Black is the Colour of My Dramaturgy: Apphia Campbell @ Brunton

Seabright Productions: Black Is The Color Of My Voice

Inspired by the life of Nina Simone, Black Is The Color Of My Voice, follows a successful jazz singer and civil rights activist seeking redemption after the untimely death of her father.

She reflects on the journey that took her from a young piano prodigy destined for a life in the service of the church to a renowned jazz vocalist at the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement.

Direct from sell out performances in Shanghai, New York and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Apphia Campbell visits Musselburgh as part of her debut UK tour.

Some strong language and adult themes.

How do you approach 'being' Nina: she is a much loved singer with a complex personality, and does this make it hard to capture her qualities?I approached Nina(Mena as she called in my play), as just a woman. It was really important for me to capture the essence of who she was rather than her stage personality. This is one of the reasons why I changed the name of the character, so instead of the audience focusing on “Nina Simone” the artist. I wanted them to focus on the woman behind the music. I also chose to the change the name because I wanted the music to add mood and texture to the text, and of course, I sing the music. But it’s used as more of a medium to take the story forward or convey a mood just as Nina Simone used it.

What attracted you to her work in the first instance?Nina Simone’s voice is what attracted to me to her. What else could it be? She has one of the most interestingly haunting voices that I’ve ever encountered, and this made me want to know more about the woman behind that voice. When I heard her sing, I was hooked and when I watched her perform I was even more intrigued. I had to know more. I remember watching a clip of her performing “My Baby just cares for me”, and her face looked as if she were a million miles away from that performance. I kept saying, “What is she thinking about? Where is she?” These kind of questions kept causing me to dig deeper.

Do you feel any responsibility to her in a way that you would not feel for a 'fictional character', and how does this express itself in the performance?
I feel a great deal of responsibility towards her because it’s her life. These are elements that I’ve taken from her life, and yes, I’ve changed a few things and interpreted them in a way that I feel she would react to a situation, but in the end it’s Nina Simone’s life. So, I feel like I want to people to walk away with as much respect and love that I’ve developed for her and the only way to do that is to be as human on stage as she would have been in this room alone. Nina Simone was real. 

No acting. No hiding.That’s how I approach my performance. I don’t force any emotion I try to just stay in the moment as she would. It also helps me saying, “Nina Simone didn’t worry about the audience, so neither should I”.


What aspects of Nina do you hope that the audience will take away from the production?
I hope that the audience gains more appreciation for her musical gift, but most importantly, I hope they walk away with an understanding of a complex woman. I’ve been really happy to hear that most audience members have told me that they feel inspired. Feeling inspired by her music is how this whole play started, so with audiences walking away feeling that way I feel that through my gifts, I’m helping Nina Simone’s work continue to impact the world.

She Plays

The Fringe has barely finished - well, I am still licking my wounds from it and hoping that I don't get ill after a month of sleeping on floors and eating on the run - and the Autumn seasons are starting up. There's even a few themes emerging, to give me a chance to create another idiosyncratic top five...

The strength of women is an oft-recorded part of recent Scottish history, at least as far as the theatre remembers it. The Steamie emphasised the importance of women's work in Glasgow in the 1950s, and two plays in Dundee celebrate the role of women in difficult times.

She-Town pretty much lays it all out in the title. An ambitious project from Dundee Rep, adding a cast of community performers alongside their core actors, it goes back to the depressed 1930s and highlights how women kept the city running. Starring Barbara Rafferty - best known for her TV work in Rab C Nesbit but has been a sparkling Scottish stage presence over the past decade - and a very large cast of women, Sharman MacDonald's new play is supported by a new Creative Scotland fund.

First in a Lifetime is designed to make work that opens up creativity to new people: this time, it has enabled community performers to appear in a professional production. Given that She-Town is all about  community, it's appropriate that this fund is supporting it.

12 - 29 September @ Dundee Rep


It's a bit cheeky to include Stellar Quines in my rundown of "theatre about women" - their remit has always been supportive to female artists. However, they have teamed up with Greyscale to run a tour by one of the world's oldest "new writers": Sylvia Dow is 73, and this is her first play.

