So much of playwriting involves sifting through the specific and contemporary to find the universal: something deeper than circumstance, and even language. It’s there that the work emerges.
Benedict Lombe has a persistent interest in this mysterious essence, and a musical intuition that makes dialogue move in strange and pleasing ways. The Congolese-British writer plumbs it most deeply in her Olivier Award-nominated Shifters (its Best New Play nod in 2025 made her the first Black British woman nominated in the category). As the project makes its Stateside debut at Cherry Lane, Lombe found herself in New York for rehearsals during both a heat wave and the World Cup. That’s where I caught her for a catch-up.
Shifters, a love story, which first made it’s West End debut in 2024, successfully bridges the distance between intuition and studied psychology; Dre and Des, in this two-hander, are cannily differentiated by the subtle, persistent rifts in the way they see and interpret the world around them. The play jostles approaches to finding real understanding and intimacy between them. Here, Lombe shares how she finally landed on the right one.
How does a play start for you?
I start with a feeling. The whole process for me is about chasing that feeling and trying to get to the closest possible articulation of it. With Shifters, the commission came from the Bush, and Lynette [Linton], our director, basically said, “I want you to write a play about Black British love.” It didn’t even need to be romantic. Do with that what you will. I really respond to something not being too definitive—something big and open.
What’s funny is that just a few days ago I found the very first bits I’d put down for Shifters, years and years ago. I hadn’t seen them in forever. And it was entirely supernatural. All of it. It was set in a cosmic, supernatural world. I’d completely forgotten that my way in was African mythology—Yoruba mythology, Congolese mythology, the Kalunga line. I had this idea that whatever I did would be weird and spiritual and fantastical. None of that is in the play, and yet all of it is in the play. It has that cosmic, otherworldly feeling even though the thing itself is deeply rooted in the real world.
Sometimes writing a play just comes down to: What are you feeling, and can you find language for it? The people with the real gift for drama work usually don’t start with a plan. The feeling comes first, it takes on form, which is language.
It’s a mess. And you refine and finesse until you’ve come as close as you can to that thing you feel in your core. It was only at the end that I realized the play has three different languages, as you said. There’s the naturalistic dialogue the two characters have with each other. There’s the dialogue they have with the audience. And there’s the poetry. Those three things, much like the characters and the scenes and the world, shift in and out of each other.
It starts instinctive, because it has to be. Then at some point it becomes technical. When I first started writing, the technical stuff was what I hated most. Now it’s what I enjoy most, because that’s where you get to play, and mess things up, and put things back together. Once you get to that point, you realize that everything you need, you already have. The answers are already there, just waiting for you to uncover them.
There’s something interesting and poetic happening with the second person sections of the play.
It just happened when I was veering closer and closer to the poetry. I’ve always been reluctant to call my own work poetry. I have so much love and respect for poets, for what they do. So, for me, the poetry is almost unconscious. It just comes out. I have such a love for musicality in writing. A lot of my characters play records in the play, because I’ll put a song on while I write. After a while, you can’t separate them. People ask how a moment landed so perfectly with the music, and it’s because I wrote it to that song.
The first kiss is a good example. It’s a bit of a spoiler, but fine. That moment is written to John Hiatt’s “Have a Little Faith in Me.” I remember getting into rehearsals with all these Black British artists and creatives, doing this Black British love story, and we come to that scene and they’re looking at me like, “Are you sure about this?” I said, “Guys, I’ve never been more sure.” We did the scene with the song and they went, “Wait, hang on. So this actually works perfectly?” I only found this out recently—they’d secretly tried doing all kinds of things to the track, and then came back and said, “We don’t need to do any of that. This is the song.”
It was so unexpected for this play, these characters, this culture, to have that song. But that’s what human beings are. You think someone should be a certain way or listen to a certain thing because of your preconceived notions of who they are and the experiences they’ve had. Reality is always much more interesting and unexpected.
There’s a clear phase shifting in drafting a play where suddenly the work is the actor and director’s responsibility, and there’s nothing more a playwright can do.
