GERALDINE Connor admits her Carnival Messiah will be a hard act to follow but she is confident Yaa Asantewaa - Warrior Queen fits the bill at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds.

"This show is quite different from Carnival Messiah in 1999 in terms of its context and conception but I have used the same style that's become my trademark: magic realism. So I use the same tools but with different results for a play that balances story and spectacle," she says.

"The style comes out of masquerade and carnival theatre; it doesn't separate dance, music and theatre: they have an equal space and importance in the show and they enhance each other."

Hence the participation in Geraldine's world premiere of the Adzido Pan African Dance Ensemble, the African and Caribbean Music Circuit, a cappella quintet Black Voices, the Pan African Orchestra of Ghana and the drummer Kofi Ghanaba.

Together, through a display of African music, dance and costume, they will celebrate the little-known life of African heroine Nana Yaa Asantewaa. A woman of exceptional bravery, at the age of 60 in March 1900 she raised and led an army of thousands against the British colonial forces in Ghana who were seeking to seize the Golden Stool, the Asante nation's spiritual symbol of unity and sovereignty. After defeat in 1901, she was exiled to the Seychelles where she spent two decades until her death in October 1921.

Yaa Asantewaa's war was the last major conflict in Africa to be led by a woman and Geraldine Connor's production, written by leading Ghanaian literary figure Margaret Busby, is the first ever show to pay homage to her.

"I first heard of her in the 1980s when there was this Caribbean centre that had her name but it was only in the late Eighties that I found out she was a real person," says Geraldine.

"When I went to Ghana last year, I learnt her full story. I've found that Africans know her story, Caribbean people less so; Europe and England not at all, and I think that's a glaring omission."

Geraldine is rising not only to the challenge of telling Yaa Asantewaa's marathon life on stage but also to assembling all her disparate all-African forces. "When you're doing original work you have a lot of licence. Some of it works; some of it doesn't but I'm happy with it; what you have to do is satisfy yourself creatively and I've done that with this production," she says.

She has decided to have three performers playing the role of Yaa Asantewaa. "Her character has so many facets. She is a woman, a mother, a warrior, a legend; she is the dance, the theatre, the music. So she's represented on stage philosophically, psychologically and artistically," says Geraldine.

Which one is which? "Ah, you must work that out!"

Yaa Asantewaa - Warrior Queen, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, tonight until May 19. Box office: 0113 213 7700.