Author: Toni Roberts

Toni Roberts is a writer from and based in London. She primarily writes plays and had a short play performed as part of The Platform at The Bread & Roses Theatre, which ran on 23rd and 24th February 2020. She studied English Language and Spanish at the University of Westminster where she first got into playwriting and has recently expanded her writing range to include poetry and essays.

Maz Hedgehog’s Let Me Count The Ways at Hope Mill Theatre

  Toni Roberts

Back for a second run, Maz Hedgehog’s play, Let Me Count the Ways, blends monologue with poetry in this one-woman show about mental health, blackness, queerness and beauty.

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Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Fly in League with the Night at Tate Britain

  Toni Roberts

Before the second lockdown Toni Roberts saw Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s show Fly in League with the Night at Tate Britain. Here, she recalls vibrant paintings alive with stories, brilliant studies of people, and human relationships that transcend the canvas’ edges.

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Adopting an Additional Identity

  Toni Roberts

Little did Toni Roberts know that her decision to study Spanish at school would turn into a life-long love for a language that has since given her confidence, creativity and, above all, joy.

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Women of the Night, Chapter 3: Vrăjitoare, Romania’s Witch Business

  Toni Roberts

In the third chapter of her mini-series, Toni Roberts discovers that witchcraft is alive and well in Romania. Looking at Lucia Sekerková Bláhová’s photography series, Vrăjitoare, the modern, technologically savvy face of magic and witchery is revealed.

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Women of the Night, Chapter 2: Nocturnal Mothering

  Toni Roberts

Looking at the work of photographer Ana Casas Broda, poet Muriel Rukeyser and musician Sherri Dupree-Bemis, Toni Roberts considers night from the perspectives of mothers, reflecting on their nocturnal experiences and reveries.

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Women of the Night, Chapter 1: Lorca’s “Rural Trilogy”

  Toni Roberts

Sympathising with the marginalised, Lorca wrote spirited plays featuring aspirational but oppressed women who sought freedom, pleasure and solace under the cover of night. Here, in the first essay of her mini series, Toni Roberts explores Lorca’s rural trilogy, reflecting on his heroines’ relationship to the night – and day.

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Postcards in Isolation 7: Mona Hatoum, Hot Spot III, 2009

  Toni Roberts

Toni Roberts discusses how Mona Hatoum’s radiant red sculpture, Hot Spot III, 2009, has become a relevant work of art during her time in lockdown and a metaphor for our cage-like existence.

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