'What doctor know about our illness? Just give you pills to sick you stomach and a doctor certificate. What they know about a black woman soul?' In North London, Del and Viv are soul-sick. Del doesn't want to be at home; staying out late - 3 p.m.-the-next-day late - is more her thing. Viv scours her schoolbooks trying to find a trace of herself between their lines. When Enid takes her daughters to the local obeah woman for some traditional Caribbean soul-healing, secrets are spilled. There's no turning back for Del, Viv and Enid as they negotiate the frictions between their countries and cultures. Two generations. Three incredible women. Winsome Pinnock's play Leave Taking is an epic story of what we leave behind in order to find home. It premiered in 1987, and was revived at the Bush Theatre, London, in 2018, in a production directed by the Bush's Artistic Director, Madani Younis. Winsome Pinnock has written numerous plays, including Talking in Tongues, for which she won the George Devine and Pearson Best New Play Awards. 'The godmother of Black British playwrights' Guardian

'I am the slave ship. Wrecked. Empty. I am a shark, livid with the desire for blood. I am the sea, boiling with fury.' On the set of a new film about Victorian artist J.M.W. Turner, young actress Lou is haunted by an unresolved history. Meanwhile, in 1840, Londoners Lucy and Thomas try to come to terms with the meaning of freedom. Moving between London past and present, Winsome Pinnock's astonishing play retells British history through the prism of the slave trade. Fusing fact with fiction, and the powerfully personal with the fiercely political, Rockets and Blue Lights asks who owns our past – and who has the right to tell its stories? Winner of the 2018 Alfred Fagon Award, the play opened at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, in 2020, directed by Miranda Cromwell. It transferred to the National Theatre, London, in 2021. 'Rockets and Blue Lights places at its center one of the nineteenth century's most famous paintings: J. M. W. Turner's "The Slave Ship". Moving between several sets of characters and ranging from the 1800s to the present, this intricately plotted drama compels us to confront the horrors of our shared past. It does so with compassion and wit, never once compromising Pinnock's vision of theater as the communal creation of new, stranger, and perhaps truer histories' Windham-Campbell Prize committee, on awarding Winsome Pinnock a Windham-Campbell Prize for Drama in 2022

Eight short plays, commissioned and developed as part of the Women Centre Stage Festival, that together demonstrate the range, depth and richness of women's writing for the stage. Selected by Sue Parrish, Artistic Director of Sphinx Theatre, these plays offer a wide variety of rewarding roles for women, and are perfect for schools, youth groups and theatre companies to perform. How to Not Sink by Georgia Christou looks at duty, love and dependency across three generations of women. In Wilderness by April De Angelis, a patient and her psychiatrist head into the wilderness to find out how sane any of us really are. In Chloe Todd Fordham's The Nightclub, three very different women at a gay nightclub in Orlando are caught up in a terrifying hate crime. Fucking Feminists by Rose Lewenstein is a fiercely funny investigation of what feminism means, and what it has become. Winsome Pinnock's Tituba is a one-woman show about Tituba Indian, the enslaved woman who played a central role in the seventeenth-century Salem Witch Trials. In The Road to Huntsville by Stephanie Ridings, a writer researching women who fall in love with men on death row finds herself crossing the line. White Lead by Jessica Sian explores the expectations and responsibilities of being an artist and a woman. In What is the Custom of Your Grief? by Timberlake Wertenbaker, an English schoolgirl whose brother has been killed on active duty in Afghanistan is befriended online by an Afghan girl. Sphinx Theatre has been at the vanguard of promoting, advocating and inspiring women in the arts through productions, conferences and research for more than forty years.

Six plays by some of the most exciting and distinctive female voices in British theatre, exploring the heartbreaking truth about the lives of women in the criminal justice system. The plays were commissioned and premiered by Clean Break, a theatre and education company working with women whose lives have been affected by the criminal justice system. Included in this volume: Fatal Light by Chloe Moss, about a young mother's inability to cope with separation from her daughter. Taken by Winsome Pinnock, about a mother confronted by the child she had to give up. Dream Pill by Rebecca Prichard, about two children forced into prostitution. Doris Day by E V Crowe, about two police officers and their different expectations of the job. Dancing Bears by Sam Holcroft, about the twisted loyalties and violence in teenage gangs. That Almost Unnameable Lust by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, about a writer holding workshops with older women in a prison. The plays were first performed at Soho Theatre, London, in November 2010.

The Methuen Drama Book of Plays by Black British Writers provides an essential anthology of six of the key plays that have shaped the trajectory of British black theatre from the late-1970s to the present day. In doing so it charts the journey from specialist black theatre companies to the mainstream, including West End success, while providing a cultural and racial barometer for Britain during the last forty years. It opens with Mustapha Matura's 1979 play Welcome Home Jacko which in its depiction of a group of young unemployed West Indians was one of the first to explore issues of youth culture, identity and racial and cultural identification. Jackie Kay's Chiaroscuro examines debates about the politics of black, mixed race and lesbian identities in 1980s Britain, and from the 1990s Winsome Pinnock's Talking in Tongues engages with the politics of feminism to explore issues of black women's identity in Britian and Jamaica. From the first decade of the twenty-first century the three plays include Roy Williams' seminal pub-drama Sing Yer Hearts Out for the Lads, exploring racism and identity against the backdrop of the World Cup; Kwame Kwei-Armah's National Theatre play of 2004, Fix Up, about black cultural history and progress in modern Britain, and finally Bola Agbage's terrific 2007 debut, Gone Too Far!, which examines questions of identity and tensions between Africans and Caribbeans living in Britain. Edited by Lynnette Goddard, this important anthology provides an essential introduction to the last forty years of British black theatre.