She was a last-minute lead in the three-hour Linda and will play JK Rowling’s grown-up Hermione Granger in the West End. Now Noma Dumezweni is making her directorial debut with a South African thriller, I See You, at the Royal Court

“That month was extraordinary,” says Noma Dumezweni. She says it again, emphasising the syllables. “Ex-tra-ord-in-ary.”

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On 1 December last year, Penelope Skinner’s play Linda opened at the Royal Court. Just 10 days earlier, Dumezweni had stepped into the lead – a part that kept her on stage for almost three hours – after Kim Cattrall withdrew on doctor’s orders. “Just terrifying,” Dumezweni says, but the reviews were ecstatic: she was a “knockout”, a “wonder-woman”. Three weeks later, she was in the papers again: announced as the grown-up Hermione in this summer’s Harry Potter play in the West End. Now, she’s back at the Court, making her directorial debut with a new South African play called I See You.

Despite winning an Olivier award a decade ago – “Yeah,” she protests, “but it was for supporting actor” – Dumezweni has largely played company roles, either at the RSC or in ensemble pieces such as Feast, a Royal Court and Young Vic production, and Carmen Disruption at the Almeida. “I’m a great company actor, a great supporting actor. I serve the piece.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘You couldn’t take your ears off her cracked, husky voice’ … Noma Dumezweni in Linda. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Linda shifted that: it made you see her afresh. She had the charisma of a lead – some of us just hadn’t noticed. Even script in hand, not yet up to full speed, Dumezweni drew focus. You couldn’t take your ears off her cracked, husky voice. It changed things for her, too: “I now realise I’m a great actor.” She says this not with arrogance, but as a mark of newfound self-assurance.

Harry Potter chat is officially on lockdown until rehearsals get going in April but Dumezweni declares: “The point is that I, Noma Dumezweni, am busting with pleasure that I’m going to be playing her.”



“Her” is Hermione Granger, bucktoothed and muggle-born. “I loved her when I read the books – and I’m an old reader, not one of the 13-year-olds who’s grown into their twenties. I didn’t grow up with these three from childhood, but I remember meeting them and going: ‘These guys are great.’ She’s great. She’s great, she’s great, she’s great.”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dumezweni with Jamie Parker, right, who will play Harry, and Paul Thornley, left, who will play Ron in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child this summer. Photograph: PA

Great in what way? “She’s Hermione, isn’t she? She rocks. She’s the one who grounds them. She’s the one who says: ‘You can do better. You’ve got to own up to yourself.’ I’ve got to be careful how I say this, but we all aspire to be Hermione. She’s struggled, but she holds it all together.”



Dumezweni’s casting caused a frisson. Many fans have long considered that the Hermione character could be of any race. Others couldn’t accept the notion at all. JK Rowling tweeted her view: “White skin never specified. Rowling loves black Hermione.” Cheers outweighed sneers. “I didn’t realise the emotional effect,” Dumezweni says. “Not on me, but on other people. That’s why I talk about it as a privilege and a responsibility.” She’s talking both as an actor aware of setting a precedent, and as a Potterphile. “The reason those books are so powerful is because you find your own archetype within them. I’ve spoken too much already,” she says. Will it be a good thing for theatre? “Oh my god, yes.”

You get the sense she’s used to pushing for change with her choices. “I don’t really go the normal route,” she says, adding that appearing in A Raisin in the Sun (the performance that won her an Olivier award) was the one job that felt like retreading old ground. The same goes for her peers – “women of colour, black women of my age group, all slowly pushing away for the last 20 years: Jenny Jules, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Tanya Moodie, Lorna Brown, Nina Sosanya.” That list is a mark of a generous actor. Dumezweni would rather lift people up than moan about being held back. “I don’t do the victim mode. I don’t do blame. I can’t bear that.”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Novella Nelson, Noma Dumezweni and Lennie James in A Raisin in the Sun at the Lyric Hammersmith in 2005. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Directing is the next step on that trajectory, and I See You is a big challenge – one she only decided to accept at the last minute. She’d long wanted to try her hand. “How do you start after all this time? I’ve got a living to earn. I’m a mum. There are so many directors, young and old, around – all doing their thing and struggling.”

I See You, written by the South African playwright Mongiwekhaya is the ideal start. A tense thriller about a young law student, Ben, accused by the country’s corrupt police force, it’s very sharp about post-apartheid tensions, and reflects some of Dumezweni’s own experiences.



“My relationship to South Africa is the same as Ben’s – we’re both outsiders,” she says. Dumezweni was raised in Swaziland by South African parents before coming to England with her mother. She saw her father for the first time in 30 years on tour two years ago. “People would start speaking to me in Zulu, and I’d go: ‘Sorry, I’ve got to stop you. I only speak English.’ Ben finds the same thing.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dumezweni with Jack Farthing in Carmen Disruption by Simon Stephens at the Almeida. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

“In Zulu, ‘I see you’ is how you say hello. It’s a very old way of meeting, but people don’t actually see each other.” The corruption goes unseen in Mongiwekhaya’s script, but so too do underlying societal divisions between generations with different understandings of apartheid, between classes with different experiences of the racist policy, and between tribes speaking 11 different languages in a single country.

“There’s one line that I love: ‘People think we’re both black, but only one of us is black.’ That applies to a lot of the discussions I’ve had here, creatively, as well.”

