Theresa Ikoko, the playwright who calls joy the language of her people

Theresa Ikoko

Born	2000 London
Occupation	Psychologist
Awards	Alfred Fagon Award

Theresa Ikoko wrote Girls late at night, by candlelight, after long days working with young people caught up in London’s youth justice system. She found her three characters “really nice company”: “the most amazing girls I’ve ever known.” Tisana, Haleema and Ruhab gossip about celebrities, compare notes on sex positions and plot their escape from carbohydrates. Then militant insurgents kidnap them in northern Nigeria, and the play asks how long a friendship can hold once fear arrives and the religious differences the girls never had to think about start to matter.

A decade after its premiere, Girls is back in London. Ewa Dina, this year’s winner of the JMK Award for young directors, stages a new production in the Young Vic’s Maria Theatre, with Hannah Akhalu, Tara Tijani and Sewa Zamba as the three friends. Meanwhile the BBC has been filming Wahala, Ikoko’s adaptation of Nikki May’s bestselling debut novel, which she has scripted and is co-directing. The self-taught playwright has become one of British television’s most trusted adapters of other people’s books, and her conviction hasn’t moved: joy sits at the centre of hard lives, not at their edges.

Ikoko grew up on council estates in Hackney, East London, one of nine children raised by a single Nigerian mother. She is Igbo, and has called Chinua Achebe “the God father of African writing”, a novelist who wrote about her people “with such audacity and pride.” One of Sister Souljah’s novels “became my whole life when I was 14,” she wrote for the Alfred Fagon Award; years later she bought copies for the young men she met working in prisons. She studied psychology at Royal Holloway and then criminology and criminal psychology at Oxford, and spent five years with Islington’s integrated gangs team before writing full-time in 2019. The job gave her a lasting suspicion of the word “gang” itself, which, she told Stylist, lets everyone avoid talking about “poverty, or access, or education, or overcrowding, or social exclusion.”

She was writing before she called herself a writer. The Race Card was read at the Tricycle’s young writers programme in 2013; Visiting Hours was given readings at Hackney Attic and the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry; and her first full-length play, Normal, was picked up for a Talawa Firsts reading in 2014. Talawa’s artistic director, Michael Buffong, had chosen it; an agent signed her off the back of it, though she has said she arrived with no training, no credentials and nobody to vouch for her.

Girls won the Alfred Fagon Award for best new play in 2015, a prize for playwrights of African or Caribbean descent working in Britain. The George Devine Award for most promising playwright followed in 2016, with a Channel 4 Playwrights’ Scheme bursary and a Verity Bargate Award shortlisting. The play opened at the HighTide Festival in Aldeburgh in a co-production with Soho Theatre and Talawa, moved through Birmingham Rep to Soho, and toured to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2017; Methuen Drama published the text. Reviewing the HighTide programme, The Times paired it with Elinor Cook’s play as “two pungent and provocative new works.” Ikoko has never wanted it read as a news story. “The play isn’t about Boko Haram,” she told Stylist. “I wanted to write about the girls – not the men.”

Screen work found her through that title. “I’m a girl from London, I wrote a play called Girls, so I feel they just googled ‘Girls in London’ and I popped up,” she told Sight and Sound about meeting the director Sarah Gavron and the team behind Rocks. The story began as Ikoko’s love letter to her older sister, and she and her co-writer Claire Wilson spent a year in workshops with Year 9 girls from Hackney schools before their script took its final shape. Bukky Bakray played Rocks, a teenager left to care for her little brother when their mother disappears. The film premiered at Toronto in 2019, opened in British cinemas in September 2020, and earned Ikoko and Wilson BAFTA nominations for original screenplay and outstanding British debut. Ikoko’s explanation for its warmth: “I think joy is the language of our people.”

Her television career has largely been one of adaptation. Grime Kids, which reached BBC Three in November 2023 after premiering at the BFI London Film Festival, took DJ Target’s 2018 book about the birth of grime in Bow and turned it into a fictional coming-of-age story about five friends. Ikoko defended its lightness. “For so many stories, particularly black stories, there is this idea that we have one story per theme, one story per area, or one story per estate,” she told the East London paper Roman Road. “But we’re not a homogenous group, and we don’t have homogenous experiences.”

Wahala takes that argument to prime time. May’s novel, published in 2022, follows Nigerian-British friends in their thirties whose circle is shaken by the arrival of a disruptive newcomer, Isobel, and the BBC is making it as a six-part thriller for BBC One and iPlayer with Firebird Pictures. Adelayo Adedayo, Cush Jumbo and Susan Wokoma lead a cast that includes Deborah Ayorinde and the Nigerian star Genevieve Nnaji. Ikoko shares directing duties with Leonora Lonsdale and Remi Weekes and is also an executive producer. The BBC’s director of drama, Lindsay Salt, called her scripts “an absolute joy – riveting, full of rich and complex characters.”

The revival of Girls runs at the Young Vic from 22 October to 21 November 2026, with press night on 27 October. Ikoko once described the audience she was writing for in her Alfred Fagon profile: “As a writer, I want to write things that change the lives of 14 year old girls in school, of university students and of grown men behind prison doors.” She meant something modest by it, she added: someone deciding to read a book, or turning on the television and seeing themselves. This autumn, a new cast of Girls plays to that audience in South London.

Tags: Meghan Markle, Caleb Landry Jones, screenwriters, playwrights, Young Vic, Theresa Ikoko