The No Boys Cricket Club; Lift Off; Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads; Fallout; Days of Significance
Roy Williams is the most prolific indigenous black dramatist in contemporary British theatre. Writing from a standpoint which is distinct from the migrant sensibilities of previous generations of black writers in Britain, Williams represents aspects of contemporary culture as drawn from black citizens’ experiences. He is of a generation which has achieved and sustained a mainstream visibility denied to their dramatist forebears, although this has yet to translate into substantial international profiles. From the mid-1990s, Williams has penned plays continuously, consolidating his place in the canon of British theatre history.
Born in Fulham, London, in 1968, the much younger child in a family of four siblings, he has always lived in London. When Williams was two, his father left the family for the United States. The son’s childhood was a time of isolation: ‘I spent my youth feeling detached, not just from my family, but from nearly everyone.’1 Attending the Henry Compton Comprehensive Secondary School, by his own admission he ‘was a bully and was bullied’.2 School was not a stimulating experience for him: ‘I had a real struggle just listening. I used to daydream, fly into my imagination.’3 This detachment and self-immersion aids his creative hot-housing. When writing a new play he sometimes realises he has neither seen nor ‘spoken to anyone else for days on end’.4
As Williams achieved good grades in English but did poorly at other subjects, his mother secured a private tutor for him – Don Kinch, actor, writer and director with the black theatre Staunch Poets and Players – who introduced Williams to live theatre, confirming his desire to act. After leaving school at sixteen, working at McDonald’s, Safeway, and in various warehouses for a year, he joined a performing arts course at Kingsway College. From there he went to the Cockpit Youth Theatre, and gained his first professional acting job with the Theatre Centre. Working with playwright Lin Coghlan, among others, he attended Noel Greig’s evening Writers’ Workshop and obtained his Equity Card.
Williams recalls that copious, but critical television watching as a youth alerted him – even before his involvement with theatre – to crucial aspects of plot, form and structure. However, a novel was his first inspiration. ‘I was reeled in when I first read Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. When I finished reading that I knew I wanted to be a writer.’5 His key drama influences were plays by Barrie Keeffe (Sus, 1979) and Nigel Williams (Class Enemy, 1978).6 Luke 4 Gary, his first play, written on his mother’s typewriter while he was a teenager, motivated him to undertake a writing degree at Rose Bruford College (1992–95). His final-year, full-length play, The No Boys Cricket Club, gained him a first-class degree. Staged at the Theatre Royal Stratford East (1996), it received Writers’ Guild and TAPS Writer of the Year Award nominations. Within two months of graduating, he experienced further success with his radio play Homeboys (BBC Young Writers Festival, 1995). Since then, awards have adorned Williams’s career: the Alfred Fagon Award (1997), the John Whiting Award (1998), an EMMA (1999) for Starstruck, the George Devine Award (2000) for Lift Off and the South Bank Show Arts Council Decibel Award and Screen Nation Award for Fallout. His plays have been revived regionally, in prison-theatre contexts, and by drama schools.
As a prominent dramatist, Williams has not distanced himself from his connections to young people’s theatre. Offside (BBC Television) won a BAFTA for Best Schools Drama (2002). Other commissions for this audience include Slow Time (2005) and Baby Girl (2007) for the National Theatre, and There’s Only One Wayne Matthews (2007) for Polka Children’s Theatre. Further radio plays include Tell Tale (2002) and adaptations of two E. R. Braithwaite novels: To Sir, with Love (1959) in 2007 and Choice of Straws (1965) in 2009. For the stage, he adapted Colin MacInnes’s 1959 novel Absolute Beginners (Lyric Hammersmith, 2007) as well as penning Days of Significance (RSC, 2007). Notwithstanding the rural setting of his early play, Josie’s Boys (Red Ladder, 1996) or those featuring Jamaican contexts – The No Boys Cricket Club (1996), Starstruck (Tricycle Theatre, 1998) and The Gift (Birmingham Rep, 2000) – Williams’s dramatic oeuvre is firmly urban-centred. His prolific output includes Local Boy (Hampstead Theatre, 2000), Clubland (Royal Court, 2001), Little Sweet Thing (New Wolsey, 2005), Joe Guy (Tiata Fahodzi, 2007), Category B (Tricycle Theatre, 2009) and Sucker Punch (Royal Court, 2010). His screenplay of Fallout was aired as part of the Disarming Britain season on urban gun and knife crime (Channel 4, 2008). In the same year, Williams received further establishment recognition with the award of an OBE for services to drama.
Williams’s juvenilia of Caribbean-related plays begin with this professional debut, which opened on 24 May 1996, initiating his artistic relationship with director Indhu Rubasingham. His earlier work centralises the immigrant generation and later plays, indigenes’ issues – something Williams recognises.
My body of work is in two halves: the early plays were very reflective and personal where characters reflected on the past; my later plays are more objective, commenting on what’s going on now.7
The Caribbean location (paradoxically) is symbolic of the Old World while Britain is the New. Sport (in this instance cricket) is used as one lens by which to evaluate degrees of belonging in contemporary urban culture, something he revisits in Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads, Joe Guy and Sucker Punch.
