It's still pretty rare to watch a theatre show where women are the main characters and even rarer to see a female protagonist whose story doesn't end in an everlasting romance with the man of her dreams. But, as those who have read the book or seen the film will know, that doesn't mean The Color Purple is a story lacking in love - quite the opposite.
Based on Alice Walker's 1982 Pulitzer Prize winning novel and adapted for the stage by Pulitzer Prize and Tony award-winner Marsha Norman, Allee Willis, Brenda Russell and Stephen Bray, the story centres on a young African American woman - Celie, living in rural Georgia. Poor, oppressed and abused, we journey with her through the decades as she strives to be happy against all the odds.
Her children taken away from her and married off to a cruel bully she must address as 'Mister', her only comfort is writing letters to her beloved sister Nettie, whose replies her husband hides from her, leaving her to think she must be dead. Ako Mitchell makes a suitably horrible Mister, treating her like a slave and repeatedly telling her she's ugly, his abusive behaviour backed up by the men around him, including Celie's own father.
