ABSTRACT
Black Men Walking, written by Testament (a.k.a. Andy Brooks) and directed by Dawn Walton, toured theatres to huge acclaim in 2018, selling out 71 of 84 shows around the UK, and reaching an audience of nearly 10,000 people. The play was produced by Walton’s company Eclipse, ‘the foremost Black-led national production company in the UK’, and was the first national touring production to be born from Revolution Mix, Walton’s initiative to bring 500 years of hidden Black British history to theatre, film and radio. The play is based on the Sheffield Black Men’s Walking Group, and is set in the Peak District of Northern England. It focuses on three men, all of whom are experiencing some kind of crisis in their lives, and a young woman the men encounter as they walk through increasingly rough weather in the Peaks. This chapter presents the edited transcript of a face-to-face interview with Dawn Walton and the written replies to an email interview with Testament. The questions were co-devised by the editors of this collection, and concern the evolution of Eclipse, Revolution Mix, and Black Men Walking, the challenges of staging a play about walking, the significance of walking itself, hidden Black histories, race and racism in the British countryside, gender and generational perspectives and the play’s reception in the UK.
