for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf at Yard Theatre
Neil Dowden in East London
★★★☆☆
11 September 2026
One of London fringe theatre’s most enterprising venues over the last decade or so, the Yard Theatre in Hackney Wick closed in spring 2025 for a £6.7 million makeover, but is now back open for business. With double its former capacity (now 220, more comfortable seats on two levels in a curved auditorium), improved rehearsal, workshop, and backstage facilities, the sustainable building designed by Takero Shimazaki Architects has come a long way since it opened in 2011 as a converted warehouse made from reclaimed materials with a six-month lease.
Photo credit: Camilla Greenwell.
Founding artistic director Jay Miller ended the theatre’s first era with his own wonderfully innovative revival of American mainstream classic Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie. Now its new era takes off with the first major UK production in decades of Ntozake Shange’s landmark radical 1975 work for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, directed by Diane Page.
The piece won an Obie off-Broadway, then a Tony after transferring to Broadway in 1976. It was only the second show on Broadway written by an African American woman (following Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun), and its two-year run is still a record for the longest-running show there by a Black writer. Shange described it as a “choreopoem”, mixing poetic monologues, song, dance, and music. Partly based on her own experiences, it gives a voice to seven African American women to tell their stories of suffering in a racist and sexist society, while also expressing their joy and pride in sisterhood.
Here there are 22 monologues delivered by a cast of five (with two doubling) who play unnamed women identified only by their rainbow-like coloured costumes and the different cities across America that they come from. They include incidents such as rape, domestic abuse, abortion, and even child murder (“a nite with beau willie brown”), but the overall tone is by no means totally traumatic as the women also celebrate love, sexuality, friendship, and empowerment. This version uses a later revised text by Shange that includes the monologue “positive” about women contracting HIV/AIDS from their promiscuous male partners. What comes across most strongly though is not individual accounts but the sense that all the women bond together in the struggle for a better life.
The language is a fusion of the poetic (Shange first wrote the monologues as separate poems) and the vernacular (the street speech of a particular community), which is not always easy to process. There is a danger that, with no through storyline or conventional characterization, the work could come across as fragmented and amorphous, but this is counteracted here with the spirit of togetherness created by the production.
There’s no doubt that for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf is very much of its time and place – which probably explains why it has been rarely staged in Britain (there was a Broadway revival in 2022 though that closed early). But it has had an influence on other writers as seen in Ryan Calais Cameron’s For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy which is a sort of Black British male response.
Page’s stripped-back production – with a running time of one and three-quarter hours straight through – certainly gives Shange’s lyrical colloquialism its full due, with no set or props. But its strength is its dynamism and physicality, immeasurably enhanced by Ingrid Mackinnon’s sensuously rhythmic choreography that embodies the women’s collective vibe. There is new music from grime artist Jammz, with rainbow-coloured lighting from Ali Hunter echoing the vibrant costumes of Cat Fuller.
The excellent cast featuring Nadine Higgin, Tatenda Matsvai, Ibilola Rossi, Cherrelle Skeete, and Alex Thomas-Smith – always on stage, if occasionally at the sides – interact with each other during the monologues as well as between them, giving each other sisterly support and encouragement as they chase their own rainbows.
This is typically bold programming at the Yard Theatre, while the follow-up show Lear, a reimagining of Shakespeare’s King Lear by Simon Stephens and Jay Miller, will see the first major return to stage of Ian McKellen since his fall during a performance of Player Kings in 2024. Bravo!
