Elmina’s Kitchen; Fix Up; Statement of Regret; Let There be Love; Seize the Day
Kwame Kwei-Armah was born in 1967 and grew up in Southall, west London, where he attended the Barbara Speake Stage School in Acton. His parents were from Grenada, but after tracing his ancestral line to Ghana he changed his name from Ian Roberts to Kwame Kwei-Armah in his early twenties as a deliberate refusal to carry the legacy of slavery around in his daily life and to ensure that his children and future generations of his family line would no longer carry the name of the slave master.1 Kwei-Armah’s public career began as an actor in the 1990s where he first became widely known for playing paramedic Finlay Newton in Casualty from 1999–2004 and as a contestant on Comic Relief Does Fame Academy in 2003. Appearances on BBC television discussion panels consolidated his role as a media pundit on black British arts and culture in the early twenty-first century, and he has also presented the documentary Christianity: A History (Channel 4, 2009) and the short series On Tour with the Queen (Channel 4, 2009).
Kwei-Armah wrote his first play A Bitter Herb (1999) while he was writer-in-residence at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre, but it was not produced until 2001, after productions of the soul musical Hold On (1999; originally titled Blues Brother Soul Sisters) at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre and Big Nose (1999; inspired by Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac) at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, in which he played the leading role. A Bitter Herb centres on a racist murder in London, evoking memories of the case of teenager Stephen Lawrence,2 and anticipates Kwei-Armah’s concern with urban violence in Elmina’s Kitchen. Kwei-Armah made his London playwriting debut when Jack Bradley (then literary manager for the National Theatre) invited him to write a play at the National Theatre Studio. Elmina’s Kitchen (National Theatre, 2003) became the first part of Kwei-Armah’s triptych of plays set in black establishments, which also included Fix Up (National Theatre, 2004) and Statement of Regret (National Theatre, 2007). He became the first British-born black playwright to have a non-musical play staged in the West End when Elmina’s Kitchen transferred to the Garrick Theatre in 2005. Towards the end of the decade, Kwei-Armah wrote and directed Let There be Love (2008) and Seize the Day (2009) for the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn, London.
Kwei-Armah has rapidly become established as one of Britain’s leading black playwrights. Elmina’s Kitchen was shortlisted for an Olivier Award for ‘Best New Play’, and won the Charles Wintour Evening Standard Most Promising Playwright Award in 2004; the television version was nominated for a BAFTA. His international reputation has been secured with productions of Elmina’s Kitchen, Fix Up and Let There be Love in the USA, and plans are afoot to translate Elmina’s Kitchen into Arabic for performance in Pakistan and Israel.3 Kwei-Armah completed an MA in Classical Narrative at the University of the Arts, London, in 2002, and he was awarded Honorary Doctorates from the Open University in 2008 and University of East London in 2009. He is committed to raising the profile of black British playwriting and was instrumental in initiating the development of a black play archive, which is housed at the National Theatre Studio. The Black British Theatre Archive is ‘a major venture, in partnership with Sustained Theatre, to archive and record extracts from every African, Caribbean and Black British play produced in the UK in the last 60 years’.4
Elmina’s Kitchen was first performed on the National Theatre’s Cottesloe stage on 29 May 2003 (directed by Angus Jackson) and remains Kwei-Armah’s most successful play. The original cast and director made a screenplay adaptation, which was aired on BBC4 in 2003, and the 2005 national tour (with Kwei-Armah taking over the leading role) visited the Hackney Empire, the Birmingham Rep and the West Yorkshire Playhouse before becoming the first non-musical play by a British-born black playwright to be mounted in the West End when it transferred to the Garrick Theatre. Three productions have been staged in the USA including Chicago and at the Center Stage Theatre in Baltimore, Maryland in 2005, which was directed by August Wilson’s director Marion McClinton.
