Joe Guy: a witty new play from Roy Williams. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
'West Indians, Africans, it don't matter, they don't see the difference - when they look at us, all of us, they see black, they see nigger!' So goes one of the sharpest lines in Roy Williams's witty new play, Joe Guy, which opened at the Soho Theatre last week. It tells the story of the hardworking young son of Ghanaian parents whose footballing skills propel him to fame in England and who ditches his accent, his shyness, his smart childhood sweetheart Naomi and his morals along the way. Throughout the play the 'black' characters rib each other over their myriad distinctions: recent migrants, mixed-race kids, Nigerians, West Indians, lighter-skinned, darker-skinned. In the tender final scene, Naomi cites the 'they all look alike' jibe, pointing to how the white establishment so often conflates all these stories into one blanket term, 'the black community', in which all non-whites are seen as one indeterminate mass, erasing their individuality.
This tendency is being strongly challenged by a slew of groundbreaking new dramas by non-white writers who are exploring the deeper complexities of identity and society. In a theatrical climate often dissed as staid and self-involved, black British and British Asian writers are currently the source of this country's most powerful work. At the National Theatre next week Kwame Kwei-Armah premieres Statement of Regret, the final part of the highly acclaimed trilogy that includes Elmina's Kitchen and Fix Up. In Statement of Regret, the imperfect contemporary hero Kwaku Mackenzie grapples with national race politics, drink, fatherhood and the lure of Oxbridge privilege. As Kwei-Armah put it to me: 'I never write plays about white people. I do not write 'about' race. I write about the black British experience and what we can do to move things forward.' He bemoans the standard practice of lumping all black writers together 'without any analysis of the superstructure, the political construction of "black"'.
This is the eternal problem with ex-colonial societies' interpretations of non-white cultures. Parcelled up into various catch-all terms, the funniest of which is the meaningless 'ethnic', are dozens of countries, histories, cultural influences and artistic traditions. Any reference to white racism or discrimination is expressed in a spirit of sadness, not outrage.
The current batch of new dramas, however, are more concerned with the contradictions, joys and flaws of the characters and the challenges they face. You could say that Joe Guy is as much about self-sabotage, immaturity and the falseness and destructiveness of the macho-man image as it is about race. Both Williams and Kwei-Armah are notable for their critiques of masculinity, the credit that their stories pay to wise women and the ever-present warning that self-hatred and divisiveness will ultimately destroy any group that is already disadvantaged by other people's prejudices.
It should be no surprise that it is the progeny of England's multiracialism who can shine the most critical light on society, and perhaps save a few tired art forms into the bargain. In a funny, slightly bitter way, an experience of bigotry gives a writer true knowledge of what we'll euphemistically call 'the ways of the world', about the structures of power and control on which societies are built and on the many prejudices which keep the status quo firmly in place. Writers' conclusions about these are finally hitting the mainstream.
Except, it seems, when it comes to women. Vindicating my long-held notion that misogyny is the strongest passion on earth, theatres, 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. Thus November's roster of plays by Indian women writers at the Soho Theatre is called, with cringe-making patronage, Giving Voice, implying that these poor little Asian ladies were huddled mute, beaten and shoeless in a roadside shack until the theatre kindly liberated them and gave them the opportunity to speak their pain.
Female dramatists deserve better than the 'oppressed little women' category in one theatre's winter season. They deserve to be promoted as great artists within the mainstream. Deepa Mehta, Gurinder Chadha and Mira Nair are all doing it in film; yet the playwright Tanika Gupta, who has been producing exemplary work for years, is still not a household name. It is men who are being promoted.
We need a genuine diversity of voices in the mainstream of contemporary drama. That's diversity as in 'all the people, all the time', not as topical one-offs (this week, Polish migrant worker angst, next, a Muslim terrorist thriller). The danger is that the current spate of commissions is simply part of a trend picked up by the white men in power, in which non-white men are 'in' for the time being, while nothing really changes; the plays go on, but nobody heeds their message. The establishment must get behind those dramatists who are non-white and even (yuck) women, whose vision of society is the most penetrating and whose wisdom may save it.
This article appeared in full in today's Observer Review.
