“Racism Isn’t Just Someone Shouting at You from a Passing Car”: Roy Williams in Conversation with Gemma Edwards

Roy Williams is one of the most eminent Black British authors of our time, having written over twenty plays for British stages over the last thirty years, alongside radio drama and feature films. He started writing full time in 1990 and graduated with a first-class BA honours degree from Rose Bruford College in 1995. It is difficult to distil his huge body of work – which continues to evolve – into key themes, but so far, his plays have explored a range of topics, including race and racism, nationalism, masculinity, working-class identities, sport, and intergenerational relationships. Williams’s drama gets to the centre of current social and political debates; his writing is textured and full of complexity. In this sense, his plays often work to nuance the increasingly binary political language in Britain, offering up characters with rich backstories who do not fit into the reductive, siloed positions that society sets out for them.

His first full-length play, The No Boys Cricket Club (1996), earned him a nomination for the New Writer of the Year Award by the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain. He has won the Alfred Fagon Prize – the leading award for Black playwrights of African and Caribbean descent – twice, first for Starstruck (1998) and then again for Sucker Punch (2010). He has won numerous other awards, including being made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018; receiving a Royal Television Society nomination for Best Writer in Drama for his episode “Cyrus” in BBC’s Soon Gone: A Windrush Chronicle in 2019; winning a BAFTA Children’s Award for Offside in 2002; and being nominated for two more BAFTAs for “Cyrus” and for Death of England: Face to Face (2021). He was also appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2008 for his services to drama.

Across his significant body of work, Williams explores the contradictions and tensions across racial, gendered, and generational divides. A recurring site – and indeed, theme – in these plays is the city and how it shapes these experiences, with a particular focus on contemporary London and how young people navigate the multiculturalism of the city, as well as how multiculturalism navigates them. Key plays that explore inner-city urban environments include Lift Off (1999), Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads (2002), Fallout (2003), Little Sweet Thing (2005), Sucker Punch, and Advice for the Young at Heart which toured across schools in England with Theatre Centre in 2013. Several of his plays are centred on sport, with a particular focus on football. Sporting events in general change the dynamic of cities, rendering them a party ground for some and unsafe for others. In addition to Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads and The No Boys Cricket Club, Roy wrote two other plays which are based on sport: Joe Guy (2007) – a play about a professional footballer – and the first part of The Death of England (2020) which makes reference to the World Cup in 2018. Roy has also written for the radio – for instance, The Interrogation for BBC Radio 4 in 2021 – and for the screen, with Fallout being adapted into a feature film in 2008 and the third part of the Death of England trilogy, Face to Face, premiering on Sky Arts in 2021.

This interview took place at the CDE Annual Conference on “Theatre and the City” at the Fondation des États-Unis in Paris on 25 June 2022.

Gemma Edwards: The city features in each of your plays. So, looking back, we might think about the streets in Sucker Punch where Leon and Troy come into the boxing gym; the King George Pub in South West London in Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads; the nightclub in Clubland (2001); and the inner-city street in Fallout. In many of these cases, the street is not safe for Black people. It is where the young boy, Kwame, is killed in Fallout and where Delroy is stopped and searched in Death of England: Delroy (2020). Has your understanding of the city – and the way that you want to represent city experiences in your plays – changed over the last twenty years?

Roy Williams: Sadly, I would say no. In those plays that you listed, the reason that Kwame in Fallout is attacked and the reason that Delroy is arrested – that is not just by luck or unfortunate circumstances. I wrote those plays at particular times, at certain moments. Fallout came off the back of debates surrounding knife crime in the early 2000 s, particularly amongst Black working-class boys. It was the murder of the ten-year-old schoolboy Damilola Taylor, who for right and wrong reasons, became the face of this debate. As for Death of England: Delroy, that was set during the first lockdown in 2020, as well as the year that England officially left the European Union after its decision to withdraw in 2016. That was the moment when Delroy as a Black man questioned: who am I, how British am I? In the plot of the play, he voted Brexit and identified himself as a Conservative voter, too. The play addresses “why shouldn’t he?” I think that is something that carries through my entire work: assumptions about what it means to be Black and British. I had a lot of fun with Delroy, in particular, making him someone who asks others not to take his politics for granted and to not make assumptions over who he is and what he likes.