Elmina’s Kitchen is a realist drama depicting inter-generational conflicts between fathers and sons as a basis from which to examine the urgent social issue of ‘black-on-black’ violence and gun crime and explore how black men negotiate their environment and overcome their circumstances. The play is set in Elmina’s Kitchen, ‘a one-notch-above-tacky West Indian food takeaway restaurant in “Murder Mile” Hackney’ (p. 3) named after central character Deli’s mother and Elmina’s Castle in Ghana, ‘the oldest slave fort on the West African coast, built in 1492 […] where enslaved Africans were kept until the European ship was ready to bring them to the new world’.5 Kwei-Armah highlights contemporary ‘black-on-black’ violence as one of the detrimental legacies of slavery that continues to disadvantage black people today, particularly black boys and men who are noted in the programme as being ‘excluded from school three times as often as their white counterparts for the same offences’, as suffering higher rates of unemployment and as being disproportionately represented in Britain’s prisons.6
Elmina’s Kitchen represents three generations of black fathers and sons – second-generation British-born central character Deli, who runs the café, his third-generation teenage son Ashley (who has recently become a father himself) and his Caribbean father Clifton who has returned to England for the funeral of his other son Dougie, who was killed on the day he was released from prison. Local Yardie gangster Digger also frequents the café and his presence keeps the local protection racketeers at bay. Digger’s version of black macho behaviour grounded in criminal activity and his unrelenting aggression and violence is contrasted with first-generation West Indian door-to-door salesman Baygee, an old-timer who appreciates the simple things in life, like sharing rum, humorous banter and calypso songs with Clifton, and is critical of ‘the new set of Yardies that eating up Hackney. They giving children BMWs, who could compete with that, eh?’ (p. 24). Their diversity is characterised through individual speech patterns, which reflect their multiple identifications within a (black) British context. Deli’s London accent is interspersed with occasional patois, especially when angry, Ashley speaks the contemporary street talk of London’s urban youth, and the West Indians Baygee and Clifton have Caribbean accents. ‘Digger is from Grenada but came to England aged fourteen. […] Digger’s accent swings from his native Grenadian to hard-core Jamaican to authentic black London’ (p. 4) and Anastasia ‘Although black British, she too swings into authentic, full-attitude Jamaican at the drop of a hat’ (p. 15).
Kwei-Armah’s plays are primarily concerned with black masculinity, thus women tend to figure in minor roles as wives, girlfriends or potential love interests. A huge picture of Deli’s deceased mother Elmina hangs on the wall of the café, but the only female character seen on stage is Anastasia, who arrives in the first scene and cheekily asks Deli for a job, helping him to transform the dingy and dated takeaway into ‘Elmina’s Plantain Hut’, a thriving business in a newly renovated space at the start of the second act. Her potential for making a positive impact on the predominantly male environment is shortlived, however, as both Deli and his father pursue her as a love interest and she is forced to leave the café, marking the beginnings of the play’s descent towards a tragic dénouement.
The plot revolves around the inter-generational conflicts arising from Deli’s futile efforts to prevent his teenage son Ashley from being drawn towards a life of crime. Deli is a reformed criminal who tries to ensure that his son chooses the right path, but Ashley condemns his father’s hard work and honest living ethic as weak, and seeks the materialist symbols of high status – the latest designer fashions and a top-of-the-range sports car – and respect on the streets, which he thinks he can gain more rapidly by dropping out of college, becoming a runner for Digger and working his way up the criminal chain, rather than through legal means. Kwei-Armah wrote the play as a warning for his then ten-year-old son about the dangers of aspiring towards the glamorised gun violence represented in gangsta rap culture, to enforce the point that there is no need to conform to peer pressure of ‘badness’. Such warnings prevail in the images of black men prematurely losing their lives that recur throughout the play. Anastasia has lost her teenage son, and Deli’s brother Dougie is killed as they await his arrival on release from prison. A final stark reminder of the inherent risks of a gangster lifestyle is delivered in the last scene as Ashley is gunned down and murdered by Digger. After discovering that Ashley was responsible for an arson attack on rival shopkeeper Roy’s shop, Deli reports the crime to the police, making a deal to save his son from prison by testifying against Digger. Becoming an informer is seen as the ultimate betrayal of brotherhood and in a final act of retribution Digger instructs Ashley to shoot his father. But while the teenager stands with his gun poised Digger shoots him in the back first, leaving the closing image of a father kneeling over his son’s lifeless body as a brutal reminder of the dangers of a gangster’s lifestyle.
Digger Alright, now point the gun at your punk-arsed dad. The one that gets beat up and does nothing, has his business near taken away and does nothing, but then informs on a brother man to the other man for what? […] Is this the type of people we need in our midst? Weak-hearted, unfocused informers? No, I don’t think so. Do you, Ashley?
Ashley’s hands are shaking a little. After a beat. […]
Ashley No.
Digger OK then, raise the gun, point it.
Digger Good. Is your finger on the trigger?
Ashley Yes.
Digger Good.
Digger pulls out his gun and shoots Ashley dead.
Deli Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.
Digger looks to Deli.
