Roy Williams and Goldie have a shared love: the Caribbean food at Theatre Royal Stratford East's bar. "The beef patty here is the best I've ever tasted," says Goldie, DJ, TV personality and actor in films such as Guy Ritchie's Snatch. "Yeah, that jerk chicken is better than even mine," adds award-winning, London-born playwright Williams, who is currently developing his last play, Sucker Punch, for film.
Though the pair are starkly different – Goldie loud and expansive, Williams shy and retiring – they have been spending a lot of time here together. Williams's new play, Kingston 14, a tale of police corruption in Jamaica, has just opened at the theatre, almost 18 years since his first play, The No Boys Cricket Club, opened here, and Goldie plays Joker, a much-feared and admired gang leader.
Williams, 46, says: "My parents came to England from Jamaica in the 50s, and when I was growing up I was always hearing stories about the island and I had a lot of questions. Why did my mum and dad come to England while my aunts and uncles didn't? Why didn't they go back when Jamaica got its independence from Britain in 1962? So when I went to Jamaica in 2008 [the National Theatre originally commissioned the play and paid for Williams to go there], I met police officers who told me how dangerous and violent Kingston was. I realised that's the story I wanted to tell about Jamaica, through the eyes of the police and the gangsters."
It took him four years to write Kingston 14 before passing it on to director Clint Dyer last year. Dyer first suggested Goldie to play Joker. "All my experience in film has been quite fleeting and tokenesque," says Goldie, who is half-Jamaican himself. "So when Clint asked, I said, 'Of course'."
This will be Goldie's first work in theatre. What attracted him to the role? "I find the situation in Jamaica very questionable. Was the point at which the British government left Jamaica when it all went wrong? Should they have stayed there? I was saying to Roy the other week, this could be a story about Slovakian slums, the Czech Republic or how ganglands rule the Somalian slums. It's about asking: how do you take the fabric of that society apart and how do you police it?
"Joker is a very symbolic character. It's a poignant role in that there are a lot of these types of characters who people gravitate towards. Those who leave destruction in their wake. When I read it I thought this guy is mixed race, he's a loner. I've got that in my life, so how do I pull that character into me and pull myself into him?"
Has it been a positive experience? "It's been really exciting. I'm understanding theatre a bit more. I've learned that you go over and over stuff. There's a big element of back-story: where have the characters been before, where have they come from?" He compares it to learning to understand classical music on the BBC2 series Maestro. "Now I appreciate where the notes are on the page and I can recognise, 'Oh, so that's where that is, and that motif repeats itself here, I see what you're doing'. And it gives me a bug. I could look at theatre a bit more, maybe. You don't want to be DJ-ing when you're 50, do you?"
