FOREWORD

I often find myself misquoting LP Harley’s famous saying ‘The past is like a foreign land, they do things differently there’. Why I replace the words ‘the past’ with history I do not know. It doesn’t improve the quote any. Maybe it is because in my mind the word ‘history’ sounds grander? Or maybe it is just that I love the word history because so much of what we stand upon as individuals, as a culture, isn’t just predicated on what happened in the ‘past’ but upon whose ‘Story’– has been recorded. Whose voice has been enshrined?

The world I grew up in as an actor was a far cry from than that of the generation working before the 1980s uprising, which made our country sit up and examine the genesis of that rage. The resulting flowering of that generations voice and its theatrical manifestations meant, selfishly, that there was work for us as young black actors. But often that work, no matter its quality, was confined to the fate of the single production, witnessed only by those that had the pleasure to behold its articulations. Very few were ever remounted. Even fewer were published, leaving future generations nothing that they could review and learn from, or even conceive that they are standing upon shoulders.

It was amid the identification of this problem, of trying to articulate a great yearning, that I met the editor of this anthology Simeilia Hodge Dallaway. With the help of the National Theatre, and the sustained theatre initiative, I decided that history would begin today. Sim came on as my project manager and we uncovered upwards of four hundred plays that had been produced in the UK over the last eighty-odd years. Sim encouraged people to look in their attics, their cellars, their aunties and uncles’ suitcases under beds older than she was to find missing pages, whole manuscripts, programme notes, old interviews, photographs and of course the few published plays that resided in the archives or bookshelves of the fortunate.

As she read through all of these works, seeing links between playwrights and themes that few have had the good fortune of being able to detect, you could see the maxim ‘we are here to be of service to and through our art form’ bubbling in her mind. How to use these new insights not just for playwrights but for all artists became her focus.

It was this curiosity, this impulse to serve I wager, that created this book of monologues primarily for Black British actors but generally for all. With monologues from Barry Reckord to Michael Abbensetts – From Michael Mcmillian to ’Biyi Bandele-Thomas, from Oladipo Agboluaje to Michael Bhim, the diversity of subjects and themes alone are enough to make this book stand out. But it is the voices, the stories that these monologues explore, the beauty, the ugliness, the pain of the twentieth-century Black British experience mixed with the triumphs and horrors of the twenty-first that will make this collection sit in the annals of OUR history. Or as Ziggy Marley sang ’Istory.

Never again will a young actor trying to get into drama school only have three or four playwrights from which to choose from that reflect his or her primary cultural background. Never again will that playwright, looking for that instant hit from a multiplicity of theatrical voices have to Google and only find African American ones.

Yes, history is today. And I am simply overjoyed that right now, certainly for those of us who exist in this wild, challenging but ultimately fulfilling world they called theatre, can say the past truly is a foreign land.

Kwame Kwei-Armah