Culture in Lockdown: Roy Williams – ‘The idea of restarting work kept me going through Covid-19’
Playwright Roy Williams tells Fergus Morgan about the culture he has been enjoying in lockdown, including classic movies, The Eddy on Netflix and Mercury-nominated singer-songwriter Michael Kiwanuka’s latest album
At 52, and two and a half decades into his career as a playwright, Roy Williams has nearly 30 plays to his name, including Clubland, Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads, and the Olivier-nominated Sucker Punch.
The most recent, Death of England, which he co-wrote with the show’s director Clint Dyer, finished its acclaimed run at the National Theatre’s Dorfman only a few days before venues across the country shut their doors. Not long after, Williams himself contracted coronavirus.
“It was scary,” he says. “I’d never felt that way in my entire life. My lungs were the worst. I could barely walk anywhere without feeling exhausted. Walking a couple of yards felt like running a marathon.”
He adds: “It was actually the idea of starting work again that kept me going. You’d think that for a writer, staying at home and working would be easy, but we take so much for granted. You couldn’t pop out for a coffee, or have a beer with a friend, or go to the bookshop or whatever, and it is those things that inspire me to write – the things people say, the things people do.
“Then the George Floyd thing happened. It’s sad that it took such an awful murder to inspire me to be creative. It was pure rage. I made myself watch that video. It made me so angry. It made me cry. I just thought: ‘What can I do?’ ”
Film
We’ve watched a lot of classic movies: Thelma and Louise, The Shawshank Redemption, Tootsie – films we hadn’t seen for years. I remember watching Tootsie in the cinema back in the 1980s. It was nice to see how different New York was back then, compared to how it was the last time I went. We found ourselves thinking if a film like that would get made nowadays, because of where we are politically and culturally. Would it be allowed to be made now?
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TV
We’ve been pillaging Netflix, and watching some boxsets that might have flown under the radar. There was a brilliant one called The Eddy, written by Jack Thorne, Rachel De-Lahay and Rebecca Lenkiewicz, and starring André Holland. It’s set in a jazz club in modern-day Paris, and it’s about the guy who runs it and his relationships with the band and with his daughter. It has a great, multicultural cast and fantastic music, too. It’s refreshing to see different faces and different narratives on TV. It is really inspiring.
I felt the same about I May Destroy You. It’s what the public wants and I hope broadcasters learn lessons from that.
Books
I’ve been rereading a lot of James Baldwin. I said to someone the other day: “I wonder what James Baldwin would have made of the state of the world at the moment.”
But then it occurred to me that everything he said and everything he wrote, he could have written about right now. Nothing he said has dated, which is inspiring in one way, and depressing in another. His documentary film I Am Not Your Negro is an amazing piece of work. That was on Netflix, too.
Music
I downloaded Michael Kiwanuka’s self-titled new album ages ago, and I’ve finally got around to listening to it all instead of dipping in and out. There’s one song on it that always makes me cry: Piano Joint (This Kind of Love). It’s just a gorgeous song. Kiwanuka restores my faith in modern music.
My guilty pleasure is the soundtrack music of John Barry. He did a lot of the Bond films in the 1960s and 1970s. He’s a fantastic composer. I don’t listen to music when I write now, but I used to, and John Barry was always someone I loved having on in the background.
What theatre work have you been doing?
Two revivals of my work were cancelled, which was disappointing, but it was pointless crying into my pillow about it. It happens and people are a lot worse off than me. I still hope that those two productions will be done next year.
I’ve also been involved with 846, a collection of audio plays responding to the death of George Floyd by people of colour. After it happened, I reached out to my writer friends on Facebook and said: “Let’s all write something.” It seemed like a few comments on Twitter and Facebook weren’t enough. I thought: “We’re writers, so let’s write.”
That was our way of adding our voices and our outrage. I took those pieces to Nadia Fall at Theatre Royal Stratford East. She found a director and got them recorded and they have been released on TRSE’s website. They will also be staged at the Greenwich and Docklands International Festival, which is exciting, although I have no idea what it will look like.
846 Live is at Greenwich and Docklands International Festival on September 12
The audio plays are available on Theatre Royal Stratford East’s website
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