In 1990, the right-wing MP Norman Tebbit fused explicitly the connection between cricket and white Britishness in his infamous ‘cricket test’, when he asked, ‘Which side do they cheer for? […] It’s an interesting test. Are you still harking back to where you came from, or where you are?’8 Williams subverts both the assumptions of whiteness and maleness through Abigail and Maisie, young cricketers who migrated from Jamaica to London and who now, in their early fifties, are confronted with the legacies of that decision. He represents a particularly uncompromising vision of diasporic (dis)inheritance in a London working-class community beset by domestic violence, neighbourhood fracas, male profligacy and drug dealing – a marked contrast to 1950s Kingston. As contemporary Kingston is a crime-ridden, impoverished city, Williams’s play implies the primary affirming space for his protagonists lies in their nostalgic pre-migratory past, which mirrors the fantasy of accessing pre-colonialism; both acts of the imaginary. The play also asks, in the fantasy Young Abi’s words, ‘What happened to my dream?’ (p. 61).
Critics failed to appreciate the play’s colonial critique and ongoing repercussions, as inherited by British-born black citizens. Nick Curtis observes, ‘It marks a decent but unspectacular opening innings for Williams on a major stage […] he’s clearly got talent, but needs a few more practice strokes.’9 This unanimity in affirming Williams’s important subject matter sat alongside observations that the play required more drafts, and remarks about audience reactions. Williams thus encountered the demand for instant expertise faced habitually by black British writers, while reviewers, encountering culturally unfamiliar material, could not assume their accustomed majority viewpoint as audience members.
The play’s formal and generic experimentation reveals how, initially, Williams’s style was not social-realist. Soundscapes palpably evoke character’s interior lives. Concurrent audio-text and spoken dialogue verbally intertwine past and present. The conceit of a character’s younger and mature versions in conversation dramatises whimsically an inter-generational communion beyond displacement and identity distortions. However, the migratory sensibility of prior national and cultural origin is also one that was imperially forged. Emigration promised amelioration to colonial disenfranchisement and the play voices reassessments of such hopes.
Lift Off, which premiered at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs on 19 February 1999, was inspired by Williams’s temoignages of west London teenagers. He explains
Before the likes of Ali G came along, I used to see white kids, all around Ladbroke Grove talking and acting like black kids. They were not being rude, or offensive, they were absolutely genuine, reacting and responding to the world they were living in. I knew there was a play there.10
Typical Williams motifs converge in this play: urban inter-racial relationships between young people, racism and its effects upon them; the fluidity of possible cultural affinities relational to socio-racial identities; young people’s traumatising by peers; adult inadequacy to sustain emotionally, support or encourage youth into maturity, and the intense compensatory (but insufficient) bonds they form with each other.
While Williams’s later dramatis personae are racially specified, Lift Off’s cast is young people: Mal, Tone (with incarnations Young Mal and Young Tone), and Carol (Tone’s younger sister), Rich and Hannah. Only Rich is detailed as ‘a young black schoolboy’ (p. 163). The reader discerns the characters’ ethnicities through the dialogue – a fact instantly apparent visually in performance – opening to scrutiny just what informs these socio-cultural categories of blackness and whiteness. Williams dramatises its absorption as shaping his young characters’ relationships to surrounding society and their individual behaviours.
Their generally unrelenting, unpalatable behaviour can be difficult to digest. Through Mal and Tone’s exchanges, Williams channels crude racialised remarks on sexuality, cultural credibility and social expectations.
Mal Wat yu expect me to say? ‘Bredren, check out Tone’s piece, shame on us all!’ I was jealous. So how’s it feel? […]
Tone Yu have got a bigger dick. Nuff girls fancy yu. Even my little sister’s up for it now. […]
Mal […] Yu carry on like there’s sum big magic secret.
Tone Well there must be.
Mal There aint. (pp. 197–8)
Williams’s artistic palette creates little subtlety in its metaphorical application of colour value to his dramatic canvas. Such representations face awkward positioning in theatre history. Black people’s presence on the British stage until the late twentieth century has ranged from non-existent to one-dimensional, topical rather than typical (if registered at all) in non-black dramatists’ plays. Negative representations by black writers can validate the socio-cultural stereotyping that persists in press and political arenas, prime mediators to public consciousness concerning Britain’s black citizens. John Stokes argues: ‘Because he works so close to the street, Williams shares his topics with the tabloids.’11 These tabloid-redolent representations are what Williams contests, yet is then paradoxically unable to write beyond, due to his subject matter and the dramatic language he has forged, which is based on his own version of street vernacular. While Williams asserts his right (remembering the historically constricted opportunities for black dramatists) to tackle any subject he wishes, he nevertheless is exposed to pigeonholing via commissioning, critical expectations and censure for perpetuating a narrow range of black people’s experiences.
