Irene Agbo: Finding the woman behind the market stall in The Crown

By Flourish Joshua

The market in The Crown is already alive when the audience enters it. There are traders, voices, movement, music, drums. Then the King arrives, and the ordinary business of the marketplace begins to acquire another meaning. Written and directed by Daniel Okezue and produced by Prolific Arts, the immersive theatre production was presented during the Bradford African Festival of Arts 2026, turning a traditional market square into a space where questions of taxation, leadership, responsibility and the welfare of ordinary people could unfold around the audience.

The King, played by Debola Akran, occupies the obvious centre of power. Around him are the people who must live with its consequences.

Irene Agbo plays one of the market women.

It is a role that could easily disappear into the crowd. Agbo gives her a life beyond the immediate demands of the plot; a woman who works, watches, worries, speaks, listens and has her own understanding of the authority that has entered her marketplace. Her performance depends on an idea that seems simple but becomes increasingly important as The Crown unfolds; before she is a market woman, she is a woman.

After the production, Agbo spoke with art critic Flourish Joshua about theatre, character, immersion, ensemble, African storytelling and the work of finding a person inside a role.

Flourish Joshua: You played one of the market women in The Crown. How did you approach the character, especially since the role could easily have been reduced to a background presence?

Irene Agbo: I tried not to think of her as just a market woman. I thought about her as a person first. What does she worry about? What does she enjoy? What does she fear? What does she think about the King? What does she want for her family?

Those questions helped me build the character. Once you understand the person behind the costume, the performance becomes more natural. For me, that was very important because I did not want her to look like somebody who had simply been placed in the market because the story needed market women. She had to feel like somebody who had lived there, worked there and had her own life before the audience arrived.

Flourish Joshua: Theatre is often described as a mirror of society. What does theatre mean to you personally?

Irene Agbo: Theatre, for me, is a way of communicating with people beyond ordinary conversation. It allows you to step into another person’s experience and make an audience feel something. I love the fact that theatre is alive. Every performance is different because the audience is different, the energy is different and even the emotions you bring into the space can change.

For me, theatre is not just about memorising lines. It is about understanding people, understanding emotions and finding truth in a character.

Flourish Joshua: That idea of finding truth in a character seems particularly important to your performance in The Crown. How much of that work happens before you enter the space?

Irene Agbo: A lot of it happens before you enter the space, especially when you are trying to understand who the character is. You have to think about where she comes from, what her relationships are like, what her everyday life looks like. You are trying to create a person, even when the script does not give you every detail.

Sometimes those details come from observation. You watch people. You listen to how they speak. You notice how they respond when something happens around them. All those things can help you understand a character.

Flourish Joshua: The Crown was presented as an immersive production. How did performing so close to the audience affect your approach?

Irene Agbo: It changed everything. When the audience is sitting far away, there is a certain distance between you and them. In immersive theatre, that distance disappears. You can see people’s faces. You can hear their reactions. Sometimes you can even feel them watching you.

That means you cannot hide behind the performance. You have to be present. For me, that was exciting because it made the marketplace feel alive. The audience became part of the environment.

Flourish Joshua: Did that proximity ever make you more conscious of yourself as a performer?

Irene Agbo: Definitely. You are aware that people can see you very clearly. But you have to get past that awareness. If you are constantly thinking, “They are watching me,” then you stop being the character.

The challenge is to remain inside the world of the play. You have to trust the character enough to forget about yourself.

Flourish Joshua: What was the most difficult part of doing that?

Irene Agbo: The biggest challenge was maintaining the reality of the character even when you were aware that people were watching you from very close range.

You have to resist the temptation to perform for the audience. Instead, you have to continue living as the character. If my character is talking to another market woman, I have to believe that conversation is happening whether the audience is watching us or not.

That discipline is important in immersive theatre.

Flourish Joshua: So immersion does not necessarily mean constantly acknowledging the audience?

Irene Agbo: No. Sometimes it means forgetting that they are there.

The world has to feel real enough that if the audience disappeared, the people in the market would still continue with their lives. That is what makes it believable.

Flourish Joshua: What did you discover about your character during rehearsals that surprised you?

Irene Agbo: Hmmm… I discovered that she had more strength than I initially imagined.

At first, I saw her simply as one of the women in the market. But as we rehearsed, I began to understand that these women were actually the social centre of the story.

They are the people affected by what happens around them. They may not sit on the throne, but decisions made by people on the throne affect their lives. That gave the character more emotional weight for me.

Flourish Joshua: The King has the crown, but the market women live with the consequences of what happens around him. Did that change the way you understood the politics of the play?

Irene Agbo: Yes, because leadership is never separate from the people being led. When you are making decisions from a position of authority, there are real people who experience those decisions.

