The Edinburgh Festival Fringe has never been a safe space for black performers, so I created my own

Like many artists in theatre, taking work to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe has always been a goal for me. In a city where everyone is looking out for new, young and exciting voices, it’s an amazing opportunity to showcase new work. Two years ago, however, my desire to go was challenged by an upsetting account of another black performer’s experience: Selina Thompson’s painful article “Excerpts from the diary of a black woman at the Edinburgh Fringe”, which articulated the isolation Thompson felt as a black artist in Edinburgh.

As a black writer and director myself, I couldn’t shake what I’d read from my mind: “I think of looking out into a white audience, and feeling horribly, horrifically alone, feeling like doing the show is going into battle,’’ Thompson wrote.

In the same year, only a couple of days later, Matthew Xia, theatre director, wrote a similar article for The Stage: “Invisible in Edinburgh – why are Bame people ignored at the Fringe?” also highlighting a similar feeling of isolation and invisibility.

Conversations about the exclusion and unease experienced by black artists at the Fringe pop up every year. Black artists decry the lack of inclusion at the Edinburgh Fringe; one or two high-profile artists claim to take an interest. However, it’s hard to imagine what it would take to make real, lasting change at the annual festival. Relatively few black artists go to the Edinburgh Fringe, both because it’s insanely expensive for most to go (a financial reality that disproportionately affects black artists) and because they know that if they do find a way to go, they may well feel alone, and ignored.

Last year, Jessica Brough, the founder of Fringe of Colour started to list Bame performers at the fringe in to draw attention to their work, and this year she’s campaigning for venues to provide free tickets to young black people in an attempt to diversify venues and audiences. While I applaud efforts like these, I still wonder whether it makes sense for myself and other black artists to focus on the Edinburgh Fringe at all. Shouldn’t we instead focus on creating new platforms that serve us better?

This August, that’s exactly the leap I took. I curated a theatre festival that is specifically for and by black artists, running over the same time period as the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. If Edinburgh wasn’t going to be a viable option for me and other artists like me, I wanted to create a space that was, and I named it appropriately: This is Black, which is running from 5-25 August at The Bunker Theatre in Southwark.

Bringing together four new plays and four teams of black theatremakers to perform for three weeks has been electrifying, and we have also worked with visual artists to create an exhibition that will run alongside the festival. But that doesn’t mean it has come without challenges. During a promotional radio interview, I brought up the importance of black writers being given a platform to tell their own stories.

The presenter’s response was disappointing. “Why can’t a white person write a story about being black?” he asked. I was shocked. The fact that it came from a black man with the same skin complexion as me threw me off further. I had not come to this interview to chat about why a white person (normally a white man) cannot and should not write a story about being black. I wanted to talk about the space I had created for black writers to tell whatever stories they chose. But there I was, forced to confront a laughably shortsighted question.

In my view, no white person is qualified to authentically write a story about my black life or other black lives. The notion that “anyone can tell any story” is a narrative peddled by, for the most part, the people that narrative most suits: white people. History has shown us as much. In fact, the last few years alone provide enough examples of such ignorance.

Take the stage adaptation of Andrea Levy’s Small Island for example. When I heard that task would be undertaken by a white woman, Helen Edmundson, I asked myself: how could a white woman understand the nuances to be able to adapt this story for the stage? I wondered whether any black British-Caribbean female playwrights had been approached for their expertise on themes such as the Windrush, identity and migration.

Not only is the idea that “anyone can write anything” false in an industry that only trusts white people as authoritative storytellers, it’s a flawed idea because of the specificity of lived experience, and the unique knowledge that specific perspectives provide. American playwright Lynn Nottage explained that the default white male perspective in theatre lacks the impact of historical knowledge of what it means to be black: “It’s like trying to recount to someone what it’s like to go through war, and you’ve never been in a war.”

Even if white writers somehow know everything they need to in order to write black stories authentically, the fact remains that they are more likely to have the opportunity and privilege to tell those stories while black writers are still fighting to get in the door.

The four plays that I’ve brought together for This is Black challenge those restrictions. All debut works, writers and participating collectives will see their fully realised stories on stage for the first time. They are varied, unexpected, complex and unapologetic. I also wanted to be able to offer black artists time, space and resources in an industry where it often feels as though they’re only available to a particular kind of person in theatre, those who are always given the license to make “edgy”, “radical”, “experimental” work and expand the canon in whichever way they want.

The rest of us (who are “different”) are shut out of participating. And when we do make work and take ownership of spaces, it is often branded by some critics as “not challenging enough”. But blackness is not one-dimensional; it is layered, complex, beautiful, ugly, angry, loud and more. But most importantly, through festivals like these, it means telling our own stories without restrictions.

This is Black is taking place at the Bunker Theatre from 5-25 August