JOY NESBITT
SCENES WITH BLACK FOLK
Written by Joy Nesbitt
What are the rules of being Black? Who decides, and who enforces them? What happens when those questions are asked aloud—with a mostly white audience looking on?
Scenes with Black Folk is a bold, genre-bending ritual play that blends satire, surrealism, and raw vulnerability to explore how Blackness is performed, policed, and pushed to the edge. Four “somebodies” take the stage, confronting the absurdity of racism and the weight of self-awareness in spaces where being seen is never simple.
Through a series of fragmented, heightened, and darkly comic scenes, the performers wrestle with identity, history, and the pressure to represent. They slip between characters, tones, and timelines—exposing how the performance of race can be both mask and mirror. The line between actor and audience is never secure. Neither is the line between truth and survival.
Unapologetically intimate, uncomfortably funny, and deliberately disorienting, Scenes with Black Folk is not just a play—it’s a confrontation. A ritual. A refusal to explain. And an invitation to witness what happens when Black people stop performing for someone else’s benefit.
Cast
ONE – Kennedy Jopson
TWO – Ryan Yengo
THREE – Joycelyn Manu
FOUR – Jay Lafayette Valentine
Team
Writer and Director – Joy Nesbitt
Producer — Sophie Cairns
Lighting Design – Abbie Sage
Sound Design – Juliana Lisk
Fight Choreography – Kemi Durosinmi
Costume Consulting – Juliana Schmidt Tomazini
Press & Reviews
“It comes to Camden Fringe at a time when our complex relationship with race shows no sign of getting any simpler, and the absurdity and comedy of the situation makes for a striking night of modern theatre. .”
"A beautiful, uncomfortable and confronting cabaret on the uniquely human experience of blackness [...] Scenes with Black Folk is a unique, obscure and inspired piece of work that just can’t be missed if you get the chance. "
"In a theatrical environment that is too often afraid to ask deep questions of race, preferring instead to just agree that “things are very bad”, Scenes With Black Folk offers a nuanced and complex study of modern black Britain from a Gen Z lens. "
