Breaking Baz: ‘We Are Lady Parts’ Star Faith Omole Pens Debut Play For London Stage; Off-Broadway’s ‘Titanique’ Sets Course For West End
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EXCLUSIVE: Faith Omole, one of the stars of Nida Manzoor’s Peacock/C4/Working Title punk comedy series We Are Lady Parts, will have her debut play produced on the London stage next month starring BAFTA Award winner Rakie Ayola.
My Father’s Fable will run at West London’s Bush Theatre from June 15-July 27.
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Omole, a British-Nigerian born in London, said in an exclusive interview with Deadline that the play’s main character, Peace, has learnt a year after her father’s death that he had another son in Nigeria who’s now coming to visit in London. “She has a boyfriend who is pushing her to meet him and a mother [played by Ayola] that doesn’t want her to meet this strange boy from Nigeria.”
The thespian, nominated for an Olivier Award for her performance in the glorious Sheffield Theatre, National Theatre and Various Productions musical Standing at the Sky’s Edge, by Richard Hawley and Chris Bush, stated that My Father’s Fable “is about identity, and the more they get to know each other the more people’s world’s start to break a bit. … I found it really cathartic to write.”
The idea for the play, which is not autobiographical, was forged out of “everything that happened” in 2020, the pandemic and the unrest sparked by the murder of George Floyd. “I found a lot of people were trying to understand how people felt — particularly Black people, people of the African diaspora — and not everybody could understand.”
Omole found that the best way to make people hear something “is to put it in a context they can understand. Everybody understands family, everybody understands love, so what we have is a woman who is getting to know herself again in the form of this secret, in the form of her father’s other son.”
She wants the play to help us understand “our identities or about our families. We know what it is to lose somebody, we know what it is to have grief. Those are the things we can connect to.”
Particularly as an actor, Omole said that she has “learnt that a human emotion is the most powerful thing that we can display, and that is the only way that we can change a person, for me anyway.”
She argued that “facts and figures, they’ll always be here, but I don’t know if facts and figures can change a person’s heart in the way that it does to just see another person for who they are in their entirety, warts and all.”
Omole told me that she’s “obsessed” with Ayola’s career. Last year she was awarded the prestigious BAFTA Cymru Sian Phillips Award for services to television, and the same body also named her Best Actress for Season 2 of The Pact. In 2021, Ayola won the main TV BAFTA for Best Supporting Actress honor for her role in Jimmy McGovern’s Anthony, which starred Ted Lasso’s Toheeb Jimoh in the title role. She also appears in upcoming Netflix drama Kaos.
Ayola last appeared at the Bush Theatre five years ago in a revival of Caryl Phillips’s 1980 drama Strange Fruit .
Rebekah Murrell (One Day, The Pact) will direct My Father’s Fable, with Ayola, Tiwa Lade and Gabriel Akuwudike in the company, with a fourth role still to be cast.
Omole said she felt “really excited, for me as a Black actress, to write a play where another Black actress can come and take up the mantle. It’s about sharing. It’s about inviting people to the table and empowering more people with voices. It’s incredible for me to sit in a room as a girl who has many times in her career felt like there are not enough roles for Black actresses and to be able to have created a play where I can look at Rakie and to look at Tiwa doing the same.”
Her aim, she said, has been to create “complex characters for the women to play.”
Laughing, she added that she wanted to “create scenes where women can play more than one emotion!”
Shaking her head, Omole cried “one hundred percent. Women are so amazing — they can’t just be summed up in one line.”
Growing up, her home was a Nigerian household. “It was kind of a weird thing,” she said. “You’d go to school and felt like you were someone else, then when you got home and were in a Nigerian home.”
The older she got, she felt she was more able to “bridge the two” cultures.
“Many of us that have an immigrant experience know what it is to feel we put on two different masks when we’re in different areas and the responsibilities we feel towards each area,” Omoloe said. “A lot of people can connect with that whether it be your culture, or your race or even just the region that you live in.
“You get northerners who are in London and then their accent just kind of softens. And they go back up north, and then suddenly their accent is out in full force, and we’re always wrestling with what it means to be a real person in each area.”
That’s an avenue explored in her play “but in an exciting way. These characters are funny and heartbreaking but powerful.”
Omole told me that she wrote when she was younger and always has loved storytelling in all forms.
“I’m an actor, I’m a singer… my biggest passion is how we tell stories and any new version, I like to learn or get my hands on,” she said. “It started off with books and reading novels up until goodness knows what time of the morning and my parents telling me that I had to go to bed. I was the kid that used a torch under my duvet to finish the novel. It started off with novels so that I knew what a character did and what a character thought, and I knew those two things didn’t always match up. Then I got introduced to drama and acting at school, which is why it’s so important to have these things, and I realized there’s another way that we can tell stories and I can be a part of it. And I can add my voice.”
Five years ago she got “brave enough” to start writing again. “Once I started, it was like a dam burst,” she said.
An earlier effort, an yet-unproduced play called Kaleidoscope, won the 2023 Alfred Fagon Award, named after the actor, poet and playwright who died in 1986. The prize recognizes and celebrates British writers of African and Caribbean descent. The Peggy Ramsay Foundation, established after the death of the eminent literary agent Peggy Ramsay, who at one point represented Joe Orton (Loot), supports the Fagon Award.
“The bravest thing for me last year was to decide to try and put stuff out because I was quite protective of all these characters and all these stories,” Omole said. “Last year I decided to send these things to people.
“Now we’re in the year of things being made,” she said smiling.
The second season of We Are Lady Parts begins May 30 on Peacock/Channel 4.
Omole said that the show dove deeper into the story of her character Bisma, the group’s bass player, “exploring her identity as a woman, as a mother as well, and how people see her in comparison to how she actually is.”
Season 1, she said, “was like a beautiful baby, and Season 2 is like this mutant, this fiery animal. It’s so cool.”
Lynette Linton, the Bush Theatre’s artistic director, described in a statement My Father’s Fable as being “a gripping story of grief belonging, and a family on the edge.”
Off-Broadway’s ‘Titanque’ Sets Sail For London’s West End
Producers Eva Price and Michael Harrison are charting a course for musical Titanique, a musical parody of James Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster Titanic, to open in London later this year.
They have their eye on a West End house, but no deal has been struck. However, I’m officially informed that the plan will be for Titanique to drop anchor sometime in 2024.
The spoof show has a spoof Celine Dion commandeering a tour at the Titanic Museum, singing her hits and spilling her truth of what occurred between the film’s Jack and Rose, played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet.
Titanique premiered at NYC’s Asylum Theatre before being towed to the Daryl Roth Theatre, where it has been extended through June 16.
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