Bridgerton star Adjoa Andoh: ‘Stories are out there, you just have to look’

“Come boffins and coders and engineers. Come linguists and musicians and historians. Come rugger buggers and sporting blues. Come one, come all . . . Your visiting professor needs you!” 

This was the call — complete with Lord Kitchener-style pointed finger — issued last month by Adjoa Andoh to the city and university of Oxford in her inaugural lecture as the Cameron Mackintosh Visiting Professor of Contemporary Theatre, a year-long position based at St Catherine’s College.

The actor, director and producer — whose credits over almost 40 years span Shakespeare, TV soap EastEnders and, more recently, the hit Netflix show Bridgerton — is the latest dramatic luminary to take up the role. Predecessors include the playwright Tom Stoppard, directors Trevor Nunn and Deborah Warner and actors Diana Rigg and Simon Russell Beale.

Andoh, 59, is also the first black person to hold the chair in its 32-year history. Yet when I speak to her on a video call, she tells me that “it doesn’t feel like a particular first in that regard”, because “the history of colonisation applies to all of us”. She cites the actor Meera Syal, born in England to Indian parents, who held the chair in 2011-12. One difference, though, is how Andoh plans to spend the year.

“I’m probably doing more stuff than anybody else,” she says, joking that she is a “fakey professor”. “I’m running workshops throughout the year, and I started even before my tenure officially did because, for me, if you’ve got me for a year, let’s do some practical, on-the-ground stuff. Let me actually work with any and all comers from the university and Oxford.”

In her lecture, entitled “Swinging the Lens: All Our Stories”, Andoh praised the power of storytelling to “enliven, uplift and engage the human spirit”, while calling for a “wider storytelling embrace”. Deploying as a metaphor the different shots that are obtained by changing a camera’s lens on set, she evoked pioneering but often forgotten figures such as Walter Tull, the first black British Army officer.

“I’m interested in the power of story because I think it influences all the perspectives [we gain] and decisions we make,” says Andoh. “People quite often don’t get their stories told. The same strata of people get their stories iterated and reiterated in various formats, and then other people just disappear off the map.

“It’s why, when I directed Richard II, I was really interested in the gardeners,” she adds, referring to her acclaimed 2019 production at Shakespeare’s Globe, which cast only women of colour. “People at the bottom have to know what’s up with everything because [they feel] every fluctuation. We’re seeing it right now: UK interest rates going up is a pain for me but it doesn’t mean I’m not going to eat. For some people it absolutely does.

“Race, class, different ability, sexuality, caste, income bracket — I’m interested in the impact of those things on unique human souls, and I want to know their stories. I know they call it ‘intersectionality’ today — I just call it being a human being alive in the world, living in the complexity of who we are — but I’m interested in those crossroads that we meet at.” 

Variety defines Andoh’s selection of plays for the workshops. Spanning centuries and continents, the corpus includes colonial-era satire (The Blinkards by Kobina Sekyi), Elizabethan comedy (The Merchant of Venice), black female gang culture (Breath, Boom by Kia Corthron) and a love story that plays out against the backdrop of the UK asylum system (The P Word by Waleed Akhtar). Her aim is to “give people the options to understand there’s a whole heap of stories out there . . . you just have to look for them”.

Away from Oxford, Andoh — who as a child would, with friends, “make parents sit through interminable hours of lights going on and off and net curtains and people screaming and make them pay for a ticket” — will in March start rehearsals for Richard III, whose story she first encountered at primary school.

“I just really related to Richard [in books by Rosemary Hawley Jarman],” she says, “and when I read the play, I was appalled by Shakespeare’s dissection of his character. I felt strongly that sense of ‘it’s not fair’ — which is something I’ve experienced myself where you are judged on your appearance and not your character.”

Pointing out that Richard, recognised as one of literature’s first disabled protagonists, has “in recent times . . . started to be played by actors who are differently abled”, Andoh explains that her own encounters with racism from an early age will shape her staging.

She grew up in Leeds and the Cotswolds, and it was “a brilliant childhood in many ways, and I love the fact that I am very connected to nature. But the pathologising of me as a human being because of my race is something I felt very strongly from very early on. I literally felt it in terms of being walloped, and I felt it at the soul level. It still goes on and happens in lots of different ways, so I’m bringing all that in.”

Long an associate artist of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Andoh was this year tipped to succeed Gregory Doran as artistic director. So what came of it?

“The conversations were had,” she says. “I just think there’s a lot of extra stuff that you have to do when you take on those roles . . . and at the moment I just want to keep telling stories. I’m not ready for the extras yet, but maybe I will be at some point.”

One reason Andoh is not yet ready is Bridgerton, the hugely successful Netflix drama in which she plays Lady Agatha Danbury.

Filming on Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story ended in August. The prequel will, she says, “fill out the characters in terms of how they got to be who they are and how they got to be here”. As with the main series, it is scripted by Shonda Rhimes, whose writing reminds Andoh of “bits of Shakespeare, in its flow and its rhythm and its repetitions and its wit and its agility”.

As well as entertaining tens of millions of viewers, Andoh believes that, because of the show, “the genie’s out of the bottle” as far as the argument for greater onscreen diversity is concerned. “For decades, I would go, ‘Oh, they’re making another costume drama. Great, so when’s the next thing I can be in?’ I don’t need to think that any more.”

But Andoh is clear that Bridgerton’s legacy goes beyond any one person’s career. “I was in Atlanta earlier this year and I had big old security guards giving me the full sweep. People are really appreciative of it.

“When small children of colour feel they can dress up as their favourite Regency character, it’s a win . . . and the riposte to the ‘go back where you came from’ people,” she concludes. “It embeds you back into the culture that you should have always been embedded in.”

‘Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story’ is out next year