Kwame Kwei-Armah’s appointment is a sign that theatre is changing (original) (raw)

Kwame Kwei-Armah, not so young, but very gifted and very black, is to be the artistic director of the cool, creative, edgy Young Vic, a London landmark for more than 60 years.

Is this PC gone mad, capitulation by lefties to the race lobby, positive discrimination or imperial guilt? None of the above. Just about bloody time.

Those who made the appointment will need to keep their heads while the usual hysterical suspects jump up and down. Perhaps some true Brit at the Tory Party conference will complain about immigrants getting all the big breaks. I have already had emails complaining about white disadvantage. It’s par for the course.

Kwei-Armah’s CV is awesome. We are acquaintances. His parents move to Britain from Grenada in the Sixties and had to survive savage racism and injustice, the same as other migrants of colour.

His dad worked at the Quaker Oats factory, his mum did three jobs to pay for her son to go to acting school. He played Finlay Newton in Casualty, the BBC’s long-running series, and built up a vast fan base. In 2004, Fin was murdered. I cried.

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He then wrote Elmina’s Kitchen which was staged at the National and then the Garrick in the West End, a first for a black playwright. Several other plays of his won accolades. He was at the top of his game when, in 2011, he moved to the US to become artistic director of the Centre Stage theatre in Baltimore. Now, happily, we have him back.

In 2017, this should not be a big story. But it is. Kwei-Armah is a symbol of resistance as well as the slow but significant progress made by one sector in Britain, arguably the only one. Theatres are becoming less white and more open to minorities as well as global influences. There is still a long way to go, but still, two cheers.

An Asian woman – Indhu Rubasingham – is in charge of the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn where she has staged award-winning dramas about Margaret Thatcher as well as Ira Aldridge, the first black man seen on the English stage way back in 1833.

Madani Younis runs the brilliant Bush Theatre in Shepherd’s Bush. He’s part-Pakistani, part-Trinidadian. Major RSC productions are now directed by talented theatre makers such as Iqbal Khan, again of Pakistani Muslim heritage.

Lenny Henry, who has campaigned for diversity on TV. (Photo by Tristan Fewings/Getty Images)

Diversity, as Lenny Henry keeps reminding us, is proving to be easy talk and no action. Since the emotive year of Brexit, migrants and their children are once again having to fight for equality.

tatistics show a miserable picture. Universities, media, science and arts institutions and public services still discriminate against black and Asian people and now eastern Europeans as well. Talent is wasted, opportunities denied.

Younis told a journalist recently: “I want to provoke culture – by provoking culture, I feel that will make us more human. And if we’re able to be more human with each other, we’re able to see each other in ways we can’t ordinarily.”

New blood encourages innovation. Obvious really. And yet, even now, especially now, when the country is shrinking into itself, this message still eludes the powerful on whom the future depends.