A rehearsed reading last year revealed Dow's sensibility echoes the absurdism of Beckett, but with an added compassion and strong sense of contemporary anguish: while the early absurdist theatre entertained through a combination of lurking fear and the pointlessness of life, Dow pitches the horror of a relationship going nowhere, caught in the cycles of repressed hopes and polite reconciliations. It fits into both the Traverse's New Writing remit and the programming of Andy Arnold at the Tron (he loves a nice bit of absurdism), and Dow becomes an interesting take on the entire idea of "the young writer".

5- 8 September @ The Tron
18- 19 September at the Traverse

It's rare that I get out to the Brunton Theatre - although when I do, I get to go for a paddle in the sea and have an ice-cream from the lovely shop just across the road. The Brunton does have a programme that operates independently from the theatres in Edinburgh, featuring plenty of touring companies up from England.

Miriam Margoyles whetted my appetite for Dickens' Women at the Fringe, and the Brunton has followed up with Miss Havisham's Expectations. A one-woman show starring Linda Marlow (she once did Berkoff's Women, so will be familiar with the bloody end of female fictional characters), it takes up the story of Great Expectations and confronts the venerable Victorian author with the truth about the woman he trapped inside a moment.

Using biographical details from Dickens' life alongside the famous novel, Di Sherlock's script takes the writer to task for playing God with characters that he does not understand: and while adaptations can be a lazy way to make theatre, Miss Havisham's Great Expectations ignores the conventional period drama cliches and recontextualises one of fiction's great, lost tragic heroines.

Saturday 15 September @ Brunton Theatre

Next up, The Guid Sisters: I have talked about this already, but it is a bold start to the new season at the Lyceum. The NTS are involved, too, and it is one of the rare times that a piece starts at the Lyceum and doesn't force me to travel to Edinburgh to see it: it is coming to the King's, Glasgow, in October.

21 September - 13 October @ The Lyceum
23 - 27 October @ The King's, Glasgow 


Towards the end of next month, another project led by Cora Bissett (after Whatever Gets You Through the Night and Roadkill, she is becoming a force in Scottish production, even before looking at her acting) reveals a hidden history. The Glasgow Girls were seven young women who stood up for the rights of asylum seekers - a tough, political story that is perfect for a musical adaptation.

A script from David Greig and original songs from Bissett, MC Soom T and John Kielty (who has been perfecting the punk musical during the Fringe), the musical is no schmaltzy song-fest, but a celebration of the Glasgow that longs to find the true meaning of inclusion and multiculturalism. The NTS are involved again - the energy and imagination of the nation's big company is looking undiminished as it heads towards its eighth year - and both Bissett and Greig have reputations as hard-hitters.

31 October - 17 November @ The Citizens 

Pinter goes East (having been West)

It seems that Scotland is getting a special dose of hot Pinter action this month. It's not enough that Dominic Hill decided to use Betrayal as his manifesto for the Citizens (his first play as artistic director, and the message that he is going to recall the theatre's past glory as a place for new visions of classic scripts was as pointed as a Pinter pause): the Brunton, over in Edinburgh has invited European Arts Company over for a double bill of The Dumb Waiter and The Lover.

Back when I was at school, The Dumb Waiter was a favourite for Advanced Level English. I have no idea why: I wasn't too bad at reading and writing, but Pinter was a closed book to me. These days, there is nothing I love more than a post-match analysis of his dread absurdism: I spent the bus journey back from Hill's Betrayal loudly explaining that the husband had not had loads of affairs, contrary to his claims. In the classroom, I had no idea why the two hit-men were sitting in the basement, or who was sending them messages.

There a few directions I could go here: one is to wonder why my teachers thought that two Shakespeare plays and one Pinter was representative enough of drama's history. Another is to point out that reading plays - as opposed to watching them - completely misses the point and is a bloody strange thing to have on the curriculum in the first place. However, I am content to accept that the purpose was just to make sure that those students who might have an inclination to enjoy theatre were quickly disabused of the notion, by the plodding pace of classroom analysis and the joyless antidote in The Spark Notes. 

The Dumb Waiter is one of Pinter's earlier works - it might have inspired In Bruges, but it owes a fair whack to Beckett. Only his pair of alienated loners have got guns and where Godot was silent, their mysterious master whistles down a tube at them.

The Lover is less of a menacing comedy and more of an offbeat episode from Everything you Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask. Any more details, and I am ruining the plot.

The Dumb Waiter & The Lover will be at Brunton Theatre on Tuesday 27 March.