Press

Ola Ince interview: ‘It feels weird to say the play is violent – you fall in love with these girls’

Ola Ince is about to stage a murder. Quite a lot of them, in fact. “The murder weapon is unconventional,” she explains, as she talks me through the set-up. “In most Westerns there are guns, right? But these women don’t have that.” Instead, they have a rock-in-a-sock and a mission to avenge their mother. 

Let’s be clear: the London-born theatre director, who attended the BRIT School in Croydon before studying at Rose Bruford College, is telling me about the play she’s currently directing at the Royal Court. Aleshea Harris’s Is God Is, which opens next week, is a raucous revenge thriller about a pair of twins who embark on a murderous rampage in the Californian desert. It’s hilarious, but also contains notes of humanity and, eventually, hope. When it played off-Broadway in 2018, it drew comparisons to Tarantino, and is currently being developed into a screenplay by Harris.

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Ola Ince on Romeo and Juliet: ‘The theatre industry can be a very dangerous place for black and brown people’

When Ola Ince was first asked to direct Romeo and Juliet at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2019, she was reluctant to say yes. “The Globe can be a pretty daunting place. It is the home of traditional Shakespeare, and that’s not what I wanted to work on,” she says. 

But after being promised that she could do “whatever she liked” with the script, she reconsidered, eventually: “I came to the play with resistance… I’m a Shakespeare anarchist.” Opening over a year after it was originally supposed to, the director, 32, hopes her production will “bring something new” to the famous story.

Ince’s Romeo and Juliet focuses on mental health. “The play didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t understand why anyone would kill themselves for a lover,” she explains over Zoom from her home in south London. In light of the pandemic, she believes it more important than ever to talk about the subject: “Everyone understands mental health now. Everyone has suffered, and everyone has changed. We have had different psychiatrists and mental health clinicians come in to rehearsal and talk to us about the huge problem we have with mental health in this country.”

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Ola Ince: ‘Achieving what you want just means you get to dream bigger’

With as many as 92% of the UK’s top theatre leaders are white, many Black theatre makers still feel unwelcome in major venues. We sat down with Ola Ince, a British Theatre Director, to discuss the power of storytelling in helping white audiences confront their own prejudices

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#savethearts: Five industry-leading creatives on why the arts matter

Navigating 2020 has been a corona-coaster. Initially, I was relieved I had the opportunity to slow down (I was juggling multiple international jobs), reflect (I had the opportunity to reconsider my work/life balance) and recover (I was constantly under the weather due to lack of rest, lots of stress and a poor diet). But this relief was followed by heartache. 

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Glass meets director Ola Ince – theatre’s rising star

WHEN Ola Ince was little, she would organise various trips to Jamaica for herself and her cousins – off they’d hop, duvets and all, onto her bed. Her mother has always described this as her “early directing years,” yet she disagrees.

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Elle List’s 50 Game changers of Now 2019.

A celebration of the next generation of law-changers and trailblazers reframing the worlds of fashion, beauty, politics and technology and inspiring the ELLE woman. The ELLE List, brought to you in partnership with Magnum.

The 2019 ELLE List, in association with Magnum, which launches today, is a curated list of emerging talent from around the world including actors, artists, musicians, athletes, activists, photographers, beauty heroes and trailblazers of every kind.

This list marks ELLE’s commitment to using our platform to shout about a brave and brilliant NEW generation who are pushing the needle and changing the world to make it a better place.

From politician Alexandria Ocasio Cortez to fashion designer Bethany Williams every person on The ELLE List has enormous talent, dazzling style, and is disrupting the status quo in 2019.