It’s lunchtime at the Royal Court and Ryan Calais Cameron and Monique Touko are discussing gravity – specifically, how to defy it. They have spent the morning in a meeting about the mechanics of the set of , their forthcoming Black sci-fi epic about a freshly liberated Zambia’s unlikely entry into the 1960s space race. “‘Expensive’ is all you can say,” Touko, eating a salad, says of the design – and what I am allowed to write about it. “It’s definitely out of this world.”

The play, which Cameron has written and the pair are co-directing, closes the Royal Court’s 70th-anniversary season this winter. It is, at its core, a story about people who refuse limitation. In 1964, just as Zambia was emerging from British colonial rule, former schoolteacher and independence activist Edward Mukuka Nkoloso announced his country’s intention to beat the US and the Soviets to the moon. He established the Zambia National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy, recruited a group of aspiring astronauts – or Afronauts, as they later became known – and began training them on an abandoned farm outside Lusaka.

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The methods were unconventional. The cohort were rolled down hills in oil drums and swung from ropes to simulate weightlessness; Nkoloso planned to send a 17-year-old girl, Matha Mwamba, to Mars with two cats and a missionary. The project never got off the ground, hampered by a lack of funding and institutional support, and Nkoloso became a victim of mockery. Yet, Nkoloso was a serious anti-colonial activist, and the extent to which his space programme was sincere, satirical or some beguiling combination of the two remains contested. “Some people think I’m crazy,” Nkoloso told the press at the time. “But I’ll be laughing the day I plant Zambia’s flag on the moon.”

For Cameron, that ambiguity doesn’t matter. He first encountered the story of the Zambian space programme during lockdown, while watching a YouTube video about “the worst ideas of the 20th century”. What he saw in the comment section was less fascination than racism – a nation’s dream equated to so-called African incompetence. “For me it was always a case of like, well, why is it funny to mock a Black man’s dream of trying to get to the moon, but not these white guys who are trying to build a plane?” he says. “I’m a dreamer. We’re all dreamers here.” In 2022, author and curator Ekow Eshun’s exhibition, In the Black Fantastic at the Southbank Centre, told the story of the Afronauts again. It was a sign; Cameron pitched the play to the Royal Court.

From left: Ryan wears wool jacket, Loewe. Monique wears jacquard dress, Proenza Schouler. Drop earring, Otiumberg. Hoop earring, Completedworks

Touko immediately understood the assignment. “It’s about the ability and the confidence to dream and the resources around you to be able to do that,” she says. She was also drawn to the chance to tell a Zambian story at a time when African narratives in Britain are still often focused on West African history. The pair travelled to Zambia, meeting young people and artists, trying to understand a country whose story is often underrepresented. “They’ve kind of been sidelined,” Touko says. “They’re definitely not at the front like they should be.”

marks an overdue collaboration for two artists whose careers have been built around centring Black stories. Cameron, an actor before becoming one of Britain’s most prominent new writers for stage and screen, is the brain behind smash-hit For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy and , and is now an associate playwright at the Royal Court. Touko, whose recent directing credits include by Tife Kusoro, and Marie and Rosetta, has spent much of her career asking similar questions about identity, representation and power.

From left: Ryan wears nubuck jacket and trousers, Jacquemus. Patent-leather loafers, Gianvito Rossi. Monique wears asymmetric satin dress, Victoria Beckham. Suede mules, Balenciaga. Drop earring, Otiumberg. Hoop earring, Completedworks.

Their instincts around Black storytelling were shaped, in part, by their own early encounters with theatre – and by what was missing from them. Cameron remembers watching Shakespeare and feeling that theatre was simply not for him – from the language and costumes to “the way that security looked at me in the theatre”. Then he discovered by Roy Williams and by Arinzé Kene and it became clear. “I didn’t know we were allowed to tell stories like that,” he says. For Touko’s part, she went to university with ambitions of becoming a barrister before switching to theatre directing. She spent years assisting other directors. “I don’t see anyone that looks like me,” she remembers thinking. “So then it was a bit like, ‘OK, so where do I fit and how do I operate?’”

Her work is unapologetically “Blackity, Black, Black, Black”, while Cameron is excited by putting Black bodies in “different” spaces – in this case, sending them to the stars. Their play is a “true-ish” historical story, yes, but it’s also a story of ambition, absurdity, failure and joy. “If someone comes [to the theatre] for the first time,” says Cameron, “I want them to be able to think, ‘This is big, now I can think of something even bigger.’”

“We have to deliver,” says Touko. “And we will.”

The Afronauts will be at the Royal Court, SW1, from 14 November to 19 December.

Hair: Lauraine Bailey. Make-up: Tina Khatri. Nails: Sabrina Gayle. Tailor: Inna Romanovych