Three generations connect across time and space on the Worthing stage

Meet Agbeke, Omotola and Aramide, three generations of proud African women connecting with each other across two continents and across time and space. Together they share their struggles, their joys, tragedies and broken dreams in order to find healing in the present.

The company offers a family story focusing on universal themes and also problems handed down through generations but predominantly love.

Director Mojisola Elufowoju, who is also the CEO and artistic director of Utopia Theatre, said: “We started the tour on January 27 and it has gone really, really well. We have had some brilliant feedback.

“It’s the first tour that we have done since 2016 and I think that’s just because of the climate generally. Lots of tours don’t make a lot of money because you’re having to pay the venues and so on. It is quite a difficult thing to set up. We were going to put this on back before the pandemic. It was a month before the pandemic happened and we had to postpone.

“And then after the first lockdown we tried again. Eventually we got three performances in but then things had to lock down again.

“We felt like ‘Was it really worth opening?’ because it was such a big challenge to do but looking back on it now it was good to have got those three performances in because it meant that we had a head start when we could get going again. It meant that we weren’t starting from nothing.

“We had a show that we could work with.

“It is my company. I set it up in 2012 off the back of finishing drama school and just not wanting to wait around for things to happen so this year is our tenth anniversary and we intend to mark that at some point.

“To be honest, I just wanted to make work that made sure that like people like me, people from my background, were represented in theatre. I am British but I am also of Nigerian heritage.

“Both my parents were from Nigeria but I was born in the UK.

“I try to represent that by making sure that the narratives themselves relate to my own experience and the experience of people like me but also inspiring others to feel connected with that experience and to understand what that experience was.

“The ten years have gone very, very well really. We’ve been blessed with grants from the Arts Council. We’ve been fully supported throughout that time and that has enabled the company to grow.

“I don’t feel that we lost time (through the pandemic). We took some of our work online and I really would not say that the pandemic left the company any less productive in what it was doing. It has also meant that we’ve had more time to think about what we are and where we want to take the company and to think about the ways that we can develop it.

“We want to ensure that we take our work to every nook and cranny in this country and overseas. And in the last few weeks we have been noticing the different types of audience that we are getting, different to beforehand, just the diversity of them.

“We were in Chipping Norton yesterday and I would say that 80 per cent of the audience was over the age of 60.

“However we have been to Coventry and I would say that 80 per cent of the audience were under 25.

“And I would say that of those, 40 per cent were black or people of colour, I think to be able to exchange our work with different types of people has been a very big bonus.”

Tickets are available from the venue.

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