Naomi Obeng is an artist and playwright. Raised in the hills between the Mediterranean Sea and the Alps in France, her ancestral roots are in Ghana and in Cumbria, via Yorkshire. She is British and currently lives in London. Her international upbringing contributes to the outsider perspective she brings to her playwriting – an early understanding of how society is built of choices we uphold in our imaginations, and an interest in characters who don't easily belong. She started writing for theatre while studying Linguistics as an undergraduate, gaining a place on the Royal Court Theatre’s Introduction to Playwriting group while she was a student. A playfulness with language, humour and irreverence for naturalism are at the heart of her work.
Her plays include: We’ll Be Who We Are (shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Playwriting), a specific kind of loneliness (Nottingham Playhouse: Unlocked), fangirl, or the justification of limerence part of Three Acts of Love, performed with a live score at Live Theatre in Newcastle and published by Methuen Bloomsbury. She writes about the invisible structures that govern our lives, and enjoys creating unruly worlds on stage to process the absurdities of our own. She also makes music.
This July, she will be joining a cohort of international artists to participate in Obrador d'estiu 2026, an international summer workshop for playwrights and theatre-makers held every year at Sala Beckett in Barcelona. During her time there, she will form part of UK playwright Alistair McDowall's workshop titled Only the Lonely: Isolation in the hyperconnected age. We interviewed her to talk about her practice, the motivation behind it, her creative process and her expectations during the workshop.
For any readers encountering your work for the first time, how would you describe what you do and the motivation behind it?
I’d say I ask big questions and write weird plays with the aim to see our familiar world more clearly for what it is. To test my own understanding of what we are doing on this planet, as humans, to capture what we are feeling, how we are behaving, who we are, and to wonder why. I’m always wondering ‘what’s really going on here?’. Theatre and live performance felt like an exciting place to pose these questions– creating experiences we see ourselves in, and hopefully come out of changed, or touched.
My first full length play We’ll Be Who We Are, for example, is a kind of absurdist play about three school friends who meet before their school reunion and have an existential crisis so huge –about the difference between identity and personality, and about the truth of the strange rigid world which they grew up in– that it ends up breaking reality in the play. I’m very motivated by writing that challenges me, that requires me to be brave. I also enjoy writing things that could never happen outside of a theatre, so naturalism and realism are not my best friends! They're not the only way to say something true about life. I'm more like: ‘Ok, so then the voice comes out of the plant pot.’ Because it makes sense in the logic of the play, and the feeling is true. Luckily, I’ve found collaborators who’ve said, ‘Ok, yes!’ to that kind of writing. I’m most interested in capturing truthful feelings that will linger outside of the theatre– especially if the facts of how the feeling arose feel weird to explain to someone who didn’t see the show. That's fun for me. I guess I’m motivated by searches for truth, ultimately. Truths that are felt, but are hard to articulate. That kind of alchemy in theatre is so special.
Your academic background is in linguistics, and you’ve also expressed a strong interest in patterns. Alongside your writing, you also make music. How do you feel these elements have shaped the way you approach character building and storytelling? Do you follow any sort of ritual or pattern?
That’s a fun question. I hadn’t quite made the connection between patterns in music, language and human behaviour, but there is something interesting to me about those very human expressions. I LOVE to notice things, maybe that's what makes me prone to making art. I have such an excess of observations, and I need to do something with them! Once you start noticing, you start categorising, and patterns are quickly identified. So I think you’re right that the interest in linguistics, the interest in music, in plays and dialogue are all linked. I often hear characters’ voices first before I know who they are. I listen to their rhythm in conversation and write down what they say, it forms the rhythm of a scene, that shows me the rhythm of the play, and that holds information about the rhythm of the story. The sources of tension and drama too are evident in patterns of silence, avoidance, trial and failure.
Each character, like each person, is their own universe of patterns and habits– for me, those create a story. Patterns form and we hold our breath to see if they will ever be broken. Obviously, it shouldn’t feel so abstract for an audience! My aim is usually to write characters who feel real and stories that resonate! But it’s true that on the other side, I’m interested in some kind of inarticulable system from which a play, or a song, a character, a world, emerges.
I’m very free with how I write! I’m not someone who has routines or needs to stick to a plan. I value freedom and responsiveness. I’ve been told I’m a bit forensic in my writing – I just like to dig until I’m satisfied that the characters have been pushed into something I feel is worth saying in a way that feels truthful, interesting, and worth an audience’s time. That can take a while.
