Anne Odeke's maths teacher said she ought to be fitted with a volume control. ‘I was the loud one, the funny one, in the class,’ she tells me. It's true, she does like to talk and even though she hasn't done many interviews, it's quite hard to get a word in edgeways.
How it all began
Odeke is an actor, writer and drama teacher whose latest play, A Place For Me? opening at the Queen's Theatre, Hornchurch, in October, then touring, looks at the arrival of Jamaican immigrants in Essex in the 1940s and 50s – the so-called Windrush generation – through the eyes of a child.
She says, ‘Up until now, the Windrush story has been quite a male narrative, so I wanted to look at the story through the eyes of a young girl. HMS Windrush docked at Tilbury, so the first steps these migrants took was on Essex soil, and that to me, as an Essex girl, feels like a great honour.’ After a short run at the Queen's Theatre in October, A Place For Me? will tour community venues in Essex.
Born and brought up in Southend-on-Sea, where she still lives, Odeke clearly retains a strong attachment to the county. After studying English and drama at Brunel University in West London – ‘I had a whale of a time’ – she returned to Essex as a trainee drama teacher at Southend High School for Girls before transferring to Shoeburyness Academy down the road. ‘It was rough, the behaviour was appalling, lots of special needs to think about, a real baptism of fire. But I absolutely loved it because it was really challenging. It had a drama staff of nine and it was far better funded than the grammar school where drama was not a priority.’
Educating others
At Shoeburyness, where she remained for four and a half years, drama was deployed in ways other than just ‘putting on shows.’ Odeke explains: ‘Drama was used to help with other educational pathways. They really got how the performing arts filtered down to the rest of the school and how it can affect behaviour and social skills. If you can apply discipline through performance, it's going to have a knock-on effect. I saw a lot of change in the time I was there.’
While she loved teaching, Odeke did not see it as a lifetime commitment. ‘I felt I'd become institutionalised and that there was something missing from my life.’ Having planned to go travelling, she decided instead to use her savings on a one-year acting course at the Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts. She says, ‘Mountview changed my life. Acting held up a mirror and gave me permission to stop and reflect. It helped me to breathe.’
Taking off
After seasons with the Royal Shakespeare Company and Shakespeare's Globe she was contacted by Douglas Rintoul, then artistic director of the Queen's Theatre, Hornchurch, and invited her to contribute to a programme of monologues dispelling Essex stereotypes, as a live stream during lockdown. ‘I told him I didn't write but he wouldn't take no for an answer. He suggested an idea to me about this black woman who'd entered a beauty pageant in Southend-on-Sea in 1908, styling herself as Princess Dinubolu of Senegal. It was a great story. Doug loved what I wrote and asked me if I'd like to perform it.’
Princess Essex, as it became known, was such a success that Rintoul organised Arts Council funding for Odeke to develop it as a one-woman show which they toured to 13 Essex venues. The Guardian called her ‘a natural show-woman who steers through multiple characters with charm.’
Rintoul is convinced her teaching experience was key to Odeke's development as a performing artist: ‘Teachers are essentially actors and enablers, creating an emotional response in people. I had to persuade Anne that she was a writer as well, and we were able to create a process where we could support her as a writer.’
The Princess Essex live stream was picked up by someone at Chester's Storyhouse Theatre which then commissioned Odeke to do a version of Little Women with music for their Grosvenor Park Open Air Theatre. She chose to relocate the story from Massachusetts in the American Civil War to Chester during World War 1. The Stage called it ‘heartfelt and joyous.’
In between her acting and writing commitments, Odeke occasionally returns to supply teaching at schools in the Essex area and finds plenty of common ground between the two disciplines. She says, ‘As a teacher you don't tell your pupils the answer at the beginning, you let them work it out for themselves, and as a writer I don't want to tell the audience what to think. Everybody doesn't have to think the same or come to the same conclusion.’