Writers can be incredibly self-involved, and I don’t mean that in a demeaning way—in some ways we have to be. I really believe a great play lives or dies by its script. Then you get into rehearsal still half-holding that earlier process where it’s all your script, your words, you, you, you. Then at some point you go: I’ve done everything in my power to make this script the best it can be, and now it’s no longer mine. It becomes ours. And then it becomes everyone else’s.
It’s mysterious. It’s like digging a hole to the other side of the world. You start with something completely self-enclosed, entirely about solving some internal problem, and then one day you become incredibly objective and practical about the text that was once so personal: “Let’s move this, cut that.”
This is technically the fourth iteration of Shifters, the third in English. By the West End run, which was the second time we did it, it was like, We know what this is, we know it works. You become much less precious. Much more economical. You cut off some of the fat to make it leaner. What’s been interesting in this third English iteration is knowing the script was already as good as it was going to get at that point in time, and being careful not to do too much. Each time you revisit a script, you’re not the same person who wrote it. There’s a point where you almost can’t revisit it. It becomes: what can I touch that won’t alter the alchemy the thing already has? I’ve had nearly two years of distance, and being able to come back and very slightly refine it has been joyous.
There’s a real difference in how British and American actors work.
Many U.K. actors who are big in the U.S. often play American characters because most of the roles in America for Black actors are African American roles, right? What’s really wonderful and so refreshing about Shifters is getting to step into this global space, into the mainstream if you will, with a Black British story without compromising on its Black British specificity. There were a couple of theaters in America who wanted to transfer our production of Shifters, with the caveat that I make the story about two African American characters so they could do some snazzy Hollywood casting with two household American names. I mean, it can absolutely be done, and I’d be cool with it later down the line. The magic of the show is that it’s a universal story. But the magic of the show is also that it is a Black British universal story that transcends its categorisation. This is not really a common occurrence in American theater. I would love to pull up the exact stats on Black British stories that actually make it across the ocean and onto stages in New York. My general feeling is the numbers may be quite low.
So, for Shifters’ first American iteration it felt really important that it remain Black British, for the simple fact that Black British culture is not yet recognised as global culture in the same way. If we can play a small part in shifting some of that with this play, then the fight to retain the identity of our show will have been worth it. That’s why Lynette Linton and I held on so tightly to this play and were so protective of it coming to New York. We wanted it done right—with care, with love, with intentionality, and that’s been central to every conversation with Cherry Lane.
Heather Agyepong, who plays Des, has been with us through all three iterations and she is truly luminous. And now Daniel Ezra, who’s much better known in the U.S. for his American roles, gets to step back into his Black Britishness with his first stage role in nearly a decade. And man, is he a revelation. I’m so excited for audiences to see the calibre of their performances. Each time we get to do this show, it gets better and better. This is usually the part where Lynette starts singing Ciara’s “Level Up.”
There’s a productive tension running through Shifters between universalism and specific identity—being a very particular kind of person and yet carrying this universal vibration you can’t quite articulate or reason your way to.
Exactly. You have one character who’s almost a hopeless romantic, an idealist, and one who’s the opposite, and they’re both wrestling with soulmates and destiny and these big philosophical questions—then meeting the reality of their adult lives, the fact that they’ve become different people. But that thing in your core that you can’t escape or ignore—the calling out of one wounded soul to another—the nostalgia, the ache, the confounding feelings of what could’ve been—that’s the fun of it. The messy deliciousness of being a human being. You can never enter a relationship on a blank slate. You each come in carrying your own stuff.
It seems like finding romance in difference is a lost art.
Have you heard the phrase “the year of yearning”? People are in a place of almost inescapable hopelessness, and the resurgence of love stories is real. Look at the numbers those Netflix and Amazon love stories are doing. People want the big, epic, idealistic love and to watch it play out. What’s wonderful to me is getting to understand all those tropes, play with them, go a different direction, turn the thing on its head and still ground it in reality. That’s what this play does. It gives you both: idealistic love, and real, authentic, intimate, messy human love.
Shifters uses the second person, which implies intersubjectivity—the ability to imagine what someone else is feeling. The title reveals the essence of the play: it is about moving between two points.
Nobody has articulated it that way. That’s exactly it.
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