Maddy Costa on the East End venue that is revolutionising black theatre
Something is happening in east London that could have a profound effect on British arts. Not the 2012 Olympics: that, according to Kerry Michael, artistic director at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, is "only the third largest regeneration project in the borough", just another development in his local landscape. It's at the Theatre Royal itself, a venue that increasingly looks like the most forward-thinking in the country.
Take a look at the work it has presented over the past few years. There have been plays exploring fundamentalism among young Muslims, challenging the homophobia prevalent in black music culture and exposing a true story of racist violence in a young offenders' institute, all written or directed by black or Asian artists.
Other theatres offer similarly diverse programmes, but few do it with such consistency and commitment.
Last year, the Theatre Royal was nominated for an Olivier award for outstanding achievement, an acknowledgement of its "powerful season of provocative work, reaching new audiences". It didn't win, but only because the award went instead to a single Theatre Royal production, Pied Piper, a hip-hop/dance piece developed by two local black teenagers. Now its Christmas show, Cinderella, is up for the 2008 award.
Pied Piper was typical of a tradition established here 50 years ago by Joan Littlewood and her Theatre Workshop, of creating work to reflect the local community. Littlewood was succeeded in 1979 by Philip Hedley, who recognised that the population of east London was no longer working-class white, but culturally much more mixed. Hedley spent 25 years staging work by black and Asian writers that was underrepresented elsewhere - including, in 1996, the first production of a play by Roy Williams. "It was the last thing I expected," says Williams, now one of the country's leading playwrights. "I was a first-time writer, writing for a cast of 12. They took an enormous risk, and I owe them a lot."
Since Michael took over in 2004, the community around the Theatre Royal has diversified further. "We now have over a hundred languages in our schools," he says; his theatre has flourished in response. Last year, it staged a play few other venues would touch: Jean Genet's subversive attack on racism, The Blacks. And, in a different display of confidence, its adaptation of the 1970s Jamaican film The Harder They Come is about to open at London's Barbican, three years after its Windrush musical, The Big Life, successfully transferred to the West End. The Harder They Come, which sold out two long runs in Stratford, has been described by Guardian theatre critic Lyn Gardner as "the first genuinely black musical ... [making] few concessions to a white audience".
It's tempting to view the Theatre Royal as Britain's pre-eminent home to black theatre, but mention this to Michael's associate director, Dawn Reid, and she bristles. "We're not: we do black work, as well as Asian work, as well as everyone else. We do it not because we're told to, but because we think it's necessary. And we have a diverse audience that trusts us. Building trust takes time; it doesn't take the one-off black show for the season." What troubles Reid - particularly because she herself is black - is that such labels carry with them the potential to be overlooked. "The more I get labelled, the more I get made outcast," she says. "Why can't I go in the same pot with the mainstream?"
Her question raises another: does black theatre really need a designated home? The company Talawa thought so: three years ago, it was hoping to create one, with the help of a £4m grant from Arts Council England. But when funding was denied, the loss didn't seem disastrous; in 2005, black theatre artists did indeed seem to be joining the mainstream. Already, a shift had taken place in the perception of black actors: once cast either as criminals or in minor roles, they were taking the leads in new dramas, in plays by Noel Coward, as Shakespearean kings. Kwame Kwei-Armah's play Elmina's Kitchen was in the West End, as was The Big Life, and London's major new-writing venues were snapping up plays by Roy Williams and Debbie Tucker Green. Two black-led companies, Eclipse and Nitro, were touring the country, to much acclaim. Britain even had its first black female artistic director of a regional theatre - Karena Johnson, temporarily running the Contact in Manchester.
Three years on, Kwei-Armah, Tucker Green and Williams are still regularly staged, Williams so frequently that critics comment on how prolific he is. And other black playwrights are beginning to break through: Oladipo Agboluaje, who has written for Soho Theatre, plus Levi David Addai and Bola Agbaje, both of whom emerged via the Royal Court's Critical Mass programme. But dig beneath the surface and how much has really changed?
Not much, thinks Steven Luckie. In 2005, the writer-director-producer was just finishing a four-year stint running Eclipse, a high-profile initiative sponsored by Arts Council England, designed to develop the national profile of black theatre. He had set up a laboratory for black writers and taken four big productions on tour, including - naturally - a play by Roy Williams. Since then, he argues, the momentum has been lost.
He blames money. It was also in 2005 that London won the Olympic bid; slowly but inexorably, money for the arts has become tighter as the projected Olympic spend increases. "Theatres may want to programme diverse work," says Luckie, "but there's a risk involved, and they have to make hard choices. It's bums on seats, and theatres are going to choose well-established names."
Several initiatives are in place to help black practitioners become those well-established names; this spring, Arts Council England is holding discussions about what the latest programme, Sustained Theatre, might achieve. But, says Luckie, many of his peers feel a dispiriting sense that these discussions will not differ from those that took place at the start of the decade, when the Arts Council declared that British theatre was institutionally racist. (Their 2002 report found that just 4% of staff in regional theatres were black or Asian, while only 13 of the 463 board members of UK theatres were non-white.) Ask Luckie whether the same conclusion might be drawn today and, without hesitation, he answers yes.
It's a sign that, while money is obviously key, the real issue could be something more insidious. As Kwei-Armah pointed out last week at a discussion on the future of black playwriting organised by Talawa, an assumption persists that "black writing is somehow local, while white writing is universal". "It's patronising and segregating," says playwright Trish Cooke. "A good story is something that people can share and relate to, and those stories don't have colour." As Levi David Addai says, "I write about life. Characters and themes from black culture will slip into my work because that's part of me as an artist. But I write about human beings, and every human being is welcome to listen."
Though black plays are being staged, says Karena Johnson, "most of that work is not being directed by black people". And the opportunities for black directors to work on new or classic texts by white writers are even fewer. "Directors are part of the artistic machinery of the theatre - they bring projects on board," says playwright Bonnie Greer. "But black people are not hired to be directors in this country. If you don't have enough directors who can generate, recognise and propagandise for black expression, it keeps black theatre at a certain level."
Pat Cumper, artistic director of Talawa, says: "The further up the power structure you go, to the person who decides what goes on stage, who decides who is cast, how the money is spent: that's where we're completely invisible." It rankles, because many of the theatres that are failing to employ black people are funded with public money. "We pay our taxes like everyone else," says Johnson pointedly. "We should have access to those buildings."
It is this that makes the Theatre Royal special, and a model for what other theatres could be. Yes, its artistic director is white and male - but Michael is also a child of immigrants, a second-generation Greek Cypriot, who didn't go to university or drama school but started out at the Theatre Royal distributing flyers. Alongside him is Reid, one of very few black women with an associate director's job. And that's not all. "If you come here as a punter, you see a diverse staff front-of-house," says Reid. "If you come as a practitioner, you'll find someone in our youth and education department with a different background; there's someone in finance. It's throughout the building. If theatres want to change, that change must come from within, because it's about who is in charge. It's the decision-makers who allow those doors to be opened."
The Harder They Come opens at the Barbican, London (0845 120 7550), on March 11. Bonnie Greer's Marilyn and Ella is at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, London (020-8534 0310), until March 15.