GE: Would you say that all of your plays come from a specific political or social moment, then?

RW: I often talk about this with other writers when we share where we get our stories from. And I think I do get my stories from what is going on in the world at that time. But that only takes me half the way. The rest has got to mean something to me: it’s got to make my heart throb. I don’t just want to write about things that piss me off, I want to write plays that break my heart as well, actually, and make me laugh. Fundamentally, when I start a play, I ask: is it going to challenge me, move me, take me somewhere?

GE: In the Death of England trilogy, you reference a number of political events in the very divisive political climate in Britain at the moment, including the UK EU Referendum. Did you and your co-writer Clint Dyer want to write directly to that moment?

RW: Definitely. There was a sense of pride between us because when the first play, The Death of England, opened at the National in January 2020, that was the day it was made official that England would leave the EU. And if you’ve been to the National, you’ll see that the name of the play is always projected on to the side of the building. On that historic day, the words on the National Theatre – on London’s South Bank – read “The Death of England.” In many ways, that felt pretty apt.

GE: I know that The Death of England came from an earlier short play that you wrote for one of the Royal Court’s Living Newspapers in 2014. Can you tell us about how the play evolved from that short?

RW: The Royal Court commissioned six writers to write short films inspired by the sections that you find in a copy of The Guardian on a Saturday, and the sections were sport, education, fashion, food, politics, and music. The short we wrote was about the character of Michael who is at his father’s funeral. His father was a massive football fan. He begins his speech, and then he absolutely turns on everyone. He rails against Black people, he rails against women, he rails against his family, he rails against everything. And then Clint Dyer said that [after that short] we were not done. He thought that the short had mileage to become a play, so that’s what we did. It went through a lot of stages. I remember that when we wrote the play, we opened it out because the film was just him talking to everybody or anybody that would listen. We had that scene in the short film, but we had all the other characters, too. We had his dad, his mum, his siblings, and his best friend, Delroy. It really was an enormous play. I remember that I called Clint and said that the play was too big with too much happening. The themes were just pouring out of it. It was a decent-length play coming in at 120 pages. It was just too much. I said to him, I want to write it as a one-person play, with Michael on stage playing all the other characters, but primarily him on stage, talking to the audience with no fourth wall. And that is how the play came to be. When I was talking to journalists in order to promote the play, it was funny because every time they found out that it is a one-person play they ask, how much of an influence Alan Bennett, with him writing Talking Heads (1988) and such. I said, that was not what I was thinking of, and in fact I was thinking more of comedians, particularly Richard Pryor, who is one of my favourites.

GE: I’ve heard that you are still not done with The Death of England. Can you tell us about what is coming next?

RW: The Death of England: Delroy is the second play of the series, and Delroy is Michael’s best friend. He was referred to in The Death of England. We were writing his story during lockdown, and during that time the murder of George Floyd happened – and that really made us sharpen our pencils. The play is not about George Floyd, but it is about a Black man living in a post-Brexit world. Delroy is born and bred in England: he is a Londoner and also a Brexiteer. For the first time in his life, a series of circumstances happens to him that makes him think: am I British or not? And then we wrote a film version called Face to Face for Sky Arts where Michael and Delroy are literally face to face, together, in lockdown as well. There is also a third play coming out which focusses on Michael’s sister, Carly, who also happens to be Delroy’s girlfriend. That story is set post-pandemic in the context of levelling up and austerity. It looks at the consequences of the last five years and asks: where is England now in result of that? We are living in an age in my country where full-time people who are working jobs nine to five are having to shop at food banks. We are one of the richest countries in the world, it is outrageous.

GE: You’ve worked with a range of theatrical forms from one-person plays to plays with a large cast like Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads. Back in 2005, you were one of the playwrights that set up the Monsterist Manifesto alongside other acclaimed playwrights like David Eldridge, Sarah Woods, and Richard Bean. Do you think that it was successful?

