LEAVE TAKING

“Dis country don’t want you, and you don’t belong nowhere else” 40 years on from its debut, Winsome Pinnock’s Leave Taking returns in a landmark production from Bristol Old Vic’s Artistic Director Nancy Medina. With wit and spiritual charge, Pinnock’s play turns one family’s search for belonging into a story of inheritance, rupture and repair. In Leave Taking, the lives of a displaced Jamaican family in 1980s North London are laid bare when Enid turns to an Obeah healer for help, drawing her teenage daughters Del and Viv into a reckoning with generational difference, cultural inheritance and belonging. Now regarded as a modern classic, Leave Taking made British theatrical history when its 1994 National Theatre staging made Pinnock the first Black British woman to have a play produced there. Leave Taking is a moving portrait of mothers, daughters and the complicated inheritances that shape who we become. Praise for Leave Taking at the Bush Theatre in 2018: