Talawa Theatre Company

Talawa Theatre Company is a Black British theatre company founded in 1986. The core of the company's work is championing reinterpretations of classic plays, developing new writing and directing talent and producing plays from and about the African diaspora. The Company is a National Portfolio Organisation, supported by funding from Arts Council England in recognition of consistent high quality work and audience development.

Since 2011 Talawa Theatre Company has been led by artistic director Michael Buffong, whose career spans theatre, TV and film.

The name Talawa comes from Jamaican patois saying "me lickle but me talawa", meaning "small but feisty".

The company's mission is to provide opportunities for black directors, writers and actors, to use black culture to enrich British theatre, and to enlarge theatre audiences seeing black work. Talawa's work embraces both literary and participation activities, finding and developing new writers and scripts, and developing theatre-makers and directors, alongside workshops for schools, colleges and corporate clients and presenting new work by emerging artists.

Jamaican-born Yvonne Brewster, Mona Hammond, Carmen Munroe and Inigo Espejel founded the company in 1986. Talawa's first production in 1986 was The Black Jacobins by C. L. R. James, a play that had not been performed in England for 50 years, and never before with an all-black cast.

Talawa has produced and toured classic work by numerous playwrights and writers including Dennis Scott, Derek Walcott, Galt McDermot, Wole Soyinka, James Baldwin, Michael Abbensetts, Trevor Rhone, William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett, Tariq Ali and Arthur Miller and worked with a variety of directors and actors including Michaela Coel, Cathy Tyson, Dona Croll, Ray Shell, Norman Beaton, Horace Ove, Paulette Randall, Don Warrington, Fraser Ayres and David Harewood.

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