RW: I think we took a lot of great pride in what we did. A lot of us were successful playwrights, and we always knew that what we said would have shelf life. The point of the manifesto was to encourage a culture of theatre in England where writers are encouraged to write big plays. A first-time playwright should be able to have access to a big stage to write a big play. And I think we succeeded. A lot of playwrights that came afterwards wrote big plays, and I would like to think that a small part of that is due to our success with that manifesto.

GE: On the big play, I want to ask about the place of sport in your drama. Is it a representational question about the themes it throws up – you've already touched on this with how sport generates discussions of nation, class, and race – or is it more of a structuring principle? I’m thinking that Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads is a very tightly structured play around that ninety-minute football game.

RW: The thing about football for me is that it is so naturalistic. I love my football and have no problem with it. I'm a season ticket holder, and I can shout at the referee along with the best of them. But I like to think that I take it to a certain point. I don’t go overboard which I feel that football fans tend to do. Even before I wrote Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads, I knew I wanted to write a play not just about racism but also nationalism, with the two going hand in hand. That was the one thing in my mind, but it didn’t become clear until I saw that World Cup match in the pub and that brought it to life. I was in a pub in Birmingham where I was in rehearsals for another play of mine. They were in tech, so I left them to it to watch the game. Ten minutes before kickoff a group of guys came barging into the bar and completely changed the atmosphere. They were all shouting “England, England.” At the time, David Beckham was playing, so there were lots of comments about Beckham, particularly his wife, Posh Spice – and I wrote these comments into the text of the play. The match was against Germany so there were also a lot of references to World War Two and anti-German chants of “we won the war” and such. But what was telling for me was that [the men] weren’t shy in saying any of those things. They weren’t shy about being sexist about Posh Spice or in their anti-German chants, but there was something that I felt when the Black players were on the pitch. And that is something that as a Black man I can pick up on. I can feel it. Racism isn’t just someone shouting at you from a passing car – which has happened to me in my life – it is about atmosphere and feeling. It was the atmosphere: they didn’t say anything because I was there. Then I came out of the pub, and I thought I've never seen that world on stage before, and if I could bottle that, then I know what my play about nationalism would be about. I knew I would replicate what I heard and what I saw on that day in Birmingham.

GE: You were talking then about not seeing that world on stage, and it strikes me that part of that world is about social class. Are you seeing anything change in terms of working-class representation?

RW: No, not enough. Not to my satisfaction anyway. I don’t really know why that is. I’ve had many conversations with other writers and different people over the years and have asked: is there a fear of putting working-class voices on stage? There shouldn’t be, but it feels as if there is. I feel we need to be very careful about that.

GE: I want to rest on inner-city environments and the idea of the urban play. In 2012, the cultural critic Lindsay Johns wrote a piece for The Evening Standard about what he perceived to be stereotypes in Black British theatre. He argued that “the overwhelming majority of Black British theatre over the past decade can be categorised as being about guns, drugs or council estates.” He then went on to call this, controversially, “Theatre of the Ghetto,” and said that these recurring theatrical representations of the Black urban youth only capture one aspect of Black British life. How would you respond to that claim?

RW: Lindsay and I had a passionate debate about this on the radio. I think on a surface level, he was right that, at the time, that is where those plays were coming from. But they were important. It was coming from what those writers were seeing, and they were responding accordingly. It was happening, but not all Black plays were doing that. Where I had an issue with Lindsay was when he said all Black plays were like that, and I said no, do your homework. There are others that are not telling those kinds of stories, possibly in smaller theatres, but their voices were out there. He was dismissive of the intent of some of the playwrights that wrote those kinds of plays, too. My friend Bola Agbaje was one of those playwrights that he took issue with, and she wrote those stories with integrity, and they were important to her. I don’t think it is right for someone to say don’t write those plays because for me that becomes censorship. At the same time, though, I always tell new writers: don’t write certain types of plays [about Black urban youth] because you think you have to or because you think that is what will sell. It has got to come from your heart, it has got to make your heart throb.

