Debut leading role in Malorie Blackman’s dangerous dystopia - on the Brighton stage

“We started last August and it has been my first-ever tour,” Effie says. “It has been so interesting. It's been really wonderful. There are so many places I've never been before like Birmingham and Liverpool and it's just really fantastic to get the chance to go and see them and of course every audience is different.” The next audience is at Theatre Royal Brighton (February 21-25) .

In the piece, Sephy is a Cross and Callum is a Nought. Between Noughts and Crosses there are racial and social divides, and a segregated society teeters on a volatile knife edge. As violence breaks out, Sephy and Callum draw closer, but this is a romance that will lead them into terrible danger in a play that explores powerful themes of love, revolution and what it means to grow up in a divided world.

As Effie explains: “The best way to think of it really is as a modern-day Romeo and Juliet. It's about these two young people that are just so entranced with each other. They start as friends and they turn to lovers eventually but they're just young people that are not allowed to be together because of class and race. The Noughts are white and the Crosses are black and the world is flipped on its head in a way because the blacks are the ones in charge. They rule society and they decide what happens. And it's about these two young people that just desperately want to be together but can't be together in this world that divides them.

“Sephy is brilliant. She is confident. She is naive. She is flawed. She is complicated. She's a normal young girl! At the start she is 13 and we can see her naively unable to understand why she can't be friends or play with this person and then during the play she journeys into more understanding and more awareness of the complications of the world. By the end she is 17 or 18. She is a young woman and she is more aware but the lovely thing is that she never loses her heart. She always stays true to herself.”

Effie graduated in 2017 and quickly enjoyed a couple of great highlights in her young career. Her first West End work was part of the ensemble in Measure For Measure at the Donmar: “And then just before the pandemic in March 2020 I was in rehearsals for a show at the National. We were rehearsing and then everything shut down but they promised us that they would be back as soon as they could and eventually we did in 2021 going into 2022. It was incredible. It was my first time at the National, my first time doing such a big-scale thing but everybody was just so friendly and warm and welcoming and everybody was just so full of understanding and patience and tips and it was just fantastic. And now it's wonderful to be doing this.”