Context: Blackman, Cooke and the Politics of Adaptation
Malorie Blackman: Writing for a Generation
Malorie Blackman OBE (born 1962) is a British author who served as Children’s Laureate from 2013 to 2015. She published Noughts & Crosses as a young adult novel in 2001, drawing on the speculative fiction tradition to construct an alternate Britain. Blackman has spoken in interviews about her motivation: she wanted young readers to understand racial inequality not through the dry facts of history but through the immediate experience of inhabiting a world where the hierarchy was reversed. The novel is addressed to a primarily young audience but was taken seriously by the wider literary world.
Blackman’s position as a British Black author writing about race in 2001 is part of the play’s context. The novel appeared two years after the Macpherson Report (1999), which found the Metropolitan Police institutionally racist following the inquiry into Stephen Lawrence’s murder. The novel’s alternate world is not escapism; it is a way of making British readers feel the weight of a racial hierarchy that existed, in a less inverted form, around them.
Malorie Blackman published the novel in 2001; Dominic Cooke’s RSC stage adaptation premiered in 2007 at the Civic Hall, Stratford-upon-Avon. Pilot Theatre’s 2019 and 2022–23 productions used Sabrina Mahfouz’s separate adaptation. The set text for the exam is Cooke’s Nick Hern Modern Plays edition.
Dominic Cooke and the RSC Commission
Dominic Cooke (born 1966) is a British director who was Artistic Director of the Royal Court Theatre from 2007 to 2013. His RSC commission to adapt Noughts & Crosses for the stage was a significant institutional choice: the Royal Shakespeare Company bringing a young adult novel about racial injustice into its main programme signalled that the text was considered important beyond its original readership. Cooke’s previous work had engaged with political drama, and he brought to the adaptation a structural instinct for compression and clarity.
Cooke’s key decisions as adaptor were: to compress the novel’s sprawling narrative into a tight two-act structure; to foreground the dual-narrator device as the play’s central formal innovation; and to specify in the stage directions a design language of projection, soundscape and minimal staging rather than a naturalistic painted set. These are directorial and dramaturgical choices — not simply Blackman’s novel put on stage. Students must distinguish between what Blackman writes (the novel, the fictional world) and what Cooke stages (the theatrical form of the adaptation).
The RSC in 2007 was at a particular moment in its institutional history: attempting to widen its repertoire beyond the Shakespeare canon and to address its historically white audience demographics. Commissioning Cooke’s adaptation was part of a broader turn towards new writing and diverse voices. The play sits within a tradition of Black British theatre that includes writers like Tanika Gupta, debbie tucker green and Roy Williams — though Blackman came from a literary rather than theatrical background. The RSC premiere gave the adaptation the production values and reach of a major national company.
For a designer working on the play, this institutional context matters. The RSC’s Civic Hall, Stratford-upon-Avon, is a flexible space that can be configured in multiple ways. Cooke’s choice of a thrust stage for the original production meant that the direct-address narration sections — Sephy and Callum stepping forward to speak to the audience — had a physical intimacy that a proscenium configuration might not have achieved. The choice of staging configuration is always also a choice about the audience’s relationship to the story.
Historical and Social Context: Race in Britain at the Turn of the Century
The novel and its adaptation speak to a specific moment in British racial politics. The 1990s had seen the campaign for justice for Stephen Lawrence, a Black teenager murdered in a racially motivated attack in 1993 whose case exposed systematic failures in the police and legal system. The Macpherson Report (1999) named institutional racism as a structural problem, not a matter of individual prejudice. Blackman’s novel was written in the immediate aftermath of this inquiry, and the world of Noughts & Crosses — where noughts cannot access the same schools, face state violence, and are not believed by the legal system — is recognisably a transposed version of the experience the Macpherson Report documented.
There are also international reference points. The play’s world draws on the logic of apartheid South Africa (a legal racial hierarchy enforced by the state) and on US civil rights history (the segregated school as a site of political struggle). Blackman has been explicit that the novel is not set in any of these historical contexts, but that it is in dialogue with all of them. For a designer bringing the play to a contemporary audience, these resonances are an asset: the visual language of apartheid passes, of segregated schools, of state executions is legible without needing to be literal.
Key contexts for the play: the Macpherson Report (1999) on institutional racism in Britain following the Stephen Lawrence case; US civil rights history (segregated schooling, state violence); apartheid South Africa (legal racial hierarchy); and the tradition of Black British theatre engaging with race and empire.
Speculative Fiction as a Theatrical Form
The use of speculative fiction as the vehicle for political theatre is itself a meaningful choice. By setting the play in an alternate world, Blackman and Cooke create a distance from the specifics of any single historical racial injustice — which means the play can speak to multiple contexts without being trapped by any one of them. The audience is invited to do the intellectual work of translation: to notice where this invented world maps onto their own world, and where the mapping makes them uncomfortable.
This is related to Brecht’s concept of the Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect): by making the world strange — by flipping the racial hierarchy — Cooke’s adaptation prevents the audience from passively accepting the familiar. They cannot sit comfortably in a world they recognise. They must think. For a director, this means the staging should not strive for complete naturalistic illusion; the stylised elements of the design — the direct address, the projection, the minimal set — should maintain a productive distance between the audience and the fictional world, even while the intimate scenes between Sephy and Callum pull them close.
Some students treat the alternate-world setting as indicating that the play is set in a distant past or a far-off future, neither relevant to the present. This fundamentally misreads the play’s purpose. The alternate world is a mirror held up to the contemporary moment, not an escape from it. The play is explicitly set in a recognisable near-future Britain with contemporary technology, institutions and cultural references — the point is that the racial hierarchy feels natural and unremarkable to those at the top of it. That is the political argument. A director’s design choices — contemporary costume references, recognisable civic architecture in the set — should reinforce this proximity rather than push the story into a remote fantasy realm.