GE: Going back to the idea of the city, your plays have moved around different parts of cities. For example, if you compare your work for schools – I’m thinking here of Baby Girl (2007) and Advice for the Young at Heart – with, say, your plays that premiered at the Royal Court Theatre which sits in that very privileged area of Sloane Square, these are different geographies within the same city. Is there a particular place that you write from?

RW: I don’t want to hang too much on it but where I grew up informs what I write about. In the plays you listed in the beginning, they all come from moments and places that I've seen growing up in Notting Hill, in West London, which to some seems affluent – thanks to that bloody film [Notting Hill, 1999], but it is an area that I would say has its own North/South divide. I used to live there, and where I lived it was less affluent, but on the other side lived David Cameron, who I used to see shopping in Tesco. I lived in a flat but then it would take me two minutes to walk past a house that is worth at least £2 million on the market. That area itself certainly informed me and my writing. I’m writing a play at the moment about Grenfell because that tower block was less than two minutes away from where I used to live. I want to give voice to the people who lived around there because I think that area was multicultural before multiculturalism was even a thing. We were twenty years ahead of everybody else.

GE: I wondered how important the English context is for your work? Do you feel like your stories apply to English cities, mainly London?

RW: My stories are very specific, but I think they are for everybody. I often say that the more culturally specific your drama is, the more universal it will be, and I don’t tend to compromise on that. However, I was surprised when a theatre company wanted to stage Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads in Rome, but I enjoyed it. It was very weird hearing the play in Italian. On the one hand, I couldn’t understand the words, but on the other, because I wrote the play, I knew the rhythm. Sucker Punch also had three productions in the US. I remember when we did it in Washington in 2012, it was about a month after the Trayvon Martin shooting, and that was mentioned a lot in rehearsals, as well as the comparisons between Black British and Black American identity. It was a healthy and interesting debate.

GE: My last question is about your writing process. Has your approach changed over time?

RW: To keep up with deadlines, I tell myself to write a certain amount of words every day: if I write more, great, but don’t write less.

Question from the Audience: Can I ask you more about your writing process and, in particular, how you revise your work? Do you have special readers who you rely on?

RW: It all depends on the facilities that the theatre you are writing for can provide for you. Somewhere like the National tends to do all of that for you, and I’ve been lucky that they’ve offered that to me. Others not so much, and it depends how much money they have and so on. For me, when I write a first draft – and I think I often shock younger writers when I say this –, it’s a great phrase I got from a writer friend, James McDermott, when he said the first draft is “just about getting your play written.” I remember one of my tutors at [Rose Bruford] college also used to say: “don’t get it right, get it written.” That’s the first draft: it’s not supposed to be any good. Then the second draft is about trying to find the play you want to write from the play you’ve already written. So, I would say regardless of the facilities that a theatre may have for you, as a writer, you should keep that in your mind. Also, write a draft that you will never show to anybody. I have drafts of my plays that nobody will ever see.

Q: You have been writing since the 1990 s. Do you feel that your writing has changed over time?

RW: I’m sometimes surprised I’m still doing it. I still remember after I wrote my first play that feeling with my second one, it felt like second-album syndrome. I felt like I got away with it the first time, could I get away with it a second time, that kind of thing. And I still feel like I am getting away with it. I feel surprised I’m still here, I’m delighted, and I’m pleased: it’s a career that means a lot to me. In terms of change, I think it can only help as one gets older: your view of the world changes, and you become less idealistic. I feel I've reached a point in my life where I am now a bit older, and I accept where I am now, which definitely fed into The Fellowship (2022). I realised that the generation that I came from, yesterday we were young, and we were marching, and we were throwing bricks at the police for treating our generation like shit, and now we are old, and we are having kids, and our kids are having their kids. It is scary but also very interesting in terms of being Black and British. I can’t help but be fascinated by the next generation and think: “how do they view themselves as being Black and British and how do they view us?” I think there are a lot of stories in that world to tell which I am looking forward to telling in years to come.