First published in 1981, Phillips's stage play Strange Fruit is set in one of England's inner-city areas during the 1970s and focuses upon the confusion resulting from pressures of post-war cultural assimilation and racial isolation experienced by the protagonist, Errol Marshall, the son of West Indian migrants. Originally staged at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield in October 1980, Phillips's play marks an important development in the tradition of West Indian and black British plays staged in London, initiated by the 1952 production of Derek Walcott's verse play Henri Christophe and Errol John's play Moon on a Rainbow Shawl. However, while Phillips expands upon the pressing themes of racism, post-war migration and post-colonial identity explored within these earlier texts, Strange Fruit presents an intertextual engagement with contemporary ideology and discourse on both sides of the Atlantic. Thus, as his title suggests, Phillips's text engages with both Billie Holiday's song of the same title and the infamous photograph of a black lynching in the American South:

Born the grandchild of a black Virginian slave and a white Irish plantation-owner, Billie Holiday, née Eleanora Fagan Gough (1915-59), sang ‘Strange Fruit’ (written by Abel Meeropol/Lewis Allen) as both a protest song against the intransigent problem of lynching in the American South, where over 3,000 blacks had been lynched between 1882 and 1968, and a song of political consciousness in a racially segregated world. Produced in 1939, Holiday's song reflected the increasing escalation of white racism and the continuing impoverished economic and political status of American blacks, despite the efforts of civil-rights organizations in America, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League (NUL).