How did your international upbringing influence your work and the stories that you choose to tell?
I think we all have a lens through which we see the world based on how we grew up. We inherit the stories the adults around us told, through word or through behaviour, about how the world is, and who we are in it. That’s hard to shake. It’s not on a conscious level, but naturally I tell stories about outsiders, people who can’t take language for granted, who search for belonging in a world that was explicitly not built for them, and sometimes actively hostile. That definitely comes from knowing people who’ve lived across the world and for whom community was never guaranteed. I’m sure my racial identity has a part to play in it too. But I love the perspective and community (and bilingualism!) the international experience has given me.
As a result, I like to tell stories that would fall through the cracks. I am drawn to empathising with and seeing people who are often unseen. My friends growing up all came from ‘somewhere else’. They all had stories of other lives in other countries before we ended up together in France, and like me, they moved on after. It all has probably contributed to me being harder to place as a playwright, especially in the UK, where writing from ‘place’ is part of the tradition (and quite useful for getting funding). Weird plays are my taste, but I also like them because they only belong to themselves. Sometimes that means they can be braver about saying what might be hard to hear.
On the other side, I’ve also noticed how little ownership I feel I have over national or even local British or French stories. The idea of taking ownership of a ‘state of the nation’ play or a ‘regional story’ – is wild to me. I don’t feel I have a claim to those perspectives. Why is that, since my story is as much part of culture as any other? Maybe that’s a challenge I can set for myself!
The format of your works is very diverse, spanning from full-length plays to shorter, more experimental pieces like fangirl. What leads you to choose one format over the other and how do you navigate between their different scales?
Sometimes I’m asked to write for a specific format – for example, fangirl was commissioned by Jack McNamara at Live as a one act play, part of a triptych called Three Acts of Love with plays from talented North East playwrights Vici Wreford-Sinnott and Laura Lindow. We shared performers for that show, including the wonderful multi-disciplinary musician MeLostMe (Jayne Dent) who wrote the score and performed it live. The sense of experiment was there from the start, so I thought it could be a good opportunity to write a play set on the internet– we were already in a heightened space and one act seemed a good length for that fangirl idea.
Some impulses or ideas feel like short plays. Some ideas feel like full length plays. Some ideas feel like songs. Some ideas feel like paintings. Navigating the different scales can be challenging. Ultimately, I try to think about what the play aims to do to the room, to the theatre, to the space it’s happening in. Does it need to unfold slowly over a whole evening? Does it need to feel overwhelming and over before you know it? That can be a useful compass– what's the play doing to a physical space and the people in it.
The theme for this year’s Obrador d’estiu workshop led by UK playwright Alistair McDowall is Only the Lonely: Isolation in the hyperconnected age. What role have playfulness and humour had in the piece that you are creating for the stage reading?
Alistair’s theme is so potent, I was really excited to write to it! With it being a short play, I wanted it to cut to the bone in a way that busy daily life doesn’t really allow. So, it’s quite intentionally not exactly a fun play, this one. It’s about being desensitised to violence through our phones and screens. It’s something I’ve been speaking to friends and family about recently. I asked elders ‘did the news used to show footage like this?’, and the answer was ‘no, no it didn’t.’ I've wondered if a lot of our modern struggles are symptoms of a gradual disconnection from our humanity, driven by technologies usurping needs we haven’t claimed loudly enough. There is humour and playfulness in how I’ve framed the piece, and there is a character who would be much happier making jokes about everything all the time, but for some reason my instinct was to not give him the space to. To see what happens. To see what we might learn. There’s starkness and humour co-existing, possibly struggling, in it. It's an experiment. I’m excited to see what people make of it.
During the Obrador d’estiu, you will share your time and space with artists from all over the world. What do you hope to get out of your experience with this small community of artists and how do you envision it impacting the work that you do after this?
I can’t wait for the conversations and exchanges with the artists I'll meet during the Obrador d’estiu. I cannot wait to be part of that community. I feel really honoured and grateful to have this rare opportunity, so I hope to listen and learn a lot. To contribute meaningfully. To be challenged. To ask good questions. I'm sure I'll feel nourished, enriched and inspired by so many diverse perspectives and theatrical worlds. I certainly want to learn from the other playwrights what writing plays is like where they’re from or where they live, in their language, and what their experience of theatre is in 2026. I’m sure it will feed into the work I do after this, it's an experience that can only enrich my writing and strengthen the paths of inquiry toward truth within my work.