Award-winning playwright and journalist Kwame Kwei-Armah tells Words of Colour why writing is his therapy and reveals his excitement and fear at getting his first directing gig in the USA.

February 2007

Exclusive: Kwame Kwei-Armah

Kwame Kwei-Armah is regularly called a Renaissance Man, with good reason. As an actor he is remembered fondly for playing Finlay Newton in Casualty. As a singer ‘he woz robbed’ on Celebrity Fame Academy. But praise has been heaped upon him for his playwriting skills, particularly Elmina’s Kitchen, which earned Kwame a London Evening Standard Charles Wintour award for ‘Most Promising Playwright’ in November 2003.

About to jet off to the USA to direct his first stage play, Kwame took time out of his very busy schedule to talk to Joy Francis.

You are about to direct your first stage play in the States. What is it called?

It is a play called Things of Dry Hours by Naomi Wallace. It is set in the 1930s and is about a black member of the Communist party in Alabama. I am directing it in Baltimore in the States. I’m going out there around my birthday in March.

Are you excited and daunted?

I am really excited about it and frightened, of course. I had a reading of it the other day at my house. I love the play. It’s small. It’s a three hander and it is quite avant garde.

I would imagine that people will be surprised that you haven’t directed a stage play before and would be thinking – didn’t you direct Elmina’s Kitchen and Fix Up?

People often think that, but I have always been a bit reticent about directing my own plays. Purely because I think there is something that others can bring to your play that you often just don’t see.

You have been quoted as saying that you wrote Elmina’s Kitchen as therapy. Does this apply to all of your writing or just to that one play?

I think that all of my plays are some kind of therapy. I am writing a play now about reparations and it is therapy for me. I write ostensibly on four different levels. I write as a political person to discuss a certain theme or there is a debate to be had or to be a catalyst for that debate. I also write ultimately for myself, because of the issues that move me, or on something that I feel strongly about.

You are regularly described as a ‘Renaissance Man’. Are you happy with that label?

One’s vanity is always touched by a statement like that. Please understand – I don’t wake up in the morning and look in the mirror and say ‘hey, you are a Renaissance Man’. On a political level I’m always appreciative of it because it isn’t a term that we often link with people who are Black British in the media. That, to me, is the real achievement: that we can be seen in that capacity by the mainstream media as Black British people of African descent.

When did you first consciously put pen to paper knowing that writing was what you wanted to do?

Post college I did poetry, which didn’t quite work for me. As a playwright I first consciously put pen to paper in 1997. But the idea had been in my head for a good few years before. A friend of mine she said to me, ‘why are you not writing? You are always waiting for other people to send you scripts with ideas that represent your own and that’s just silly’. Then I started reading Malcolm [X] and Marcus [Garvey] and linking the whole thing of self determination, of having your own voice. I was contradicting my own politics by not attempting to do something myself.

When you were Writer-in-Residence at the Bristol Old Vic you were also acting in Casualty. Did you ever doubt that you would have a fully fledged career as a writer?

I didn’t necessarily write to have a career. I wrote because I needed to. It wasn’t until 1999 when I was a co-winner of the Peggy Ramsay Award that I thought about it. I won the award for my first play A Bitter Herb. I realised that I was a winner and thought, okay then, I’m a writer. But it wasn’t until the success of Elmina’s Kitchen that I really perceived writing as a career that could financially pay me as much money as I was being paid as an actor. I have to say that it is a most blessed situation where you can live and raise your family on doing something that you love and sometimes contributes to a national debate.

You’ve cited August Wilson and David Mamet as influences on your writing. Which female writers inspire you?

Toni Morrison is exciting and rocks my world and the world of literature. She is someone I am taken by and caught in the rapture of.

What novels have you read recently or are itching to read?

There are books that I read over and over again like Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. I’ve read three novels in the past two weeks: Doris Lessing’s The Cleft, 26a by Diana Evans and the new Thomas Pynchon book. I’m itching to read Killer Tune by a Black British female novelist called Dreda Say Mitchell.

What tips would you like to share with new writers and those who are keeping their creative gems hidden?

I would say write that which you feel if you did not write you would not be happy with yourself. Write because it is something you need to say, or is a story that if it doesn’t get out of your system you will go to your grave saying ‘I wish I did that’. The other big thing is expect 99 percent of the people you send your script or writing to, to reject it. Have the strength and courage of mind to take rejection, yet still believe in your idea. Take from the criticism that which you can, but if it is something you really believe in, no matter how many times it gets knocked back, you have to just believe this is the right thing for you.

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