Paul Boakye | |
|---|---|
 Paul Boakye in 2016 | |
| Born | 28 September 1963 Tollington, London, England |
| Nationality | British |
| Known for | Writer, editor, campaigner, marketing executive, and entrepreneur |
| Website | www.blackgayblog.com |
Paul Boakye is a British writer, editor, campaigner, and marketing executive. He is best known for his provocative drama, Boy with Beer , [1] and for his work as editor and creator of Black Britain's premiere men's lifestyle magazine, DRUM. [2]
Paul moved to Jamaica with his father in 1966, returning to England after seven years. [3] He attended Hollydale Primary School in Nunhead until 1975 and went to Sedgehill School for the next five years.
He was editor of DRUM magazine (2003-2005) and received a Creative and Life Writing master's degree at Goldsmiths, University of London. As a Commissioner for the Power Inquiry, he contributed to Power to the People, [4] a report on the future of democracy in Britain debated in Parliament. He has been a guest speaker/broadcaster for radio and TV, as well as a regular newspaper reviewer on BBC Breakfast.
Boakye has won the UK Student Playscript Award with Jacob's Ladder (1986) and the BBC Radio Drama Young Playwrights' Award with Hair (1991). [5] His controversial stage play Boy with Beer is published by Methuen Drama in Black Plays 3 [6] and is described as Britain's first black gay play. He is also the author of No Mean Street [7] for Kuffdem and Red Ladder Theatre Company, Wicked Games produced by Leeds Playhouse, and the video drama Safe for Birmingham Health Authority and The Young Men's Video Project.
Boakye was invited to meet Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace in recognition of his sexual health promotion work with African communities in Britain, which has included editing a selection of ground-breaking health promotion publications.
Benjamin Obadiah Iqbal Zephaniah was a British writer, dub poet, actor, musician and professor of poetry and creative writing. He was included in The Times list of Britain's top 50 post-war writers in 2008. In his work, Zephaniah drew on his lived experiences of incarceration, racism and his Jamaican heritage.
In Jamaican popular culture, a sound system is a group of disc jockeys, engineers and MCs playing ska, rocksteady or reggae music. The sound system is an important part of Jamaican culture and history.
A Whistle in the Dark is a play by Tom Murphy that premiered on September 11, 1961 at the Joan Littlewood's Theatre Royal, Stratford East, London, having been rejected by the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. It then went on to be a West End hit. Murphy was twenty-five years old at the time.
Josette Patricia Simon is a British actor. She trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London and played the part of Dayna Mellanby in the third and fourth series of the television sci-fi series Blake's 7 from 1980 to 1981. On stage, she has appeared in Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) productions from 1982, playing Ariel in The Tempest, to 2018 when she was Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra. The first black woman in an RSC play when she featured in 1982, Simon has been at the forefront of colour-blind casting, playing roles traditionally taken by white actors, including Maggie, a character that is thought to be based on Marilyn Monroe, in Arthur Miller's After the Fall at the National Theatre in 1990.
Richard Barrington "Rikki" Beadle-Blair MBE is a British actor, director, and playwright. He is the artistic director of multi-media production company Team Angelica.
Biyi Bandele was a Nigerian novelist, playwright and filmmaker. He was the author of several novels, beginning with The Man Who Came in From the Back of Beyond (1991), as well as writing stage plays, before turning his focus to filmmaking. His directorial debut was in 2013 with Half of a Yellow Sun, based on the 2006 novel of the same name by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
John Arthur Antrobus is an English playwright and screenwriter. He has written extensively for stage, screen, TV and radio, including the epic World War II play, Crete and Sergeant Pepper at the Royal Court. He authored the children's book series Ronnie, which includes Help! I am a Prisoner in a Toothpaste Factory.
Una Maud Victoria Marson was a Jamaican feminist, activist and writer, producing poems, plays and radio programmes.
Sir Noël Peirce Coward was an English playwright, composer, director, actor, and singer, known for his wit, flamboyance, and what Time magazine called "a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise".
Christopher Douglas is a British actor and writer.
The Civilians is an investigative theatre company in New York City founded in 2002 by Artistic Director, Steve Cosson. The Civilians artists pursue their inquiries using interviews, community residencies, research, and other methods. Working with a combination of journalism and art, the Civilians creates theatrical events that seek to promote inquisitions of current issues. According to Variety Magazine, The Civilians "travels far and wide researching a piece around a given subject, conducting interviews and comparing notes along the way, sometimes for years."
Winsome Pinnock FRSL is a British playwright of Jamaican heritage, who is "probably Britain's most well known black female playwright". She was described in The Guardian as "the godmother of black British playwrights".
Jon Victor Jory is a theatrical director instrumental in the development of Actors Theatre of Louisville; he is also widely rumored to be the writer behind the pseudonym Jane Martin.
Michael Wilcox is a British playwright.
Paul Danquah, born Joseph Paul Walcott, was a British film actor, known particularly for his role in the film A Taste of Honey (1961), adapted from the 1958 play of the same name written by Shelagh Delaney. He later became a barrister and a bank consultant. His father was the Ghanaian statesman J. B. Danquah.
Michaela Ewuraba Boakye-Collinson, known professionally as Michaela Coel, is a British actress, filmmaker and poet. She is best known for creating and starring in the E4 sitcom Chewing Gum (2015–2017), for which she won the BAFTA Award for Best Female Comedy Performance; and the BBC One/HBO comedy-drama series I May Destroy You (2020) for which she won the British Academy Television Award for Best Actress in 2021. For her work on I May Destroy You, Coel was the first black woman to win the Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Limited Series, Movie, or Dramatic Special at the 73rd Primetime Emmy Awards.
Sabrina Mahfouz is a British-Egyptian poet, playwright, performer and writer from South London, England. Her published work includes poetry, plays and contributions to several anthologies.
Boy with Beer is a 1992 British in three acts play written by Paul Boakye and first performed at the Man in the Moon Theatre in January 1992. The play takes place over three nights each separated by one month. Boy with Beer is published by Methuen Drama in Black Plays 3 edited by Yvonne Brewster (1995).
Good Morning, Bill is a comedic play by P. G. Wodehouse, adapted from the Hungarian play Doktor Juci Szabo by playwright Ladislaus Fodor. It premiered in London at the Duke of York's Theatre in 1927.
Harwant S. Bains is a British playwright and screenwriter.
You see, his dad had run off with their housekeeper in 1966 and took the boy with them to Jamaica when he was only 3-years old. Mum was left to fend for herself and his baby sister here in England. Living the life of Riley on the island, the boy is chauffeur-driven to and from school. He spends weekends idling on daddy's new farm presided over by an evil stepmother. That is until his father is arrested for possession of marijuana and the boy is shipped off back to England to a mother of whom he has no memory.
His debut play Jacob's Ladder (1986) took the UK Student Playscript Award. In 1991, Hair, portraying the cultural gap between a Jamaican single mother and her British-born son, received the BBC Radio Drama Young Playwrights' Award. In his self-produced Boy with Beer (1992), Boakye chooses to deal with hitherto taboo subjects including the making of a black gay couple, bisexuality and AIDS.
Unlike conventional teaching methods, which youth workers feel have made little impact on black teenagers. No Mean Street is a powerful, physical drama set in the heart of black street culture that speaks their language. "See those leaflets and booklets," said Gillian Gottshalk, a 22-year-old youth worker at The Mill in Bristol, pointing to an information rack after the performance. "This play has made more of an impact than hundreds of those. They don't mean anything to black teenagers."
