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Written by Oscar and BAFTA Award nominee, Chadwick Boseman (Black Panther), Deep Azure makes its UK premiere at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. Playing a strictly limited run, book your official tickets today.
When Azure’s fiancé, Deep, is fatally shot by police, their life is shattered in an instant — and grief becomes a battleground.
Held together by the spiritual imprint Deep leaves behind, Azure and their closest friends, Roshad and Tone, struggle to survive the aftermath and search for healing. But their journey is disrupted by the Heavenly MCs of Street Knowledge, who challenge them to confront injustice, memory, and resistance head-on.
Inspired by the real-life killing of university student Prince Jones, infused with the poetry of Shakespeare, and driven by the raw energy of hip-hop theatre, Boseman’s powerful and lyrical epic transforms the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse into a space of reckoning, ritual, and radical storytelling.
Deep Azure contains references to violence, racism, police brutality and eating disorders.
Written by Oscar nominee and Black Panther star Chadwick Boseman, and inspired by the real-life shooting of his friend and Howard University classmate Prince Jones, Deep Azure is an urgent, energetic and powerful exploration of police brutality and so-called “black on black violence.” Funny and furiously devastating, Deep Azure is a compelling play that tackles the important issues head on. With the rise of racial profiling and violence against minorities under ICE, more than twenty years after it was first penned, it is, heartbreakingly, even more timely and necessary than it was in 2005.
Set in a near-future America, Deep Azure follows the fallout after the police killing of Deep, a young Black man. As his girlfriend Azure and their community search for truth and justice, the play fractures into poetry, memory and protest - interrogating love, rage, loyalty and the systemic forces that shape Black lives.
The cast are as urgent, energetic and powerful as the play itself. It’s exhilarating to watch as they bound through the audience, leaping over the Upper Gallery bannisters and vaulting onto the stage. The iconic candlelights flicker as wooden beams tremble under the force of pounding platform boots. At times the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse feels less like a theatre and more like a rally, the audience caught inside the pulse of Hip-Hop theatre, swept up in movement, rhythm and righteous anger. At others it’s pindrop silence, this isn’t a lecture, this is a (tragic) love story, and it is theatre that refuses to sit still.
18 Feb, 2026 | By Sian McBride
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