When Words of Colour online was launched a year ago, award winning playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah was our first interviewee on the cusp of making his directorial debut in the USA. Since then he has directed one of his plays in London, seen another debut in Chicago and has written a musical tribute to Bob Marley. Does this man ever sleep? asks Joy Francis

February 2008

Kwame Kwei-Armah

A year ago you were about to direct your first play – ‘Things of Dry Hours’ by Naomi Wallace – in Baltimore. How was that experience?

That feels like an experience I had only the other day. It was wonderful. I had a wonderful team around me at Centre Stage and it was chosen as one of the top productions in the last year by the Baltimore city papers. I was very pleased. It was my first time directing and with someone else’s text. The awkward thing was taking off my playwright’s hat and putting on my director’s hat. They are two very different things. Often a director would say to me, cut that line, and I would say, hell no. Yet here I was, saying to my writer I think you need to rewrite the whole end of the play - and she did. Now she [Naomi Wallace] loves it.

You’ve had a busy and successful 12 months with ‘Statement of Regret’ at the National and ‘Let there be love’ at the Tricycle, which you also directed. How did you find coming back to the UK after Baltimore to pursue both the writing and directing?

In between those plays, ‘Elmina’s Kitchen’ premiered in Chicago. I also went on to Broadway and directed one of the 24 hour plays in October. I’ve opened six productions in a row really and I’m exhausted. But what is interesting is that I came back from Chicago having worked with one of the hottest new directors in New York - Derrick Saunders with his ensemble company Congo Square. I came away with a real fire in my belly. Derrick is an actor, writer, and an intellectual. He made me think that I have to create something in the UK that we can stand on. So when I came back, I knew I didn’t want to direct ‘Statement of Regret’, but I had written ‘Let there be love’ while I was in Chicago and I thought this is the story I want step out with as a director in the UK.

How do black and Asian British playwrights go about capturing the US theatrical market’s attention to get their plays produced there?

There is the straight route, which is getting yourself an American agent who will send your work out to various theatres. I didn’t go that route. Centre Stage in Baltimore had read ‘Elmina’s Kitchen’ and asked if they could produce it. Then various other theatres asked to produce it or ‘Fix Up’, which we are hoping for a US production this year. The plays are being taught on a lot of different playwriting courses in America. When plays are big in the UK everyone over the world reads about it. And if you have an agent then they come to you. I haven’t actively fought to have an American commission.

It shows that the stories of black communities are universal.

That is a very big point to me – that we are seen as local issues as opposed to international. Someone in Pakistan wants to adapt ‘Elmina’s Kitchen’. The play has been adapted into Swedish and some people in Israel want to do it. I believe in cultural specificity. If you are specific enough, therein lays the universality. The Diasporic African has a universal appeal. Wherever you go and see black people you know they have commonality on the whole - of music, of history and various different cultural traits. We are from London, Europe and Brazil so internationalism and universality comes naturally to us. We also have families in all of those countries.

With the resonance that your work is having in the US, why then have you said that you are not keen on moving to the US?

My stories come out of my British sensibilities, my Black British sensibility. I write because I have something to say. I don’t know if I have that much to say about the African American experience. That said, I am writing African American narratives at the moment, but I mainly write about what comes of my experience in the UK. In a way I’m being fed here in terms of being allowed to direct, be a playwright at the highest level at the National and to present Newsnight Review. I’m being fed in a way that not a lot of us are in this country due to a mono-cultural, almost tribal, domination by our predominant culture in this country. As a result not a lot of us are able to fulfil our potential and get the opportunities so we are looking to other markets. I’ll be in American next month as I go back and forth.

Last year there were so many plays written by black and Asian playwrights or featuring racially diverse characters from ‘Pure Gold’ at Soho Theatre to ‘Emperor Jones’ at the National. Cynics would say this was down to 2007 being the bicentennial anniversary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. Do you think that this creative output is sustainable?

I do believe it is sustainable because the talent base is here. I think the will from the artistic directors in Britain is to make sure that it has a diverse portfolio and they are still looking for plays outside of the mono-cultural lens. What we have to be aware of now is that race is secondary to faith. And faith is where a lot of the attention and sensibilities are going. We have to be careful, as playwrights and black narrative creators that we are not yesterday’s fad, now that we have had the bicentenary. We still have to fight to maintain that we are given as much access as possible.

Playwright Roy Williams has moved into writing scripts for television and the big screen. Will you be going down that path?

Yes, I’m in the middle of writing a couple of them now. I had a couple of movies that I wrote last year fall at the very last hurdle after nearly being financed. It was depressing. I’m writing for TV now. Although I perceive myself as a playwright, the screen narratives are very important.

What are your plans for the next 12 months?

‘Let there be love’ comes back to the Tricycle at the end of the summer and there are talks that it may jump into the West End. And fingers crossed that the Bob Marley musical I have written will move forward.

Where do you find the time for all this writing?

I need parallel years - one year to write and one year to rest.

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