In Lift Off, complexity is gleaned from the characters’ implied backstories. These form an unnerving accompaniment to their harsh interactions. School is an irrelevant backdrop to their lives. Healthy aspirations are non-existent. They are fixed in abusive cycles of emotional impoverishment (which they then display to each other). Ventriloquists and imitators of culture, they lack agency to change their circumstances. Beneath the bluster and bombast of the patoisimbibed street vernacular, lie narratives of difficulty and open-endedness rather than neat conciliation – or hope. Williams remarked:
It’s hard for black men in particular to find themselves without having the weight of stereotypes thrown at them. […] They’re faced with ‘all black people are athletic, all black people are good movers, they’re good singers, they’re good dancers, they’ve got big dicks’ – all that rubbish.12
The play’s title invites multi-significance: lifting off (not forcing), to reveal or expose contents; the launching pad into adulthood; releasing something trapped under a concealing label. Critic Dominic Cavendish observes: ‘A desire for honesty underpins all his work, even if that means potentially causing offence,’ as Williams explained to him:
Before I write a line I often take a deep breath, knowing the risks involved, but I think: I have a responsibility to tell the best story I can and if I’m going to write about young black kids getting into crime and gun culture then I’ve got to put it down.13
This reveals a perspectival lacuna, not only in how a predominantly white British theatregoing public experiences representations of blackness, but also in the world of young people, subjects scapegoated habitually by Britain’s media. Williams’s work attempts, with questionable success, to refashion this.
However, non-conforming characters invariably are futureless. Like Fallout’s murdered schoolboy Kwame, Rich dies. His suicide is linked to the torment he suffered from Young Mal and Young Tone, through humiliation and verbal annihilation.
Mal Yu little spas Rich. […] Yu aint nuttin man. […] He aint black. Fuck knows wat he is. (pp. 234–5)
Rich rejects subscribing to a generalised category of violence attributed to black men, which he has suffered from his father (revealed when he cries ‘get off me Dad!’, p. 171, as Young Tone wrestles him against his will). While his death interrupts the continuation of violence, or future laced to perpetuating the grim legacy ascribed to black males, it is self-sacrificial. Identity definition is intimately bound to cultural stereotypes, as derived from racialised masculine characteristics. Tone (white) not only ventiloquises black-associative street talk, but also engages in cultural cross-dressing aiming to reproduce Mal’s hyper-sexualised version of black masculinity. Hannah, a racist white girl who deplores Tone’s exogamy, identifies this false consciousness:
Hannah You’re not black though.
Tone I might as well be right.
Hannah Looked in the mirror lately? […] There must be something seriously missing in your life if you think acting like them is going to fill it in for you. (p. 209)
Mal is a provocative character. His inveterate misogyny and homophobia range from his attitude to his mother, ‘The fuckin bitch. […] She has to open her mout whenever she feel’ (p. 216), to other people’s mothers, ‘Yer mum sucks dicks for a livin’ (p. 165), to groping women in clubs. He has sex with under-age Carol, Tone’s sister, on the grounds that, ‘her arse was all nice and fit man, wat was I supposed to do? Am I a batay bwai?’ (p. 231). He abusively rejects Carol when he learns of her pregnancy, ‘Getting yerself pregnant man, yu stupid bitch. […] Ca’ yu aint nuttin but a fuckin little whore. Exits’ (p. 225).
Black culture is displayed by a set of distinctive attributes mimicked by white youth, yet the aspirational element of this imitation does not alter grass-roots social discrimination. When the malignant Mal is revealed as having malignant blood cancer, incurable because of his race (not enough black male bone marrow donors are registered), this points to a greater disenfranchisement of black people within Britain. The play connects to other works dramatising health issues in the black British dramatic canon: Maria Oshodi’s Blood, Sweat and Fears (1988) and Benjamin Zephaniah’s De Botty Business (2008). Believing he will die from leukaemia, Mal belatedly values Rich (the misfit in the misogynistic, desensitised world of one-upmanship). He fancifully converses with the dead Rich in a generic annexe outside Williams’s prevailing signature of social realism, as Abi and Maisie interacted with their younger selves. This volte-face can test an audience’s sympathy. Emotional brutality and callousness chafes against exercising compassion towards a young life short-changed for social health failings. Although Keith Peacock asserts that ‘His own race will let him die’, it is worth remembering his death will eventuate from a mesh of social factors caused by the racist-impelled legacy of second-class citizenship for black settlers and indigenes in modern Britain.14
Yet, Mal has a loving mother, who, Carol reminds him, is ‘worried about yer’ (p. 216). The denigration of mothering, its absence or powerlessness, and the misogyny towards feminine qualities (often parading as feistiness which is soon traduced) is a feature of Williams’s corpus. The No Boys Cricket Club celebrates female friendship but bleakly represents the mothering of sons: Abigail’s son deals crack, Maisie’s son dies. In Williams’s British-based plays, male–male cross-generational conflict remains of paramount importance. Women characters function as the catalysts by which to explore a primacy of male–male contestations in families and friendships.
As part of the National Theatre’s Transformation season, this play opened in The Loft on 2 May 2002 and was revived with a semi-promenade staging at the Cottesloe (2004). The play shows football fans gathering in a working-class, south-west-London pub for the England versus Germany World Cup qualifying game (2000) which England lost. Writing in response to the event, Williams establishes himself as a contemporary if not contemporaneous chronicler of British culture.15 He dramatises a debate of narrow, white-centred nationalism versus the new claimants, indigenous black citizens, in relation to the broader base of antipathy to Germany sustained since the Second World War. Williams employs duologues to tread a fine line between conversation and didacticism. Alan, white, mid-fifties, racist rhetorician, is set against ex-soldier Mark, black, early thirties:
Mark I’m English.