Digger Yes. Ah so dis war run! (pp. 94–5)
Elmina’s Kitchen was commended as one of a new wave of plays by black British writers that probed beneath news headlines to provoke consciousnesses about the state of the nation and was especially praised for portraying serious issues with warmth, sensitivity and humour, ‘bringing a human face to London’s gang violence and showing how easy it is to make the wrong choice when struggling to survive’.7
Fix Up was first produced at the National Theatre’s Cottesloe on 16 December 2004 (directed by Angus Jackson) and has also been produced in Italy and New York.8 Kwei-Armah continues his concern with history and the politics of progress for black people in contemporary Britain and the impact of the past on the present. The play brings together a range of characters who debate contrasting opinions on race, culture and heritage and the fundamental question about the need to understand history and heal the past in order to secure a better future. It is ‘Black History Month […] in “Fix Up” a small, old-school “Black conscious” bookstore’ (p. 3) in Tottenham, north London, where the shelves are crammed with books and African statues and carvings that reflect the Afrocentric politics of owner Brother Kiyi, but the shop is empty and the CLOSING DOWN SALE sign hints at its future. Although Kiyi struggles to make the money, he remains committed to the political project of the bookshop as a resource for remembering black history, to the extent that he has forged volumes of books that he passes off as authentic slave narratives. Kiyi is a father figure to the community, loaning out books to ensure that they are read, using slave narratives to teach ‘care-in-the-community patient’ Carl (p. 4) how to read, and letting political militant Kwesi use the upstairs room free of charge to hold meetings of his activist All-Black African Party, which is organising reparations for slavery events. Kiyi’s best friend Norma regularly pops in for a chat, to continue an ongoing game of draughts and advises him on how best to secure the future of the bookshop.
The naturalistic trajectory of Fix Up is propelled by the arrival of a stranger whose presence impacts on all of the characters and disrupts the seeming harmony of the community. Mixed-race character Alice arrives in the first scene under the pretext of buying books to broaden her knowledge of black history and discover the ‘black’ part of her cultural heritage that she had not experienced growing up with her white adoptive family in Shropshire, but she also has a more pragmatic purpose to reveal Brother Kiyi as the black father who left her to be brought up in care. Alice’s presence is used to raise questions about race, heritage and identity, acknowledging that people of dual heritage may well be one of the fastest-growing communities in Britain and considering some of the implications this might have for contemporary race politics.9 Kiyi’s black consciousness politics are heavily informed by the speeches, lectures and manifestos of prominent black nationalist thinkers and political activists such as James Baldwin, Marcus Garvey and Claude McKay, whose tapes he listens to in the shop, but Alice draws attention to the inherent sexism and Afrocentrism of the black nationalist movement, and highlights Kiyi’s attitudes towards mixed-race people as outmoded for the context of contemporary Britain, ‘flawed by nostalgia, arrogance and a limited view of what “black” is in a Babylon where mixed race or (the PC term) “dual heritage” is the norm’.10
Fix Up stages debates about the routes of progress for contemporary black British people, centring primarily on the value of sticking to archaic political principles versus progressing through popular consumerism and questions about the merits of individual versus community gain. The lack of customers suggests there is no longer any desire for knowledge of black history in contemporary Britain, and the bookshop is under threat of being sold to developers and converted into a potentially more lucrative venture of luxury flats over a black hair care shop. The revelation that political activist Kwesi is behind the conversion plans is used to raise questions about how the quest for black liberation needs to adapt to the changing demands of a contemporary world. Kiyi exclaims, ‘You can’t replace history with hair gel’ (p. 23), but Kwesi’s rationalisation of his lucrative business venture opposes Kiyi’s ‘knowledge is power’ ideals with a viable approach to empowerment through fiscal means.
People don’t – want – books. They wanna party, and look good, have the latest hairstyles, and nails and tattoos. That’s where niggers be at, Kiyi. They ain’t spending they money in here. Why should the other man take our money, Kiyi? That’s why we powerless, ’cos we ain’t where the money at. (p. 71)
Hair is a prominent motif in the play, underlining the commercial potential for converting the bookshop to a hair product store. Kiyi’s full head of ‘greying, unkempt locks’ (p. 2) is a signifier of his Afrocentric political allegiance and sitting centre stage cutting off his locks as the bookstore is being dismantled around him at the end of the play symbolises a break with the past and the end of an era for his black radical politics. Norma wears a different wig in each of her appearances and her first concern on deciding to get involved in local politics is about where she can buy a new wig to wear at her inaugural election campaign meeting. Kiyi’s comment that ‘in the first months of trading no doubt more black folk will have passed through here than I’d have seen in my whole fifteen years’ (p. 63) is an indictment of the possibility that ‘black people today would rather have their roots done by a hairdresser than examined by a historian’, as one astute reviewer put it.11
Reviews suggested that the dramatic potential of the play was undermined by the weight of the themes, causing contrived, melodramatic plotting and characterisation with unbelievable twists, particularly in the second half, as the loose ends are tied up. However, some of the more positive reviews indicated that Fix Up demonstrates Kwei-Armah’s innovative contribution to contemporary British playwriting. For example, Helena Thompson writes: ‘To his credit, Armah’s understanding of traditional structure underpins a script that broaches issues rarely seen at the National. It is a combination that makes his message all the harder to ignore.’12
Statement of Regret was first produced at the National Theatre’s Cottesloe on 14 November 2007 (directed by Jeremy Herrin) and an updated version was broadcast as ‘The Saturday Play’ for BBC Radio 4 on 18 July 2009. It explicitly tackles the issues of post-traumatic slave syndrome that are alluded to in Kwei-Armah’s previous two plays, examining the legacy of slavery in the lives of black people in contemporary Britain and the vexed question of whether an apology should be made for the continued discrimination created by this troubled aspect of British history. A play directly addressing the effects of post-traumatic slave syndrome is undoubtedly the natural culmination of a triptych whose plays are concerned in some way with the legacy of slavery on black psyches.
