From childhood in Trinidad to fame as a Play School presenter: Floella Benjamin’s journey to success
Floella Benjamin’s Coming to England
at the Oxford Playhouse
from Wednesday, September 18 to Saturday 21
Review by JON LEWIS
The Presenter’s Journey to Success
The story of the Windrush generation of W Indian immigrants to the UK is being dramatised more frequently on stage. Next month sees Windrush Secret at the Corn Exchange whilst in the past week the Oxford Playhouse has hosted Nicholl Entertainment’s Floella Benjamin: Coming to England, adapted from Benjamin’s 1997 autobiography into a feel-good musical drama by the leading children’s writer David Wood.
The narrative is framed by a set that resembles an old television with a back wall suggesting static (designer, Jasmine Swan). The audience follows the remarkable journey from childhood in Trinidad towards fame as a presenter on Play School of the colourfully-attired Floella (Julene Robinson). She eventually is made a Dame, joins the House of Lords and wins a BAFA. The staging, directed by Denzel Wesley Sanderson who shares Benjamin’s Trinidadian heritage, suggests the Caribbean island’s lush vibrancy with outsize images of hibiscus flowers.
Floella and her five siblings live well in Trinidad but her father (Charles Angiama) has dreams of playing jazz. He is seduced by adverts in the papers encouraging West Indians to move to their ‘mother country’ to ‘make Great Britain great again’. He is the first in the family to emigrate to a bleak, drab London whilst Floella’s pragmatic mother (Maryla Abraham) follows shortly after with the eldest two children. The remaining four children are split up into pairs, Floella and her younger sister staying with an unfriendly ‘aunty’, the boys exploited by a cruel employer. Eventually, all four kids rejoin their parents in London living in one room in a dingy house, a space ‘filled with love’.
Floella discovers that London’s streets are neither paved with gold nor initially welcoming. There are scenes where trusted members of society such as her teachers voice bigoted and racist views. She’s ignored in shops whilst white customers get served. Other children bully her because of the colour of her skin. However, Floella maintains that her ‘smile is my armour’. Her high-achieving parents defy prejudice and buy a property in middle-class Beckenham to provide the children with access to better schools.
An uplifting, enjoyable production.