Alan No you’re not.
Mark I served in Northern Ireland. I swore an oath of allegiance to the flag. […] How English are you? Where do you draw the line as to who’s English? I was born in this country. And my brother. You’re white, your culture comes from northern Europe, Scandinavia, Denmark […]
Alan The fact is, Mark, that the white British are a majority racial group in this country, therefore it belongs to the white British. (p. 218)
The exchange typifies James Vernon’s ‘troubling slippage between “England” and “Britain”’ which is, as Krishan Kumar observes, ‘one of the most enduring perplexities of English national identity. How to separate “English” from “British”?’16 Saying English and meaning British or, saying British but implying English, presents a conundrum of identities, necessitating decoding – both by the play’s characters and by the audience, who may or may not find these viewpoints to coincide with those they bring to the performance. The English/British dichotomy suggests the inclusion/exclusion dynamic wherein patriotic emotion is somehow attached to England and its associations with whiteness, not Britain, a contrived conglomerate of geo-political contingencies. In this equation black British can never be English or part of its self-appointed hegemony within the countries and islands of the United Kingdom. Richard Hoggart’s observation that ‘Presumably most groups gain some of their strength from their exclusiveness, from a sense of people outside who are not “Us”’ is fused in the play to a post-imperial definition of nation which excludes non-white citizens.17
Of the premiere, David Benedict wrote, ‘the National is aspiring to the condition of pub theatre’ and ‘while it’s salutary to be presented with unpalatable facts about society […] facts alone are not what drama is for’.18 Contrastingly, John Peter found ‘the comedy is brutal. It can make you ashamed when you laugh. That’s the point. The theatre is a ruthless teacher.’19 The assumed dialogical relationship between white-male critic and staged play is tested by Williams’s material. His comedy (located in his characters’ expletive-ridden repartee) is generally overlooked by reviewers whose responses reveal cultural unawareness of both vernacular and black-centred experiences. Experiential newness tends to be perceived as social didacticism where a panacea to social dysfunction is expected from the playwright.
This play reveals the complexities of disenfranchisement by virtue of class affiliations shared by black and white citizens, paralleled to fading English sovereignty (symbolised in the demise of English football internationally) and its outdated xenophobic projections. Barry, Mark’s younger brother’s notable entrance, ‘the flag of St George painted all over his face’ (p. 37) and tattoo of the British bulldog, invites scrutiny of how far the marking of jingoistic nationalism on one’s body can only ever be a form of mimicry or scarification for black citizens – given racism’s grim ideological and material legacy.
However, Williams also dramatises Barry’s ludicrousness. He is marginalised and reviled by white racists for being black, yet embraces and imitates their xenophobia towards German people (frozen conveniently in that nation’s most reprehensible historical period). Williams parodies the so-called English reserve which, via football fervour, is transformed into aggressive male group hysteria – hooliganism – that negatively distinguishes English football supporters. Repellent aspects of Englishness are displayed and interlocked through German-hating and black-hating prejudice. As the hyper-sexualised character Mal was politically powerless in the world of Lift Off, so too are the hyper-racists of this play. Lawrie exclaims: ‘They’re gonna walk over us, like everyone else!’ (p. 180) Defeat in football elides easily into retaliation against perceived enemies in his immediate environment: ‘If those cunts can’t do it on the pitch, we can, we will! We’re England!’ (p. 180) – an impotently delusive, post-Empire, post-devolution, battle cry.
Barry, the most zealous supporter of them all, punctuates Act Two with his refrain, ‘ENGERLAND’, and chanting ‘ENGERLAND! ENGERLAND! ENGERLAND! […] Stand up if you won the war!’ (p. 208), a claim he inherits, given the considerable (and until recently historically overlooked) contributions of black service personnel to the defeat of Nazi Germany. He savours his participation in hooliganism, boasting anecdotally:
I backed you and Lee up when those bunch of Dutch fans tried to have a pop, we kicked every bit of shit out of them. Then we roared, right into their faces, England! (p. 209)
The grass-roots racism dramatised in Alan’s obvious sway over his white counterparts is problematised by his semi-mentoring of Barry as a footballer. They might form a class-based and geographically close-knit community, but the sense of dispossession, of being eclipsed (as England has been), is voiced through corrosive racism. Suzanne Scafe observes, ‘The black enemy within and the German enemy without are conflated slowly’ through narratives of failure, envy and resentment.20 Alan deplores the present-day economic superiority of nations who lost the war, for Mark all conversations confirm racial prejudice and pub landlady Gina’s father Jimmy yearns for the days of ‘the older blacks’ over ‘those fucking black kids from that estate’ and ‘the immigrants’ (p. 187).
