Mark Norfolk is a British prolific author and independent filmmaker. He has made documentaries, short films and feature films and authored plays for stage and radio and well as publishing several books.
Early life and career
Born in London, Mark Norfolk studied Independent Film at the University of Wales, Cardiff and has worked as an actor, reporter and sports journalist.
Norfolk noticed while growing up that the voices of black characters in plays and TV shows were never really authentic, "That takes away a large part of what they are: they're just doing what the majority of society has given them to do. What that's done over the years is made black people lose any representation of themselves. So it's very important that people are now trying to use language as it is said." The continuing themes in his writing bring a sharp focus on contemporary British society and how the various groups and generations interlock or collide.
Mark Norfolk's theatre debut came in 1998 when as part of Black History Month his play, Fair As The Dark Get, was staged at the Albany Theatre, and closely followed by Buy Your Leave the next year.
He then wrote and directed Diary Of Somebody (2000), a short film which won an LFVDA Production Award (London Film & Video Development Agency) and followed that with a low budget, digital feature film Love Is Not Enough which premiered on 10 September 2001 to a sold out audience at the Curzon Soho Cinema, London as part of the BFM International Film Festival. Time Out film critic Tom Charity wrote "You could call it an avant garde deconstruction of independent film practice and process – or you could call it a piss-take. It's a shambles, but engagingly so. I laughed lots." ITV's popular film show, Movie Nights called it "a highlight of the festival". In 2002 Love is Not Enough opened at the same cinema.
Norfolk's play, Knock Down Ginger was produced at the Warehouse Theatre after being selected for its International Playwriting Festival in June 2002. The play was nominated for the Arts Council's Eclipse Award For Combating Racism Through Theatre and was shortlisted for the Verity Bargate playwriting award, later the same year it was staged in Urbino, Italy, opening the Premio Candoni Festival of New Writing and won a Croydon Guardian Culture Award. The play, directed by Jeffery Kissoon, starred Judith Jacob, Sylvester Williams and marked the stage debut for Troy Glasgow.
In 2002 he took part in the Soho Theatre Writers' Attachment Programme where he developed Wrong Place. The play went into production directed by artistic director, Abigail Morris and featuring Mark Theodore, Larrington Walker and Geoffrey Burton, at the Soho Theatre the following year. 2003 also saw the start of an ongoing film and theatre collaboration with actor and director, Jeffery Kissoon with whom he later worked, most notably on Naked Soldiers (2010) featuring Ewart James Walters, Adam Sopp and Elisabeth Dahl at the Warehouse Theatre; and the next year Where The Flowers Grow (2011), featuring Ashley Gerlach and Jodie Richardson.
In 2013 Norfolk was a co-writer of Blair's Children at the Cockpit Theatre with April De Angelis, Anders Lustgarten, Georgia Fitch and Paula B. Stanic. In 2016, Norfolk worked with Jeffery Kissoon on adapting William Shakespeare's Hamlet for the first ever all-black cast of the play in the UK which toured nationally for Black Theatre Live. The production was also noted for having an all-black creative team. In the same year Mark adapted Hamlet for an Albanian language contemporary version titled Princi I, that he also directed at the Dodona Theatre in Pristina, Kosovo.