Benedict Lombe Wins the Blackburn Prize for ‘Lava’

For the first time in the 44-year history of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, awarded annually to a female, transgender or nonbinary playwright who writes for the English-language theater, the honor has gone to the writer of a debut play.

Benedict Lombe, 30, a British Congolese playwright based in London, received the award on Monday for “Lava,” a one-woman memoir-monologue that deals with Black identity and displacement.

“It feels incredible,” Lombe said in a phone conversation on Monday evening en route to the award ceremony at the Globe theater in London. “It’s a huge play that allows me to create a space where Black people can leave taller than when they walked in.”

The Blackburn Prize comes with $25,000, as well as a signed print by the abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning. Many of its recipients have gone on to great acclaim (among them, the Pulitzer Prize winners Annie Baker, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Marsha Norman, Lynn Nottage, Paula Vogel and Wendy Wasserstein).

Lombe’s “Lava” was commissioned by the Bush Theater in London, and debuted there in July 2021. Ronke Adékoluejo starred in the one-woman show, directed by Anthony Simpson-Pike. In reviewing the work for The Guardian, Kate Wyver praised Adékoluejo’s indefatigable charisma, writing that she “controls the stage with such ease, oozing charm and confidence.”

But under the bright joy of Adékoluejo’s performance, Wyver wrote, “fury rumbles in Lombe’s text.”

“With hindsight, she takes us through incidents and aggressions from her life, each one being pushed into the pit of her stomach, gnawing at her, getting heavier as she carries the cumulative weight,” Wyver wrote.

“Lava,” which Andrzej Lukowski of Time Out London characterized as a “freeform poetic eruption,” tells the story of a British Congolese woman who discovers a tale of quiet rebellion when she has to renew her British passport and wonders why her South African passport — a country she is also a citizen of — does not carry her first name. It takes place in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, during the time of Mobutu Sese Seko’s dictatorship; post-apartheid South Africa; Ireland; and London.

“It was gratifying to be able to celebrate Black people in fullness,” said Lombe, who wrote the play in the summer of 2020, “and to uplift us when so many people were feeling the opposite when they walked in.”

Along with Lombe, the nine other finalists for the Blackburn Prize were honored. They received $5,000 each, and included Zora Howard, who was honored for her play “Bust.” One of Howard’s previous works, “Stew,” was a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Drama.

Last year, Erika Dickerson-Despenza won the Blackburn Prize for her play “cullud wattah,” a look at the water crisis in Flint, Mich., through the lens of one family. It went on to be produced at the Public Theater last fall.

Is a New York run also in the cards for “Lava”?

“I mean, fingers crossed,” said Lombe, who is in residence with the National Theater Studio in London and working on new commissions. “I hope so. We’ll see what happens.”