Statement of Regret is set in a black policy think tank in 2007, the year in which Britain celebrated the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade, and was inspired by Tony Blair’s ‘statement of regret’ that no apology would be made for slavery. The timing of the first production allowed for a more explicit examination of topical issues around debates about reparations for slavery, and a crucial exploration of how slavery may have created divisions between black people – most notably in creating animosity between those of West Indian heritage who were transported and enslaved and those of African descent. The characters debate the complexities of the reparation debate and question the impact of slavery on black race relations.
Kwaku Mackenzie is the West Indian Director of the Institute of Black Policy Research (IBPR), where he heads a team of intelligent and well-spoken workers who are mostly of African descent. The play opens with the think tank members gathering in their plush modern office to celebrate the recent government appointment of the first ever Minister for Race, which is immediately followed by a meeting to brainstorm ideas for their next agenda. The office colleagues represent a cross-section of black British society, including Africans and West Indians as well as one female and one gay employee, and ideas of a homogeneously united black community are countered by internal factions based on class, gender, sexuality, heritage, political leanings and personal ambitions. A key question is whether black institutions should be setting their agendas in relation to wider government initiatives, and whether they should maintain a separatist race agenda or be pursuing integration. The think tank was initially founded to address white racism, but outspoken Idrissa, Director of Research, highlights the need to respond to changing racial agendas by turning the debate inwards to self-criticism.
Kwaku believes that black political thinking can be rejuvenated by returning to the issue of the impact of slavery, which continues to manifest itself in a range of social ills. His workers criticise his ideas as old notions that blamed white racism for the disadvantaged experiences of black people in Britain, and suggest that there are more pressing intra-cultural issues, such as sexism, homophobia and domestic violence in black communities. A reparations agenda goes against the integrationist initiatives that were heavily pursued in British culture in the 2000s, emphasising divisions not only between blacks and whites, but also between African and Caribbean blacks. Kwaku compounds the conflicts with the controversial suggestion that any reparation for slavery should be given only to West Indians, who have borne the brunt of the atrocities of slavery and continue to be disadvantaged today. The second half of the play descends into the acrimonious trading of insults between Kwaku and his colleagues that features West Indian name-calling of Africans as savage ‘jungle bunnies’, ‘African booboo, take the bone out of your nose’ (p. 72) as defensive insults from feelings of being let down by African complicity in slavery, and African taunts of West Indians as lazy or ‘cultureless’ (p. 76) as a reflection of a sense of superiority towards those who are disenfranchised by a history of enslavement.
These political debates are refracted through personal family issues, particularly the legacy of passing on a heritage from father to son. Kwaku’s alcoholism and grief for the recent death of his father affect his judgement and his relationship with his two sons – Junior, the legitimate son of his marriage to an African, and Adrian, the illegitimate son from his affair with a West Indian – which also emphasises the intra-cultural factions between Africans and Caribbeans in Britain. Adrian overcame growing up with a struggling single mother by doing well in school and gaining advanced university degrees, whereas Junior lived with his parents in a big house and received a private education, but is viewed as somewhat of a failure in his father’s eyes because he did not go to university and identifies with black street culture. Kwaku’s decision to employ Adrian as an office intern sets off a trail of repercussions in already fragile office politics, which culminate in the breakdown of relationships with his wife, legitimate son, and employees.