Rather than simply a black–white antagonism, characters are equally shaped by the green-eyed monster. Mark and Gina’s ex-relationship, supplanted by Lee and Gina’s former relationship and Lee’s and Mark’s friendship, have suffered from unresolved jealousies and resentments not derived from racial tensions, suggesting Richmond’s prophetic ‘the question of racial differences is incidental to the much larger problem of cultural conflict and social change’.21 Ultimately, Mark’s murder by Gina’s son Glen cements the binarism, mirroring not only two football sides but Hoggart’s ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ dichotomy. Unlike football, there is no going home after the murder. The pub symbolises an island of embattled whiteness surrounded by angry black youths. Closing with ‘Sound of police sirens approaching’ (p. 235), Williams aurally evokes the bitter history between an institutionally racist police force, and black citizens’ experiences of a criminal (in)justice system. The empathic, enigmatic final exchange between the mutually bereaved: Barry (face paint erased), and Lee, ‘Lee (toBarry) Don’t lose yourself’ (p. 235), suggests co-recognition of the legacy of angry retaliation to prejudice, and the struggle to negotiate identity and self-worth as separate from this.
Fallout, which opened on 12 June 2003, is an ‘incendiary play’ which dramatises a racially related homicide investigation.22 Hot-tempered black policeman Joe confronts white colleagues’ liberal hypocrisy and the gang culture glorification now reigning where he was raised. Inter- and intra-cultural and racial differences converge in this scorching exploration of losing connections to one’s cultural roots and the ever-diminishing chances of obtaining justice for a murdered African teenager. The fallout gestures to the stage-world murder’s brutal ramifications and a wider consequentialist context of transgenerational displacement and social disenfranchisement. Director Ian Rickson described Joe as an epic figure, a kind of prodigal son returning to his kingdom.23 However, Joe’s alienation from his community of origin and professional context, and his inability to exact respect from the young people he is desperate to bring to justice (and even redeem), becomes a portrait of a man who is anything but commanding. Ultz’s décor, a disembowelled Royal Court main house, placed the stalls audience behind wire cages and circle audience looking down upon the action, creating a fishbowl effect or suggesting that the cast were under surveillance, a familiar objectification experienced by black people in white-dominated society.
Fallout marked definitively (and controversially) Williams’s presence as a leading neo-millennial playwright. As Sarah Compton describes, ‘Roy Williams’s new play opens with a gang of black kids running away from kicking another boy to death.’ She praised the play:
Williams is brave enough to take us into the lives of the killers, not to exonerate them, but to reveal the circumstances that make them behave as they do, to explore the corruption wrought by a sense of exclusion, of thwarted ambitions, of a false equation of toughness and cool. At the same time, he tackles the effects of political correctness in the police force and the police’s inability to nail the boys they know are guilty.24
Black cultural commentators tended to disagree. Darcus Howe voiced disapprobation towards this representation of blackness, noting audience composition as ‘almost wholly white except for four or five blacks including myself’, where: ‘This was not a slice of real life, but of low life sketched by the playwright for the delectation of whites.’25 As he ‘almost vomited’ because of the playwright’s dubious offering, white critic Toby Young’s abjection interchanged theatricality with actuality: ‘I left the theatre sickened by its savagery – and its accuracy.’26 As Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has pointed out, the tendency for white critics’ misguided praise of the culturally unfamiliar rewards stereotyping rather than encouraging artistic experimentation.27
Evoking Mal’s diatribe against a generalised African worker in Lift Off, intra-racism between African and Caribbean-origin antecedents is identifiable in Fallout, but Williams avoids confronting these tensions (which implicitly catalyse the murder), stating that the focus is ‘the political correctness that had been the response to the exposure and acknowledgement of institutional racism’.28 His dramatised ghetto reveals teenagers marooned in a demographic bereft of moral guidance. They form substitute attachments spiked by ferocity and desensitisation. Flashpoints of male violence arise as black male characters become trapped in cul-de-sacs of circumstances which they perceive as demeaning and emasculating. Estate life and the consequences of poverty and social marginalisation govern the lives of teenagers and peripheral characters, such as Manny, the gang leader, or Dwayne’s father, a vagrant addict. Manny is a device to expose Dwayne’s vulnerability, providing a sub-textual indication of the extreme emotional and probable socio-economic deprivation characterising Dwayne’s life up to the point of Kwame’s murder.
Manny Yu my Bwoi. Good bwoi, Junior.
Dwayne Wat?
Manny Wat?
Dwayne Wat yu juss call me? […]
Dwayne Junior is yer son, who live up by Shepherd’s Bush, my half-brudda, […] live wid his two little sistas, Tasha and Caroline, yer daughters… Remember dem? Nuh, it muss be Anton yu remember, yer son who live up by Dagenham way. Or is it Stuart, my little brudda, who live two minutes away… Nuh, nuh, it muss be the latest one, dat lickle baby wid the stupid name, Kenisha. (p. 90)
Staging dispossession opens Williams to charges of writing depressing material devoid of suggesting ‘any way of changing this reality’.29 Harry Derbyshire declares that ‘each fictional circumstance is designed to shed light on the world outside the play’, confirming Suzanne Scafe’s observation of white critics’ reception, ‘like so much Black expressive art, it is more valued as polemic than as theatre’.30
In his mid-thirties, Williams took up global issues and explosive current affairs to explore contemporary youth morality. Days of Significance – which opened on 10 January 2007 at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon – is not an intertext of Much Ado About Nothing, although the characters’ stichomythic verbal duels resonate with Shakespeare’s play. Its tripartite structure encompasses an English market town and Iraq. Prior to leaving on a tour of duty, two young soldiers join their friends on a drinking binge. The characters’ ignorance and moral dysfunction symbolise the fallacy of the West’s moral high ground over those it deems terrorists. As Shakespeare filtered critiques of his contemporary political context through geo-historical displacement to investigate English Renaissance society, so too does Williams engage with recent issues concerning youth culture, binge-drinking and social alienation in a globalised world.