That was something I kept thinking about. My character may not be the person making the decision, but she has to live with it. She has a family. She has work. She has responsibilities. So even though she is not sitting on the throne, what happens on the throne matters to her.

Flourish Joshua: What did you learn from working with the other actors?

Irene Agbo: Every actor brings something different to a production. You have to respect that difference.

Working with other performers teaches you to listen. You cannot always be thinking about your own performance. You have to be aware of what the other person is giving you and respond to it. That is one of the things I enjoy about theatre. You are never completely alone.

Flourish Joshua: Is listening an underrated part of acting?

Irene Agbo: Very much. Sometimes people think acting is about saying your lines well, but you have to listen before you can respond truthfully.

If I already know exactly how I am going to react before the other actor has finished speaking, then I am not really listening. The other performer has to be able to affect you.

That is what makes a scene feel alive.

Flourish Joshua: The Crown combines theatre with music, chanting, drumming and communal storytelling. What did that combination mean to you as a performer?

Irene Agbo: It reminded me that African theatre has always been connected to the community. Storytelling was never only about one person standing somewhere and speaking. There was music, rhythm, movement, response and participation.

In The Crown, the talking drum, the chants, the voices of the market sellers and the presence of the audience all became part of the storytelling. It felt like we were creating a community rather than simply presenting a play.

Flourish Joshua: Did working within that tradition change how you thought about the market itself?

Irene Agbo: Yes. The market stopped feeling like a set.

It became a place where people had relationships. People knew each other. They had disagreements, conversations, worries and moments of humour. There was a sense that these people had lives before the audience entered and that their lives would continue after the performance.

That is important to me because culture is often carried through those ordinary interactions.

Flourish Joshua: There is also something interesting about the way the play places the ordinary people around the King. Did you feel that the market women were carrying part of the emotional weight of the production?

Irene Agbo: I did. The King is important because of the position he occupies, but the people around him give that position meaning.

If there are no people whose lives are affected by his decisions, then the crown does not mean very much. The market women make you see what leadership means at ground level.

Flourish Joshua: What do you think audiences should take away from The Crown?

Irene Agbo: Just think deeply about the relationship between those who lead and those who are led. But I also want them to recognise the humanity of the people in the story.

Sometimes we focus so much on the person wearing the crown that we forget about the people standing around them. The play reminds us that leadership is ultimately about people.

Flourish Joshua: And what would you like audiences to remember about your character?

Irene Agbo: I would like them to remember that she was a person.

She was not just there to fill the market. She had her own concerns and her own understanding of what was happening. I think that is true of people generally. Sometimes we see someone’s position before we see the person.

Flourish Joshua: That seems to return us to where we began: finding the woman behind the market stall.

Irene Agbo: Exactly.

Theatre gives you an opportunity to see people differently. Even if the audience remembers the King because he wears the crown, I hope they also remember the people around him. They are part of the story too.

The woman behind the stall

What emerges from Agbo’s account of The Crown is a performance built less on theatrical display than on attention. Her market woman does not need a grand monologue to acquire significance. The character becomes legible through the small things an actor has to understand before she ever speaks: where she stands, who she knows, what she fears, whom she listens to and what a decision made by someone in power might mean when it reaches the marketplace. The restraint suits the production.

In an immersive work, where the audience is close enough to notice an actor’s smallest reactions, exaggerated performance can quickly expose itself. Agbo’s instinct, as she describes it, is to resist that temptation. She speaks repeatedly of listening, of remaining inside the character and of allowing the marketplace to exist beyond the audience’s attention. Those ideas are visible in the performance itself. Her market woman feels less like a character waiting for the play to require her and more like someone who has been living in this world before we arrived.

This is also where her understanding of the character’s political significance becomes effective. Agbo does not turn the market woman into a mouthpiece for the play’s ideas about leadership. She gives her something more useful: a life that makes those ideas matter. The King can debate taxation and responsibility, but Agbo’s character reminds us that such questions eventually reach the person standing behind the stall, counting her earnings, thinking about her family and deciding what tomorrow will require.

Her performance is therefore strongest in its sense of proportion. She understands that a supporting character does not have to compete with the centre of a story to complicate it. The market woman remains one woman among many, yet through Agbo’s attention to her inner life, she becomes a quiet measure of what the crown means to those who do not wear it.

There is a pleasing consistency between Agbo’s account of acting and what she achieves on stage. She says she wants the audience to see the person before the position. In The Crown, she does precisely that.

The King may occupy the throne. The market may surround him with noise, music and movement. Yet somewhere behind the spectacle is a woman who has come to work, who has a life beyond the arrival of the King, and who will still have to live with whatever happens after he leaves. Agbo makes sure we see her.