Kwei-Armah touches upon a range of pertinent political issues in Statement of Regret, such as separatism versus integration, divisions and hierarchies in British black communities, book knowledge versus work experience and life knowledge, and contemporary race and identity politics and potential directions for the future, thus cementing his reputation for provocatively staging debates about controversial subjects. The production received the most damning reviews of his plays so far, drawing criticism for cramming too many ideas into one piece and for unconvincing and underdeveloped personal stories – Kwaku’s affair with his female co-worker, marital breakdown, and the eventual suggestion that his erratic, paranoid, aggressive, and forgetful behaviour is a sign of the onset of dementia. However, Michael Billington ‘applaud[ed] the play for its honesty in tackling abrasive issues’, Charles Spencer commended Kwei-Armah for ‘being unafraid to wade in where more cautious writers might fear to tread’ and Kate Bassett paid a big compliment by claiming that ‘Kwei-Armah is now our black British David Hare. Statement of Regret is an illuminating state-of-the-nation play.’13
Let There be Love was first performed at the Tricycle Theatre on 17 January 2008 (directed by Kwei-Armah), revived for a second production in August 2008, and also mounted at Center Stage Theatre, Baltimore, Maryland, in 2010. After the scathing reviews of Statement of Regret, the play was ‘a type of healing’ that got Kwei-Armah back to writing quite quickly, and was also a tribute to his mother, upon whom the main female character is based.14 The play is set in the front room of elderly first-generation Caribbean migrant Alfred’s home in north-west London, which is decorated in a conventional West Indian 1980s style with flowery wallpaper, a world globe trolley that opens up into a drink bar and a radiogram that he calls Lillie holding pride of place in the corner. At the start of the play, Alfred is a ‘quintessential grumpy old man, a cross almost between Alf Garnett and Victor Meldrew’ (p. 260), a cantankerous xenophobe whose bigoted ideas about new immigrants as ‘thieving the Englishman job’ (p. 269) echo prejudiced attitudes that were once used against his generation of post-war Caribbean immigrants, a marked reminder of ‘how quickly we forget: how the impulse to feel threatened by the next group to arrive in society overrode memories of the discrimination and pain we had ourselves suffered’.15 Alfred has frosty relations with his two daughters; the elder, Janet (not seen in the play), has thrown him out of her house for being derogatory about her white husband and mixed-race child, and he fell out with his younger daughter Gemma when she left her male partner and became a lesbian, and she has not visited him for the past three years. The arrival of Polish cleaner Maria, whom Gemma employs to help Alfred while he recovers from an operation, is the catalyst towards healing the rift with his daughter and improving his fraught family relations.
Kwei-Armah uses the relationship between Alfred and Maria to explore issues of citizenship and the passing of the baton between older and newer migrants. Maria is in her late twenties and represents the next major generation of immigrants arriving in late-twentieth-and early-twenty-first-century England with similar hopes, dreams and aspirations as their predecessors, especially a belief in the idea that they would only stay long enough to make money and return home wealthy. Her aspirations are refracted through the reality of Alfred’s generation’s experiences – he is sixty-six years old and has lived in England for over forty-five years, and although he does not like to be called English, has a reverence for speaking the Queen’s English, corrects Maria’s ‘broken English’, and helps her to prepare for her citizenship test by teaching her about what it means to be ‘British’.
Maria and Alfred immediately connect over missing ‘home’ and as his health and her living circumstances deteriorate, she moves in to live with him and the pair develop a warm and understanding platonic friendship that contrasts with the inter-generational conflict with his daughters. Like Kwei-Armah’s earlier plays, it is memories and failure to heal past conflicts that is continuing to affect Alfred today, and with Maria’s encouragement he faces up to the past by visiting Grenada to see his ex-wife and returns to England with a new lease of life as he looks to the future. Maria’s effect leads to his redemptive transformation from a prejudiced old codger who resents the new immigrants to a forgiving man who eventually recognises her as the next generation to walk the path created by her predecessors, and acknowledges the inherent progress of the newer immigrants benefiting from the inroads of a pioneer generation that came before.
Let There be Love is a warm and poignant realistic comedy-drama that infers love and understanding as a fundamental basis for building and maintaining relationships. The quintessentially feelgood quality is underlined by playing Nat King Cole’s versions of ‘Let There be Love’, and ‘Let’s Face the Music and Dance’ at various points, culminating in Maria and Alfred sharing a final dance before he relaxes back into his chair and dies smiling peacefully as the lights and the music fade. Kwei-Armah wrote the play to examine the impact of new immigration in Britain, to show ‘how much warmer, how much easier the country had become for immigrants, mostly due to the battles my parents’ generation – the Windrush pioneer generation – had fought and won’.16 A number of pertinent themes are touched upon, including inter-generational conflict, racism, immigration, citizenship, sexual politics, domestic violence, terminal illness and assisted suicide, but this is a smaller and more intimate play with only three characters and makes a departure from the usual debate and didacticism of his writing style. Reviewers were generally surprised by the domestic focus of the piece when compared to Kwei-Armah’s trilogy and some criticised the play for being contrived and excessively sentimental while others enjoyed the warm affection at the heart of the play.