War is an age-old arena in which masculinity is tested, a public display of state-enacted violence that becomes glorified and enshrined in national consciousness. While the militarism of Shakespeare’s era might now be uneasiness at waging war, its residual associations as a route to manhood remain. Jamie, accused of torturing Iraqi prisoners, represents the dehumanisation and unquestioning allegiance to superiors that is vital militarily, but disturbing in civilian life. His threat to his girlfriend Hannah, ‘I could kill you right now’, aligns its literal possibility with his disclaimer: ‘It was an order!’ (p. 264). Automatic military loyalty is at odds with any personal civilian relationship: ‘Grass on my mates? Dishonour myself as well as my unit? You really don’t know me, Hannah’ (p. 265). His inarticulateness circumvents any explanation for torture. A rhythmic anaphora, ‘I dunno, I dunno, I dunno why I did it […] I dunno, I dunno, I don’t fucking know. We juss lost it’ (p. 266) underscores his emotional limitations. Mantra-like, it protects him from personal responsibility. ‘I’ becomes the group identity of ‘We’, the unit survival strategy for soldiers.
Williams purposely defied commissioning expectations that he would write a play for black characters.31 Its two published versions (the second with a rewritten final act adding a wedding and reversing the seduction dynamic between Lenny and Hannah) evince the pressure that contemporary black British dramatists can face. As Caryl Phillips identifies, ‘A lot of artists aren’t given a chance to evolve… You need a period of gestation which is usually quite long.’32 Influential (white) broadsheet reviewers have begun to point out that hastiness, leading to a lack of depth, characterises Williams’s latest writing, insinuating that his prolific production may not best serve his artistry. According to Phillips, ‘The danger is that white people will cut you off if you don’t do what they want you to do.’33 Although established, Williams remains fearful that each play will be his last and noted his frustration of not having enough time to finish his final approved version of Days of Significance:
in-between Stratford and the Tricycle [its London venue], I did rework the play. When we had to get the play in to be published we were still working on it. So even the second published version is not the finished version.34
This relates to Williams’s fixity in a commissioning cycle which restricts aesthetic experimentation. The consequence (perhaps) of his too-prodigious output is a static rather than protean stage language. John Stokes notes of Days of Significance (2007) that the restrictions ‘of street talk finally become apparent, and with them a dilemma facing the writer. […] At key moments his words turn flaccid, like symptoms of a spent cultural force.’35
Williams inherits British theatre’s legacies: drama and performance that has consistently restricted and even erased black people’s presence and input until the mid-twentieth century. He has experienced a degree of having his work revived (essential to longevity) and toured nationally in studio spaces but has not, as yet, enjoyed a West End transfer. Praising Williams as an inspirational presence, Caryl Phillips calls him ‘perhaps the most adventurous, and certainly the most prolific, black dramatist to emerge in Britain in recent years’.36 Naming collaborative partnerships as essential to the development of the British playwright – a dynamic in which white (male) theatre practitioners are well-versed, Phillips exemplifies Harold Pinter/Peter Hall, Edward Bond/Bill Gaskill, David Edgar/Trevor Nunn, while noticeably omitting the directorial longevity of Paulette Randall, Indhu Rubasingham and Michael Buffong in relation to black dramatists.37
Williams writes from an empathic, responsive and principled standpoint, evident in the many interviews, after-show talks and educational material in which he remains a committed participant. As part of the Monsterist group, he lobbied against the small cast sizes, inadequate budgets and confinement to studio spaces which have been viewed as adversely affecting contemporary writing. He noted recently the movement’s obsolescence:
I think we all agreed okay we will make our points and then we’ll leave, otherwise we’ll come across as a bunch of whinging playwrights. But thankfully theatres have got the message and more and more writers have been encouraged to write bigger plays.38
British theatre historiography shares much historically with race relations discourse,
a discourse about a largely silenced other, a discourse in which, to borrow from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the subaltern could not speak, except within the epistemological framework imposed by academic experts.39
Williams’s motivation has been to fill a perceived cultural vacuum in British theatre, ‘Question: “Why do I write what I write?” Answer: “Because no-one else is.”’40 However, his sex-gender schematics generally fulfil Bidisha’s observation that ‘misogyny is the strongest passion on earth’, which in a theatre context means ‘producers and editors (of both sexes) are still mysteriously unwilling to go anywhere near talented non-white women writers, except in the most tokenistic and belittling way’ – parallelling non-white male writers’ characterisations of women and white male critics’ unchallenging reception of these characterisations.41
There is little scholarly material on Williams. What exists is primarily by white scholars or is confined to identity politics themes, examining the plays as dramatic literature without concurrent performance analysis. Aleks Sierz references Williams as New Writing in non-academic surveys and journalistic interviews. Williams’s traceable evolving aesthetic goes unrecognised in Keith Peacock’s comparative work. Harry Derbyshire’s discussion of Fallout is filtered through a multicultural prism, delivering a sociological reading divorced from aesthetics as though the play is a direct refractor of the social world only, and not the world of the theatre. Its performance semiotics ignored, as well as influential sources of reception (only one theatre review is cited), the play becomes a case study for sociological readings. Janelle Reinelt comparatively discusses Days of Significance as part of her aim to contest ‘a series of characterisations that have produced a different, dampened impression of contemporary British writing’.42 Aware (unlike Peacock and Derbyshire) that audiences in all their experiential variegation exist in theatre-making, Reinelt proceeds to discuss the play using a Performance Studies approach and chronological plot retelling.
