‘You’re thinking these girls all wrong,’ Miss Mai tells Enid in Winsome Pinnock’s play Leave Taking, adapted from the recent Bush Theatre revival for Radio 3 (and produced by Pauline Harris). ‘They don’t know where they come from.’ Miss Mai continues: ‘These girls got Caribbean souls,’ but they’re living in south London.
Viv and Del have been taken to see Miss Mai, known locally as an obeah woman, by their mother Enid for a palm reading, a prediction, or perhaps a casting out of demons. Del has got into bad company, has lost her job at the burger bar for being cheeky, and fears she must be pregnant. Viv was the studious one, her mother’s great hope, but is now beginning to wonder what Shakespeare has to say to her. ‘Me and these teachers, we don’t feel the same things.’
Pinnock, who is credited as ‘the godmother of black British playwrights’, premièred Leave Taking in 1987 but it is if anything more relevant today.
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