Seize the Day was first performed at the Tricycle Theatre on 22 October 2009 (directed by Kwei-Armah) in repertory with Roy Williams’s Category B (2009) and Bola Agbaje’s Detaining Justice (2009) as part of the venue’s ‘Not Black and White Season’, a trilogy of plays exploring black Britain at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Each playwright chose a topical theme, with Kwei-Armah drawing inspiration from the election of President Barack Obama as the first African American President of the USA to imagine what it would take for London to elect a black Mayor, which would amount to a symbol of progress of improved race relations in Britain. A realistic mode situates the play in relation to contemporary British society, referring to key black British political figures, past and present, including Bernie Grant, Diane Abbott, Paul Boateng and Trevor Phillips.
Seize the Day is the first of Kwei-Armah’s plays to incorporate multiple settings, moving between a range of private, public and professional locations (living rooms, parks and offices) to bring together a focus on the domestic and the professional by contrasting the rising political career of reality television star presenter and mayoral candidate, Jeremy Charles, with his turbulent personal life. Jeremy is in his mid-thirties and lives in a nice home with his white wife, but he is not happy in his marriage and is having a longstanding affair with a black woman. It is implied that he married a white woman as a symbol of status, but he feels that she does not support him in his career, and she experiences hostility from his black friends. A chance confrontation with urban teenager Lavelle is the catalyst for rethinking his stereotyped views of young black working-class masculinity. After witnessing what looks like a mugging while recording a live outside broadcast and slapping seeming perpetrator Lavelle to the ground, Jeremy undertakes to mentor the teenager, but he has much to learn from Lavelle about young black men’s lives. Jeremy was born on a council estate and has risen to become a celebrity and recognised face in the community, but his choices are brought into question by Lavelle, who accuses him of losing touch with his ‘ghetto roots’ and not being true to his race. Their relationship provides a basis to address many of the racial issues that have resurfaced throughout Kwei-Armah’s plays, including questions about the black community’s responsibility for raising children better and solving urban youth problems.
Jeremy’s celebrity status and profile increases following the broadcast of him hitting Lavelle, making this an opportune moment to stand to become London’s first black Mayor, and the play maps issues of strategy, spin, public face and conspiracy that are at the heart of election campaigns. Alongside Jeremy are a range of other black middle-class characters who groom him for his role, helping him to develop the terms of a campaign that would attract both black and white voters. Jeremy does not want to emphasise racial issues and his political adviser Howard wants to market his crossover appeal, but there is increased pressure for him to address black issues, the argument being that if he as a black man does not tackle these issues then no one else will. Given that there are so few black people in highly influential positions in Britain, those who make it are often perceived to have a responsibility to highlight black issues.
Jeremy’s values are contrasted with Lavelle’s to raise concerns about the failure of black boys who identify with ‘street’ culture at the expense of pursuing a proper career. Jeremy criticises Lavelle’s identification with black street style where his public image belies his capability. Lavelle gained eleven A-star grades for his GCSE exams, but rejected the opportunity to go to college, and talks ‘street’ slang interspersed with occasional big words. Lavelle learns about life choices and Jeremy rethinks his stereotypical perceptions about the black underclass. A meeting between the two men in the final scene demonstrates that they have started to understand and accept each other’s life choices. Throughout the play, the contrast between Jeremy’s white wife Alice and black lover Susan is simplistically drawn in terms of their sexual appeal, stereotypically of the black woman as a highly charged sexual being in contrast with an uptight white woman, though both female characters are heavily under-written. The suggestion that he married a white woman as a symbol of his upward social mobility is ironically reinforced in the final scene as Jeremy’s increased racial awareness coincides with him separating from his wife, rejecting his mayoral campaign, and making plans for a future with Susan.
Seize the Day combines the prominent debates of Kwei-Armah’s earlier work, incorporating domestic and institutional worlds and considering the impact of one on the other. Discussions throughout echo those heard in Fix Up and Statement of Regret, and, in a similar way to Let There be Love, the resolution in the final scene leaves a sense of hope for better understanding between diverse communities in Britain.