Notable essays on Williams include those by Elizabeth Barry and William Boles (who contextualise his early work, discussing it comparatively through aesthetic investigation) and pioneering black British academic Suzanne Scafe (who interrogates the socio-cultural circumstances of spatial occupancy in Britain’s theatre venues and its relationship to a dramatist’s vision). As initiatory forays into a developing critical mass, the articles’ publication sites – an uneven and not easily obtainable hardback book also addressing Asian work, and an alternative press paperback – have not helped their dissemination or permeation of cultural records and scholarship. They have become obscured by other frameworks in an almost palimpsestic fashion. Interplay of literary criticism and performance analysis is vital for the emergence of an appropriate critical lexicon. No area better demonstrates this necessity than the work of Black British dramatists as they challenge prevailing theatrical, socio-cultural and linguistic assumptions and certainties.
Walter Ong notes, ‘The spoken word does have more power to do what the word is meant to do, to communicate.’43 Williams’s distinctive stage language (while not approaching the experimental virtuosity of debbie tucker green) enables experiential representation of characteristically marginal voices in British theatre. As Williams asserts,
I am a playwright full stop […] I don’t write because I am black, I write because I am a writer […] Black playwright, coloured playwright, brown playwright, whatever. Just as long as they don’t miss out the word playwright.44
Plays One: The No Boys Cricket Club, Starstruck, Lift Off (London: Methuen Drama, 2002).
Plays Two: The Gift, Clubland, Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads (London: Methuen Drama, 2004).
Plays Three: Fallout, Slow Time, Days of Significance, Absolute Beginners (London: Methuen Drama, 2008).
Alibhai-Brown, Yasmin, ‘Black Art Can be Bad, Just Like Art by Whites’, Independent, 2 May 2005 <http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/yasmin-alibhaibrown/yasmin-alibhaibrown-black-art-can-be-bad-just-like-art-by-whites-489793.html>
Anon., Fallout Education Pack, Royal Court Theatre, 2003.
Barry, Elizabeth and William Boles, ‘Beyond Victimhood: Agency and Identity in the Theatre of Roy Williams’, in Dimple Godiwala (ed.), Alternatives within the Mainstream: British Black and Asian Theatre (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2006), pp. 297–313.
Bidisha, ‘Shine the Spotlight on Every Shade of Black’, Observer, 4 November 2007.
Bridglal, Sindamani, ‘Profile of Caryl Phillips’, Artrage, No. 1 (1982), pp. 3–6.
Cavendish, Dominic, ‘Man of the Match’, Daily Telegraph, 19 April 2004.
Compton, Sarah, ‘Black British Drama Takes Centre Stage’, Daily Telegraph, 9 July 2003.
Derbyshire, Harry, ‘Roy Williams: Representing Multicultural Britain in Fallout’, Modern Drama, Vol. 50, No. 3 (2007), pp. 414–34.
Fisher, Dan, ‘Split Between Britain, U.S. Seen as “Inevitable”’, Los Angeles Times, 19 April 1990.
Hoggart, Richard, The Uses of Literacy (London: Transaction Publishers, 1992).
Kennedy, Maev, ‘Youth Takes Centre Stage in National’s Quest for Relevance’, Guardian, 9 April 2002.
Kumar, Krishan, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: CUP, 2003).
Ong, Walter, ‘Word as Sound’, in Peter Elbow (ed.), Landmark Essays on Voice and Writing (Davis, CA: Hermagoras, 1994), pp. 19–34.
Osborne, Deirdre, ‘The State of the Nation: Contemporary Black British Theatre and the Staging of the UK’, in Christoph Houswitschka and Anja Müller (eds), Staging Displacement, Exile and Diaspora (CDE 12; Trier: WVT, 2005), pp. 129–49.
—, ‘“I ain’t British Though / Yes You are. You’re as English as I am”: Belonging and Unbelonging in Black British Drama’, in Ulrike Lindner et al. (eds), Hybrid Cultures, Nervous States: Britain and Germany in a (Post)Colonial World (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), pp. 203–27.
Peacock, D. Keith, ‘The Question of Multiculturalism: The Plays of Roy Williams’, in Mary Luckhurst (ed.), A Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama: 1880–2005 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 530–40.
