic drew on the life of the African-American woman Ellen Craft, who escaped slavery by disguising herself as a white man. Yet it is not only well-known historical figures like Gandhi and Mandela that inspire her, she says; “I’m also interested in the heroism of our mothers, people you don’t recognise.” In fact her biggest hero is an Indian woman she met while helping to found a slum-dwellers theatre company there.

As well as India, Adebayo has worked in many countries including Brazil, Israel, Palestine, South Africa and the Antarctic. She specialises in Theatre for Social Change and, despite having been part of numerous television and radio productions, feels that “theatre has a wonderful capacity for interactivity and for bringing people together.”

Indeed, her works are always interactive and innovative, marked in particular by the way in which they incorporate music, dance, song and images. The first person who influenced her view on what a play could be was Ntozake Shange, who wrote For Coloured girls who have considered Suicide in 1974. Adebayo enthuses; “It was really poetic and written for movement – that’s what I’m interested in.”

The next piece Mojisola is working on focuses once more on biography and the North Pole; it is a tale of betrayal inspired by the life of Matthew Henson, an African American who was, disputably, the first man to reach the North Pole.