Gradually, Kwei-Armah’s work has attracted attention from academics such as Deirdre Osborne, Geoffrey Davis, Amelia Howe Kritzer and David Lane.17 He is an openly political playwright who writes as a ‘catalyst for debate around themes that are pertinent to our communities and to our nation’ and his ‘diasporic black politics [are] influenced by the philosophies of Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X and the writings of James Baldwin and Amiri Baraka’.18 While his playwriting influences include Edgar White and David Hare, he was particularly inspired to document black British experiences after seeing a production of August Wilson’s King Hedley II (1999) in New York. His plays share Wilson’s style of using naturalist plot conventions to examine history and explore how the past impacts on the present, especially looking at how legacies of slavery affect contemporary black men’s psyches.19 A key motif of Kwei-Armah’s plays is the way that secrets, lies and the revelation of past indiscretions threaten to undermine the stability of characters who are dealing with unfinished business from the past.
Kwei-Armah updates identity-politics plays to account for the perspectives of two generations (second and third) that were both born in the UK and address other topical issues arising from the lives of black people in Britain today. A prominent trope throughout Kwei-Armah’s oeuvre is a concern with black masculinity, depicting fathers and their children to symbolise a sense of legacy and heritage that metaphorically alludes to slavery, while highlighting the literal responsibilities that come with fatherhood and their role in teaching the successive generations how to follow in their footsteps. Kwei-Armah counters stereotypical ideas of absent and irresponsible black fathering by making fathers present and fundamental to creating the futures of their children.
Kwei-Armah also homes in on the intra-cultural tensions within black British communities, provocatively staging debates that draw inspiration from current affairs and issues, including ‘black-on-black’ violence, Blair’s ‘statement of regret’, the election of President Obama, and Boris Johnson replacing Ken Livingstone as London Mayor, as well as themes of immigration and citizenship. He uses a conventional linear narrative structure where a stranger’s arrival is the catalyst for the ensuing drama, and the plays are built using humour in the first half and pathos in the second as the conflict builds towards dénouements that see the characters’ arguing and fighting reflected in messy stages and destroyed habitats. Careful and precise stage directions set up symbolism through location, décor and language use that capture the subtle inflections of various black accents to evoke diverse identities and identifications in the UK.
The institutional settings for Kwei-Armah’s National Theatre triptych become forums for public debates on the topical issues at the heart of each play as the realistic sets are peopled with characters that could be drawn from everyday life in these habitats. Despite the realism of the settings, there is very little stage action as the focus is placed on dialogue. The centrality of debate is a particular quality of Kwei-Armah’s writing that sees diverse characters arguing around the core issue, often disagreeing with each other about pertinent issues of race and progress, thus challenging homogeneous notions of black people by allowing a range of complex and contradictory ideas to surface.
One of the most significant inroads of Kwei-Armah’s playwriting is the representation of a rarely seen black ‘transitional class’, departing from the trend for plays about ‘urban’ black teenagers that proliferated on the British mainstream stage during the early twenty-first century.20 In the post-show talk for Seize the Day, Kwei-Armah stressed that he was not dealing with the black underclass, while also identifying his playwriting as metaphorically alluding to the arts and the place of black theatre in Britain.21 His characters debate issues of cultural diversity that echo concerns for British arts institutions, questions about the relationship between black theatre and mainstream institutions, whether black theatre practitioners should maintain a separatist agenda or seek integration, and about what types of plays earn black playwrights a mainstream profile. He writes from the heart, about issues that matter to him, aiming to challenge stereotypical perceptions of black men, rather than seeking to appease the expectations of the producing houses. Kwei-Armah’s determination to challenge legacies of slavery stems from his childhood vow to change his name after watching the televised version of Alex Haley’s Roots (1997) at just twelve years old, which has continued throughout a playwriting career that is dedicated to writing political dramas that raise awareness about important issues of race, culture and heritage for black people in contemporary Britain. His success illustrates how he is fulfilling the challenge to write plays that are accessible to both black and white audiences, functioning in line with black aesthetics to reveal black humanity through art while creating awareness that could lead to social change.
Plays by Kwame Kwei-Armah: A Bitter Herb, Big Nose, Hold On (previously Blues Brother, Soul Sister) (London: House of Theresa, 2001).
Plays One: Elmina’s Kitchen, Fix Up, Statement of Regret, Let There be Love (London: Methuen Drama, 2009).
Not Black and White: Roy Williams Category B, Kwame Kwei-Armah Seize the Day, Bola Agbaje Detaining Justice (London: Methuen Drama, 2009).
Anon., ‘96: Kwame Kwei-Armah’, MediaGuardian 100 2010, guardian.co.uk website, 12 July 2010 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/jul/12/kwame-kwei-armahmediaguardian-100-2010>
Davis, Geoffrey, ‘This is a Cultural Renaissance: An Interview with Kwame Kwei-Armah’, in Geoffrey V. Davis and Anne Fuchs (eds), Staging New Britain: Aspects of South Asian British Theatre Practice (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2006), pp. 239–51.