—, ‘Black British Drama and the Politics of Identity’, in Nadine Holdsworth and Mary Luckhurst (eds), A Concise Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Drama (London: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 48–65.
Phillips, Caryl, ‘Lost Generation’, Guardian, 23 April 2005.
Reinelt, Janelle, ‘Selective Affinities: British Playwrights at Work 1’, Modern Drama, Vol. 50, No. 3 (2007), pp. 305–45.
Richmond, Anthony H., The Colour Problem (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1955). Rickson, Ian, Personal Interview, London, 23 April 2004.
Scafe, Suzanne, ‘Displacing the Centre: Home and Belonging in the Drama of Roy Williams’, in Joan Anim-Addo and Suzanne Scafe (eds), I am Black/White/Yellow: An Introduction to the Black Body in Europe (London: Mango, 2007), pp. 71–87.
Sierz, Aleks, ‘Beyond Timidity: The State of British New Writing’, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Vol. 27, No. 3 (2005), pp. 55–61.
—, ‘“What Kind of England Do We Want?”: Interview with Roy Williams’, New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 22, No. 2 (2006), pp. 113–21.
Stokes, John, ‘Unofficial Rules of the Game’, The Times Literary Supplement, 6 November 2009, p. 17.
Vernon, James, ‘Review: Englishness: The Narration of a Nation’, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 36, No. 2 (1997), pp. 243–9.
Waters, Chris, ‘“Dark Strangers” in Our Midst: Discourses of Race and Nation in Britain, 1947–1963’, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 36, No. 2 (1997), pp. 207–38.
Williams, Roy, ‘Spread the Word (Twilight Zone)’, Talk, Morley College, London, 22 May 2005.
—, Personal Interviews, London, 24 October 2004 and 10 March 2010.
—, Talk, Goldsmiths, University of London, 24 October 2005. —, Monsterists Panel, Birkbeck, University of London, 14 May 2009.
Wu, Duncan, Making Plays: Interviews with Contemporary British Dramatists and Their Directors (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000).
1. Roy Williams, ‘Spread the Word (Twilight Zone)’, 2005.
2. Roy Williams, Talk, Goldsmiths, 2005.
3. Aleks Sierz, ‘“What Kind of England Do We Want?”’, p. 113.
4. Williams, Talk, Goldsmiths, 2005.
5. Roy Williams, Personal Interview 2010.
6. Roy Williams, Personal Interview 2004.
7. Ibid.
8. Dan Fisher, ‘Split Between Britain, U.S. Seen as “Inevitable”’.
9. Theatre Record, Vol. XVI, No. 11 (1996), p. 681.
10. Williams, ‘Spread the Word (Twilight Zone)’.
11. John Stokes, ‘Unofficial Rules of the Game’.
12. Williams, Personal Interview 2004.
13. Dominic Cavendish, ‘Man of the Match’.
14. Keith D. Peacock, ‘The Question of Multiculturalism’, p. 533.
15. The play ‘is based on the experience of the playwright Roy Williams, who found himself the only black man in a pub that night and was gradually intimidated out of it’ (Maev Kennedy, ‘Youth Takes Centre Stage’).
16. James Vernon, ‘Review: Englishness’, p. 249; Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity, p. 1.
17. Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, p. 48.
18. Theatre Record, Vol. XXII, No. 9 (2002), p. 556.
19. Ibid.
20. Suzanne Scafe, ‘Displacing the Centre’, p. 81.
21. Anthony H. Richmond, The Colour Problem, p. 13.
22. Deirdre Osborne, ‘The State of the Nation’, p. 130.
23. Ian Rickson, Personal Interview, 2004.
24. Sarah Compton, ‘Black British Drama Takes Centre Stage’.
25. Theatre Record, Vol. XXIII, No. 11–12 (2003), pp. 756–60; Vol. XXIII, No. 13 (2003), p. 861.
26. Ibid.
27. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, ‘Black Art Can be Bad, Just Like Art by Whites’.
28. Anon., Fallout Education Pack.
29. Aleks Sierz, ‘Beyond Timidity: The State of British New Writing’, p. 59.
30. Scafe, ‘Displacing the Centre’, p. 81.
31. Williams joked that the RSC had contracted more black actors than usual in anticipation of casting specifications (Roy Williams, Monsterists Panel).
32. Sindamani Bridglal, ‘Profile of Caryl Phillips’, p. 6.
33. Ibid.
34. Williams, Personal Interview 2010.
35. Stokes, ‘Unofficial Rules of the Game’.
36. Caryl Phillips, ‘Lost Generation’.
37. Duncan Wu exemplifies the white male hegemony dominating British theatre in his pairings of male writers and directors. Women, black or Asian practitioners are excluded.
38. Williams, Personal Interview 2010.
39. Chris Waters, ‘“Dark Strangers”’, p. 219.
40. Williams, ‘Spread the Word (Twilight Zone)’.
41. Bidisha, ‘Shine the Spotlight on Every Shade of Black’.
42. Janelle Reinelt, ‘Selective Affinities: British Playwrights at Work 1’, p. 305.
43. Walter Ong, ‘Word as Sound’, p. 21.
44. Williams, ‘Spread the Word (Twilight Zone)’.