Meet the writer-director putting queer Caribbean people centre-stage: ‘It just isn’t done’

Emily Aboud’s Splintered opens with its emcee taking a shot from a moon cup.

“Because they’re the MC, they’re the menstrual cup,” Aboud tells PinkNews, “which is just a stupid joke. But I love it.”

Splintered is a cabaret, drawing on the form’s long history of satire, politics and queerness. It explores what it means to be LGBTQ+ and Caribbean – Aboud hails from Trinidad and Tobago, hence her drag king name, TriniDad and TooGayThough – while asking how much of its homophobia is rooted in colonialism.

It’s a question Aboud notes has no simple answer. While Britain is responsible for many of the anti-LGBTQ+ laws which have shaped generations of attitudes, many will ask why little has changed decades since independence.

“Obviously, Britain is to blame,” they say. “We were colonised for so f**king long that of course it’s gonna take a while to unlearn it.

“But also, we’re a republic now, and our homophobia is right at home. It’s embedded. Trinidad is a republic entirely made up of Trinidadians… we are governing ourselves yet we cannot we can overthrow [homophobia].”

In 2018, a judge in Trinidad and Tobago ruled the law which criminalised sex between consenting men to be unconstitutional. Similar rulings following in Barbados, Antigua and Barbuda and St Kitts and Nevis.

But across the Caribbean, laws that actually protect the LGBTQ+ community have been slow to follow – not to mention hearts and minds.

“Section 28 was horrible, right,” Aboud says. “But that’s been Trinidad forever. We don’t mention gayness. It’s not a thing. If it’s on telly, it’s on American telly, it’s never spoken about in class.

“I think there’s loads of queer people in Trinidad who only in adulthood, after reading some books and talking to people, are like: wait, hold on, this is a part of me.”

Aboud didn’t realise she was queer until she moved to the UK for university. “Because it was around me, and I realised that it was an option. Not that being gay is a choice – it was more like that thing that I’ve never allowed myself to explore or thought it was possible to explore was open. We couldn’t see the colour blue until we had a word for it.“

With Splintered, Aboud wants to explores this “muddled” legacy, but above all wants to celebrate Caribbean queerness. For Aboud, doing one without the other would be impossible – hence Splintered being a cabaret.

Cabaret often doesn’t attempt to solve any problems, Aboud says, but instead creates space to examine political struggles in a way that is “nuanced, exaggerated and camp”.

“Under the guise of the cabaret, it offers like a safe way in for the audience to be like: ‘Oh, my God, this is horrible, but I have control and I can laugh at this. And it kind of ties into what carnival is as well – it’s like a big festival of satire of the oppressor, and cabaret’s the same thing.”

Splintered is returning to London’s Soho Theatre there for a final run from Tuesday (18 April), almost four years after it debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe.

As Aboud prepares to say goodbye to the show, she’s still surprised she managed to pull off in the first place – and she fears the path for theatre-makers like her is becoming narrower and narrower as arts funding all but disappears.

“The first time we did at the Fringe, it was so hard, so hard that I wouldn’t do it now,” they add.

“But if in 2019 this felt like the hardest thing, to put on was this little Fringe show with three people and two stools, and that felt impossible to do, I have no clue how theatre companies are existing in 2023.”

Despite this, Aboud’s company, Lagahoo Productions, appears to be thriving, developing new pieces by and for Caribbean people.

In the 2021 England and Wales Census, more than 1.1 million said they were Caribbean or mixed Caribbean, yet the community is underserved by the UK’s theatre industry.

Of Splintered, Aboud says: “We’ve had like people who grew up in the Caribbean come and be like, Oh my god, this is this is so accurate, and then British people also just being like: I’ve never seen that part of my culture shown in a naturalistic way.

“Even just dances, even just playing Soca music on stage, it just isn’t done. There’s very few plays about carnival, but carnival is one of the biggest festivals in London. I can only think of one play, and that’s J’Ouvert. So what’s going on?

“I just I think it’s just really nice to put Caribbean music and Caribbean words and Caribbean dancing on stage and be like: This is us, man. I hope you like it.”

Splintered is at Soho Theatre 18-29 April.