I have not told my nieces what Grandad Anansi is about but they stop by the poster outside the Half Moon theatre and begin piecing things together for themselves. “Is it a Halloween show? Will there be spiders?” asks seven-year-old Eva, pointing to the spider dangling beside a picture of the grandfather.
She is only half wrong. The show, written by Elayne Ogbeta and staged as part of Black History Month, is about intergenerational love and the Windrush generation. Ogbeta incorporates the legend of Anansi, a part human spider from west African and Caribbean folklore, into the story of a grandfather (Marcus Hercules) who is finding a way to tell his granddaughter Abi (Jazmine Wilkinson) that he is leaving Britain to return to Jamaica.
