When it was announced that Francesca Amewudah-Rivers would be making her London West-End debut starring as Juliet alongside Hollywood actor Tom Holland as Romeo, it should have been a celebratory moment. Instead, the young actor — who has already starred in productions of Othello, Macbeth as well as a BBC drama — was faced with a heartbreaking, but all too familiar, sequence of events in which she received thousands of racist and misogynistic comments online. The social media harassment got so bad, Jamie Lloyd, the theatre company behind the production, issued a statement condemning the “barrage of deplorable racial abuse online directed towards a member of our company.” And more than 800 Black actors signed an open letter, organized by playwright Somalia Nonyé Seaton, in solidarity with Amewudah-Rivers. “The racist and misogynistic abuse directed at such a sweet soul has been too much to bear,” the letter states.
