In February 2026, the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse transforms. The candlelit wood of our Jacobean-style theatre will vibrate with a distinctly new kind of energy: the lyrical, rhythmic, and hauntingly beautiful pulse of Chadwick Boseman’s Deep Azure.
While many know Boseman as a global icon, he was first a playwright and a scholar who understood that theatre must be a site of truth-telling. Deep Azure is his "ghostly epic"—a play that fuses the structural weight of a Shakespearean tragedy with the contemporary heartbeat of Hip-Hop. Inspired by the state-sanctioned killing of university student Prince Jones, the play is a visceral exploration of police brutality, identity, and the heavy cost of surviving in a world that views your body as a threat.
As we mark this UK premiere, our Retail team has curated a special collection of books to complement the production and extend your experience beyond the stage. We believe that what you read after the candles go out should help you meet the play’s themes "straight up."
The Director’s Desk
To understand Deep Azure, look at the texts that inspired our director, Tristan Fynn-Aiduenu. During rehearsals, bell hooks’ All About Love and James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son were on his desk. These foundational critiques challenge a society that historically and all too often still chooses oppression over love, providing the intellectual backbone for the characters' search for peace.
Bridging the Bard and the Beat
Why perform a Hip-Hop play at the Globe? This production highlights a profound connection between the two: rhythm. Just as Shakespeare utilised the steady, driving heartbeat of iambic pentameter to give his stories life, Boseman used the complex, percussive "flow" of Hip-Hop to drive his narrative. In Deep Azure, these two worlds collide—the classical meter meets the modern beat, proving that whether on the page or the street, rhythm is a universal tool for both survival and storytelling.
To explore this intersection, our selection includes Farah Karim-Cooper’s The Great White Bard and Ian Smith’s Black Shakespeare. These works interrogate the classical canon, proving that the language of the "Bard" and the "Street" are both essential in the fight for representation. For those fascinated by the technical craft of the production, Questlove’s Hip-Hop Is History and Conway & Murray’s Making Hip Hop Theatre offer a masterclass in the culture that gave Boseman his voice.
We have also included the work of James Shapiro, whose books provide a vital historical context for how these stories function in a polarized world. In The Playbook, Shapiro examines the mechanisms used to stage—or suppress—radical art, while Shakespeare in a Divided America acts as a mirror, reflecting how the Bard’s plays have been used at every political flashpoint in history to define who belongs in the American "Dream". These texts ground the play's themes of police brutality within the broader "Culture Wars" that make Boseman's work so unfortunately relevant today.
Connecting to Home: Resistance, Reality, and Accountability
While the play has American roots, its themes of resistance and belonging are universal. However, we must be clear: the experiences of the Black diaspora - the questions of belonging and the weight of systemic persecution - do not stop at the Atlantic.
For our director and the British cast, this production is driven by their own lived experiences as people of colour in a Britain that is still largely unwilling to hold itself accountable for the legacy of colonialism. This play is a mirror to a society where discrimination remains a daily reality and systemic pressures continue to stifle POC lives.
Through Gretchen Gerzina’s Black England, we see that this presence is not new; Black Londoners have resisted and persisted through historical silences for centuries. Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race further exposes these structural realities, sparking a necessary and often difficult conversation about the nature of racism in the UK today.
Essential texts like David Olusoga’s Black and British, Lanre Bakare’s We Were There, and Joy White’s Terraformed show how stories of identity and justice are written into the very soil of the UK—and how much work is still left to do. This collection refuses to sideline these stories as "American issues."
The Heart of the Story: Recommended Further Reading
At the centre of Deep Azure is a tragedy that changed the lives of those who knew him. For those wishing to delve deeper into the real-life inspiration for the play, we highly recommend Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me. A college friend of Prince Jones, Coates writes a devastatingly beautiful account of Prince's life and the shattering impact of his death - the very grief that fuelled Boseman’s script. While we are currently unable to stock this title in our shop, it remains a vital companion piece for anyone moved by the reality of Azure’s journey.
We invite you to visit the Globe Shop to explore the Deep Azure book selection, which will be available on a rolling basis throughout production. These books are not just companions to a play; they are maps for navigating the systemic pressures of our world and windows into a history that demands to be heard.
Deep Azure runs from February at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. Book your tickets for Deep Azure. The curated book collection is available in the Globe Shop and online here.
Written by Christopher French (Retail Manager)
