Princess & The Hustler

Chinonyerem Odimba is a Nigerian-born playwright who lives in the United Kingdom and has been publishing plays since the mid-2010s. She has been prominent in the British theater scene, working with organizations like Clean Break, Talawa Theatre, and the Tricycle and Royal Court Theatres. Her theater works have included Twist, How to Walk on the Moon, and Joanne. Her 2015 play Wild is de Wind was shortlisted for the Bruntwood Prize. She has also done stage adaptations of classical works including Euripides’s Medea and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. She has worked in radio and television as well. She is the artistic director and CEO of tiata fahodzi, a leading UK theatre company that focuses on African heritage in Britain.

Princess & The Hustler takes place against the backdrop of a turbulent period in race relations in the UK. By the early 1960s, a significant number of Black immigrants from the West Indies had arrived in Britain, some as veterans shortly after World War II and some more recently. In the UK, they were met with housing and employment discrimination which made it hard for them to integrate and succeed. Through Wendell’s involvement in them, the play specifically deals with the 1963 Bristol Bus Boycotts, a movement organized by Roy Hackett, Paul Stephenson, and other Black Englishmen. Fed up with their treatment as second-class citizens and outraged at the Bristol Bus Company’s “colour bar” that prevented Black people from being employed, these men organized a four-month-long boycott that succeeded in breaking down the colour bar and paved the way for more sweeping civil rights legislation in the following few years.

Princess & The Hustler dwells on themes of Black British family dynamics and sense of belonging and self-love, and Odimba returns to these themes in her other works, including Black Love (2022). Other works that deal with the Black British experience include Andrea Levy’s Small Island and Courttia Newland’s The Scholar. Plays that deal with Black family dynamics and sense of societal belonging in an American setting include Lorraine Hansberry’s classic A Raisin in the Sun, August Wilson’s plays such as Fences and The Piano Lesson, and the fiction of Zora Neale Hurston, like “The Gilded Six Bits” and Their Eyes Were Watching God. Plays that deal with young women grappling with societal beauty standards include Kirsten Greenidge’s Milk Like Sugar. Literary works that feature paternal abandonment include Claire Zorn’s The Sky So Heavy.