Elam, Harry J., Jr, The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson (Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 2004).
Howe Kritzer, Amelia, Political Theatre in Post-Thatcher Britain: New Writing 1995–2005 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
Kaneko Lucas, Valerie, ‘Performing British Hybridity:Fix Up and Fragile Land’, in Joel Kyortti and Jopi Nyman (eds), Reconstructing Hybridity: Post-Colonial Studies in Transition (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 241–55.
Kasule, Samuel, ‘Aspects of Madness and Theatricality in Kwame Kwei-Armah’s Drama’, in Dimple Godiwala (ed.), Alternatives within the Mainstream: British Black and Asian Theatres (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2006), pp. 314–27.
Kwei-Armah, Kwame, ‘From Ian to Kwame: Why Slavery Made Me Change My Name’, Observer, 25 March 2007 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/mar/25/humanrights.britishidentity>
—, ‘Introduction’, Plays One (London: Methuen Drama, 2009), pp. ix–xiv.
—, Personal Interview, London, 12 July 2010.
—, et al. ‘Our Job is to Write About What is in Our Hearts’, Guardian, 6 October 2003 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2003/oct/06/theatre.race>
Lane, David, Contemporary British Drama (Edinburgh: EUP, 2010).
Logan, Brian, ‘“Heart of Blackness”: The Playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah Would Like to be the David Hare of Black British Theatre’, The Times, 29 October 2007 <http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/theatre/article2748898.ece>
National Theatre, Black British Theatre Archive at the NT, <http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/51932/platforms/black-british-theatre-archive-at-the-nt.html> —, Elmina’s Kitchen Programme, May 2003.
Osborne, Deirdre, ‘The State of the Nation: Contemporary Black British Theatre and the Staging of the UK’, in Dimple Godiwala (ed.), Alternatives within the Mainstream: British Black and Asian Theatres (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2006), pp. 82–100.
—, ‘“Know Whence You Came”: Dramatic Art and Black British Identity’, New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 3 (2007), pp. 253–63.
Sierz, Aleks, ‘Cooking Up a Storm’, Evening Standard, 25 April 2005 <http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Cooking+up+a+storm%3B+Black+British+writing+ is+thriving+in+the… -a0131910972>
1. Kwame Kwei-Armah, ‘From Ian to Kwame’, p. 18.
2. Stephen Lawrence was murdered in south-east London in April 1993 and the case became notorious for the police mishandling of the investigation, which failed to secure a conviction of the killers. However, the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry and its subsequent Macpherson Report had a major impact on race relations debates and legislation in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
3. Kwame Kwei-Armah, Personal Interview.
4. See Black British Theatre Archive at the NT. Sustained Theatre is an Arts Council-funded initiative established to promote connections and collaborations for a diverse arts sector in Britain. See <http://sustainedtheatre.org.uk/Home>
5. National Theatre, Elmina’s Kitchen Programme.
6. Ibid.
7. Maddy Costa, Guardian, Theatre Record, Vol. XXIII, No. 11–12 (2003), p. 703.
8. Kwei-Armah, Personal Interview.
9. The 2001 British Census included mixed race as a separate category for the first time.
10. Benedict Nightingale, The Times, Theatre Record, Vol. XXIV, No. 25–26 (2004), p. 1695.
11. Patrick Marmion, Daily Mail, Theatre Record, Vol. XXIV, No. 25–26 (2004), p. 1696.
12. Helena Thompson, Ham and High Express, 7 February 2005.
13. Michael Billington, Guardian, Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph, Kate Bassett, Independent, Theatre Record, Vol. XXVII, No. 23 (2007), pp. 1373, 1375.
14. Kwei-Armah, ‘Introduction’, p. xiv.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. See Deirdre Osborne, ‘The State of the Nation’ and ‘“Know Whence You Came”’, Geoffrey Davis, ‘This is a Cultural Renaissance’, Amelia Howe Kritzer, Political Theatre in Post-Thatcher Britain and David Lane, Contemporary British Drama.
18. MediaGuardian, ‘96: Kwame Kwei-Armah’; Deirdre Osborne, ‘“Know Whence You Came”’, p. 253.
19. See Harry J. Elam, The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson.
20. See for example Roy Williams’s Fallout (2003) and Little Sweet Thing (2005), Bola Agbaje’s Gone Too Far! (2007) and Off the Endz (2010), and Levi David Addai’s 93.2 F.M. (2005) and Oxford Street (2008).
21. Post-show talk at the Tricycle Theatre, 29 October 2009.