Theatre Director Emily Aboud is a theatre director, a film director and writer of mixed heritage,
born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, based in London.
Trinidad although always under pressure to remain oil and gas focussed is also a research hub into the
future of solar wind, green hydrogen and water power. Trinidad’s just had a budget promoting
investment in infrastructural development work, health, access to employment across the life course.
Importantly Trinidad’s government and PM Kamla Persad-Bissessar are actively promoting all the
arts:theatre, film, fashion and music in the Caribbean In Transit Campaign at a recent symposium
organised to launch the campaign attended by the French Ambassador to Trinidad: Guillaume Pierre.
the campaign team led by Marielle Maignan.
Emily who’s in her early thirties is Directing Paula Varjack’s 9/16ths across the eighteen venue UK
tour in 2026. She’s at Nottingham Playhouse tonight 20th March.
Emily and Paula Varjack have a shared forensic eye on narrative details often missed in mainstream arts:
looking at the impact of what happened to Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake after the 2004 incident
(interestingly, Emily was ten(!)), where during an American Superbowl entertainment break
he ripped off Janet Jackson’s bodice and exposed a nipple for nine sixteenths of a second.
The way that moment was understood and received: the positive and negative consequences for
young man and mature woman and the way that moment announced a new manipulable form of
relationship between audience and performers is Paula Varjack’s moment to look at the world, at
culture and reclaim it. See the research done by Shannon Holland
Who makes art and the management and conducting of social outrage for profit? Emily is outraged by
injustice and inequality (see her work, theatre credits below). She’s doing it for Trinidad and
London (and for everyone across the lifespan).
Emily won a scholarship to study engineering at Edinburgh University but like her father, a high
court judge who wrote and published poetry, Emily had always been a kind of ‘scientartist’: performer,
moving heaven and earth after her degree to do an MA at Mountview in Directing. Over the last ten
years Emily has matured into an accomplished Director, writer, communicator, writing performing,
teaching: to Emily the boundaries between art and science are imaginary.
Talking to Emily I get the feeling that she has great courage, compassion and deep sensitivity:
understanding the labour in the tension between helping people to express, communicate and form
something new and different, enabling difference deftly and sensitively.
By 2019 when Janet Jackson performed at Glastonbury Emily was twenty five and there she was
awestruck by two things: the first Janet Jackson was here, live in front of so many people but awestruck
too about why so many women had watched Janet as children, there’d been five albums ( Damita Jo,
20 YO Discipline Unbreakable Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation but how many people realised this? Yet
so many people particularly black women wanted to will her to reclaim her space after that
incident, that erasure: so in an exciting way in 9/16ths there’s a recovering of time.
Directing this is a privilege and a joy: one for the incredible ancestors, the people here now
channelling those questions, helping us to know more, share more. one for the women, all women
everywhere.
Emily and Paula and the ensemble are fighting the one strike and you’re out: all the fear around
women’s capabilities, skills across the lifespan (if I was younger…) and their career.
The background to 9/16ths and context is all the conversations about self and history, migration,
movement, celebrating being alive across all the genres woman’s eye view, a documentary of the
things that matter: how we live, love, endure and survive.
As soon as you start thinking about the history of fashion, street style, culture, the world comes to
life through improvisatory conversation music and dance: the story of Notting Hill, carnival (Trinidad
and Tobago and across the world as relief from Colony), as a place to walk around and meet across
neighbourhoods, something silos have helped us forget.
Emily’s work
When you think about precarity of work she was quickly sharing her perspective in student led
productions about precarity and inequality such as Chatham House Rules
Evening Standard Future Theatre Award in 2021. Associate artist at the Bush Theatre and Artistic
Director of Lagahoo Productions. Shortlisted for the 2023 and 2025 RTST Peter Hall Award. Final round
Genesis Fellow Associate Director at the Young Vic 2020 JMK Award Shortlist 2021 2022. Directed
Disco Inferno (National Youth Theatre),Tender (Bush Theatre), Sweet Charity (Mountview), Rock DJ and
Three Other Songs That Saved The World (New Diorama Theatre), Lady Dealer (Bush Theatre, Paines
Plough Roundabout), Haemosporidian (Lyric Hammersmith), Flip! (Regional Tour with Fuel Theatre),
Close Quarters (LAMDA, 2023), BOGEYMAN (Edinburgh Queen Dome, Fringe 2022), SPLINTERED,
(also writer Edinburgh Fringe 2019, Soho Theatre 2023), Pink Lemonade (Bush Theatre 2021,
Edinburgh Fringe 2019), British Book (Roundhouse 2021), Exceptional Promise (Bush Theatre), & Salty
Irina (Ovalhouse) among others.Associate/Assistant: The Harder They Come (Stratford East), Going
Through (Bush Theatre) and the upcoming The Story (Olivier Theatre, National Theatre).
Wrote and directed SPLINTERED (Soho Theatre Mainhouse) and BOGEYMAN (Pleasance
QueenDome). Insurrection: A Work in Progress Opera for the Royal Opera House that was staged in
2023. She is currently on commission by Pigfoot Theatre.Directing in Trinidad & Tobago as well as
throughout the UK.Teacher, facilitator, workshops for Talawa, GRAEAE human rights theatre, community
projects with Cardboard Citizens, The Outside Project, Harrow Arts Centre and The National Youth
Theatre, amount others.
Drama school Mountview, LAMDA, Central School of Speech and Drama, Oxford School of Drama,
ALRA South and Italia Conti.
She has written for the Trinidad Guardian, writing feminist articles under the pseudonym, Lagahoo. ( a
lagahoo werewolf is a terrifying blend of african and western folklore spirit)
She aperforms regularly as a drag king, TriniDad, TooGayThough across the UK and Trinidad &
Tobago. Performing in The Yard, VFD, The Glory and EartH Hackney as a finalist for the Man Up
competition, the largest drag king competition in Europe
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