(March 9, 2019 – Source: Getty Images North America)
*Idris Elba has responded to allegations made by writers Sarah Henley and Tori Allen-Martin that he plagiarized the four years worth of work the British duo spent collaborating with him on his new play “Tree.”
On Thursday Elba posted a statement to Twitter rejecting Henley and Allen-Martin’s allegations that they have not been acknowledged for their work and were pushed off the project, Complex reports.
Tori and Sarah published a lengthy statement on Tuesday detailing their complaints about being removed from “Tree,” and not being credited as the producers on the show, which follows a biracial young man’s journey to his parents’ hometown in South Africa. The story was inspired by Elba’s 2014 album “mi Mandela,” which Allen-Martin also collaborated on.
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(May 5, 2019 – Source: DIMITRIOS KAMBOURIS/Getty Images North America
In his response, shared on Twitter the same day the play premiered at the Manchester International Festival, Elba says “new ambitions” took the show in a different direction, and Henley and Allen-Martin chose not to be a part of the production’s new direction under director Kwame Kwei-Armah.
Idris also calls their claims of plagiarism “offensive and troubling.”
“As new ambitions started to be proposed for the jump off point for development, Tori & Sarah decided they didn’t want to pursue the early thoughts and declined to work any further on the project,” he wrote in his lengthy response. “This is not uncommon in the development process. They expressed their reasoning and we respected their decision. We were left without any writers and had to start work very quickly, which is our contractual right as beholder of the original idea, the album.”
He also noted that he “wanted to offer an opportunity to support these new writers while creating a piece of work and scale and to a director’s vision,” adding. “The outcome is an accusation of plagiarism and discrimination.”
Meanwhile, Tori and Sarah claim Elba removed them from the production and that they suffered from “intimidation and disrespect” while working with him.
“The levels of intimidation and disrespect we faced were totally unacceptable, soul-destroying and as we’ve since heard—not uncommon for up and coming theatre writers, particularly female ones,” the playwriters wrote in a post for Medium titled “Tree. A Story of Gender and Power in Theatre.”
Elba and director Kwame Kwei-Armah are credited as the creators of “Tree,” but Allen-Martin and Henley believe they deserve credit on the project as well. Both are mentioned in the foreword of the play.
Read the full accusation against Idris Elba here.
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