Leave Taking
by
Winsome Pinnock
Liverpool Playhouse Studio
Leave Taking was first staged in the same year that Black History Month began in the UK. Set in London, the play was first performed at the Liverpool Playhouse Studio. Liverpool has the oldest Black community in the UK and is an area with a long history of migration, immigration and anti-racist action.
The play explores the daily struggles of Enid, a Jamaican woman who emigrated to London, bringing up her two daughters, Del and Viv as a single parent and who makes a living as a cleaner for the NHS. Enid feels guilty and irritated about her Jamaican family’s financial expectations and is weary and frustrated by her life in England which does not provide her with the wealth and ease her relatives back home imagine. Her daughters Del and Viv have as idealised a view of Jamaica as her Jamaican relatives have of England.
The only people with whom Enid can share her troubles, and the pain of her mother's death, are fellow Jamaica migrants Mai, the Obeah woman from whom she seeks reassurance about the future of her daughters, and her longstanding friend Broderick.
Leave Taking is Pinnock’s most frequently performed and written about play. It has received five professional productions in the UK and was adopted as a set text on the English Literature GCSE syllabus in 2021. On its first production in 1987 it was seen as symbolising issues of intergenerational tension between young British-born Black people of Pinnock’s generation, born in the 1960s, and their parents, born in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1995 it was produced by the National Theatre as an educational touring production that travelled across the UK. At the time of its last production in 2018 at the Bush Theatre in London it was regarded as emblematic of structural racism, particularly in the British government’s treatment of Caribbean migrants and their rights to citizenship known as the Windrush Scandal.
About the writer
Award winning playwright Winsome Pinnock was born in Islington in 1961 to Jamaican parents. As a Black woman born in Britain to first generation migrants from Jamaica descended from enslaved people, issues of who, how and where people belong suffuses Pinnock’s work. Her plays explore the range of the Black Caribbean British experience from the Victorian era through to the present day, moving between the historical and the contemporary periods.
Since Leave Taking she has written many more plays for stage and radio. These include a number of works for children and young people including The Wind of Change, A Rock in Water about Trinidadian activist Claudia Jones who founded the Notting Hill Carnival, Can You Keep a Secret? for the National Theatre Connections Festival and Pig Heart Boy, an adaptation of Malorie Blackman’s nove for the Unicorn Theatre. In 2018 she was awarded the Alfred Fagon Award for her play Rockets and Blue Lights which was briefly staged at the Royal Exchange Manchester before the Covid-19 lockdown, then broadcast on BBC Radio before being restaged at the National Theatre in 2021.
More resources
BBC Bitesize on Leave Taking for GCSE English Literature
Listen to an extract from the play recorded for the National Theatre's Black Plays Archive
Winsome Pinnock's revised preface to Leave Taking, 'Reaching Out for Life in a New Country', published in 2018
Winsome Pinnock being interviewed in 2018 about the new production at the Bush Theatre
Credits:
copyright and credits: text by Kate Dorney, Photos by Helen Murrary and Richard H Smith, assets from the National Theatre. Citation: Kate Dorney 2025 'Leave Taking', Black Theatre History Month project