Meet Adura Onashile: The British-Nigerian Playwright Forging Her Own Path

Although Onashile has been researching and developing Ghosts for years, it feels particularly relevant now, given last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, which saw the Bristol statue of slave trader Edward Colston toppled, and protests around the statue of Cecil Rhodes in Oxford. “It was absolutely right that we were questioning why we had these statues venerating men who essentially condoned genocide,” she says crisply. “People say: ‘Well, if we take these statues down we’re erasing history.’ But I don’t know – are there any statues of Hitler?”

Colonial legacy aside, Onashile loves life north of the border. She first came to Scotland for work, to appear at the Fringe. When she tried to return to London, it was too overwhelming. “To navigate a city like London,” she says, “you need to live with a certain amount of stress every day.” Like many creatives who have fled the capital, Onashile is evangelical about life outside the Big Smoke. “The creative scene is more intimate,” she says, “and it’s easier to have conversations with people. And it’s easier in Scotland to be an auteur, so you can move from being a writer to a director to an actor, which really suits me.” And of course, there’s the cost of living. “Your money goes a lot further up here than in London,” she laughs.

Onashile is a mother to a two-year-old girl. Like many working parents during Covid, eking out time for work has been a struggle. “Today she’s at nursery,” Onashile says, “which is great. But getting a run with your head in the zone is tough, because nursery only takes her for certain days. But you know, mothers have been writing and making work for years.”

Leaving London was not something she ever planned. Onashile was born in the UK, but her parents returned to Nigeria when she was one. By the time she was 11, her mother had brought her back to Bermondsey in London. “I was bullied a lot because of my accent,” she says, “and people thought I had airs and graces, because I was really studious. It was tough.” At school, Onashile would mimic the way that the popular white girls in her class spoke and dressed, in order to fit in.

“It was that immigrant mentality,” she continues, “of being more like them, because they get on. That was the beginning of mimicking accents, and that’s probably why I got into theatre, although I didn’t realise it at the time. It saddens me that I found myself, aged 12, realising that my own skin wasn’t the best place for me to be.”

Acting ultimately wasn’t for Onashile, because she realised her favourite bit of the dramatic process was the creating, not the performing. “It took me a really long time to realise that the bit I liked the least was when the rehearsals were over,” she says.

When she transitioned into writing and directing, everything fell into place. HeLa told the story of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman from 1950s Baltimore whose body became the subject of decades of scientific research, without her knowledge or consent, after doctors scraped a cell sample without her permission. After HeLa came Expensive Shit, which opened at the prestigious Traverse Theatre during the Fringe in 2016, and was also made into a short film.

With critical acclaim came the impostor syndrome. “I was overwhelmed with the pressure of being at one of the top theatres in Edinburgh during the Fringe, with my directorial debut,” Onashile says candidly of the experience of opening Expensive Shit. “It was a lot of pressure.” It was the first time that an all-Black production had opened at a Scottish theatre, and the media attention felt intense.

“I felt like a bird in a cage,” she tells me. “I didn’t know whether my work was being reviewed because of its quality, or because it was the first time people had seen anything like that.” She worried that, in writing for a white audience, she was reinforcing a white gaze. “White people are the majority of the people who see theatre,” she says, “and without even realising, I spent my entire career centring them.”

With Ghosts, Onashile has stepped back from that gaze. “I tried to centre the world for a Black audience,” she says. “I don’t have to answer any questions about people’s ignorance, because it isn’t an educational piece. I presume the people experiencing it know this history, and are Black. That was a shift for me.” Centring on a Black audience allowed Onashile to make something that felt more honest, and true. “It was about becoming properly authentic,” she explains, “and standing on my own, as myself, with no compromises.”

After Ghosts, Onashile plans to direct her first feature film, which she has already written, and is currently being financed. The story is loosely based on her relationship with her mum, and she hopes to begin filming this summer.

Lead image by: Eoin Carey