Cooking up a storm

FOR years, the West End has been a no-go area for black British drama.

Black Americans yes, but not the home-grown variety. Now, suddenly, two shows arrive at the same time.

Kwame Kwei-Armah's Elmina's Kitchen opens tonight at the Garrick, and, next month, The Big Life sails into the Apollo Theatre.

For all their differences - Elmina's Kitchen is a hard-hitting drama about gun crime in Hackney's Murder Mile while The Big Life is a feelgood ska musical about West Indian migrants in the 1950s - both are courting a new black audience.

And it's a less reverent audience that brings with it a quite different theatrical experience. As anyone who has seen a show at the Theatre Royal Stratford East or the Tricycle, or a black play at the Royal Court, can attest, black audiences do flock to see plays by black writers and, unlike the traditional staid white audience, they often participate in the drama by calling out approval or objecting vocally.

Both these shows have been hyped as the first time that black Britons will see their lives portrayed on West End stages. This may be true in the narrow sense that the shows are the first to be staged in the heart of London, but it ignores the fact that black British playwriting has a long history.

Black writers have been penning plays since the 1930s, when CLR James's The Black Jacobins starred Paul Robeson, and in the 1950s, when Errol John's Moon on a Rainbow Shawl was a hit. Things really took off in the 1970s with writers such as Mustapha Matura, Michael Abbensetts and Alfred Fagon.

These plays were, however, staged at subsidised theatres and didn't have the make-or-break pressure of profit margins. Both Elmina's Kitchen and The Big Life have also been developed in the subsidised sector and so are not West End shows in a purely commercial sense. Even so, they need big audiences to survive. Will black Britons come and see them?

Elmina's Kitchen's selling point is its actor/writer. Known to millions of viewers as Casualty's Finlay Newton, Kwei-Armah also takes the lead in his play, which, when it originally opened at the National Theatre in 2003, won him the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright.

"The reason I agreed to appear on stage now," he says, "is that it was suggested that, with me in it, we might break the glass ceiling of having a black British play in the West End." But can the play repeat its National success, when it filled the 300-seat Cottesloe space, in a commercial theatre that is double the size?

"It does worry me slightly," admits Kwei-Armah. "Or rather, that's the challenge." He says that when Elmina's Kitchen toured stateside to Baltimore, it filled a 700-seater with mixed black and white audiences for six weeks - "and they had never even heard of me - so we should be able to fill the Garrick".

In New York, he saw Denzel Washington in Julius Caesar play to huge mixed audiences. In fact, the Americans have a much better record of commercial black plays - Raisin in the Sun, recently revived in London, was billed as the first black play on Broadway. It premiered in 1958, but the first black Broadway play was Garland Anderson's Appearances in 1925.

Kwei-Armah says that "too few black people go to the theatre because - just like white workingclass people - they are disenfranchised. They think, 'Am I worthy enough?' and 'Is this my natural habitat?' The more plays that are put on about Caribbean or working-class people, the more those people will come."

His recipe is more stars. "When I saw Topdog/Underdog at the Royal Court [by American Suzan Lori-Parks] the audience was full of black kids who'd come to see rapper Mos Def in the cast," he says.

He's also proud that Fix Up, his recent second play at the National, sold out, with between 30 and 50 per cent non-white audiences.

An even better idea than stars is lower ticket prices. Indeed, Elmina's Kitchen is offering 50 seats a night for Pounds 10 to young people aged 13-18, and a special community liaison officer is going to London schools and youth groups with tickets at only Pounds 5.

The recent success of black British writers such as Kwei-Armah, Roy Williams (whose Little Sweet Thing has just finished at Hampstead) and Debbie Tucker Green (with Stoning Mary, which also closed at the weekend, at the Royal Court) has prompted talk of a black theatre revival. Ironically, the contemporary issues of multicultural Britain that they deal with have not always endeared them to their black audiences.

Williams says that he has had complaints from some theatregoers that his plays present negative stereotypes. "I knew that would be a risk, me being a black playwright writing about black kids who commit crime, but that s**t's happening out there. And if I don't write about it, I'd be ignoring reality."

Associate producer Philip Hedley does not have the same fight on his hands with The Big Life, which began at Stratford East, the venue he ran for 25 years. " It's inevitable," he says, "that we will get lumped together with Elmina's Kitchen, but I must stress: we don't have guns in ours. Ours is about the success stories - the hardworking, achieving people."

The Big Life hopes to repeat the West End success of last year's Young Vic transfer Simply Heavenly, and Five Guys Named Moe, another Stratford East production, which scored a commercial hit 15 years ago. Both of those, though, dealt with black American themes and culture. The Big Life is being marketed as "the first West End musical set in a black British community".

Hedley certainly managed to attract ethnically diverse audience to his east London venue. "The audience at Stratford East has always got the best reviews of any audience in the country," he says.

"They are lively, and they participate."

But will they travel? "It hasn't happened so far," he admits. "Only a tiny percentage of our audience came to see Five Guys Named Moe.

A lot of West End producers saw The Big Life in Stratford and praised it to the skies, then they'd look at me sideways and ask, 'But will your audience come to the West End?'" Hedley is obviously going to do his best to get them there. The Big Life supporters include celebrities - Benjamin Zephaniah, Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Trevor Phillips - and "ambassadors", who help to organise coach parties. "It's got a heartwarming campaign feel about it," says Hedley. "Everyone who sees the show wants to bring their families." As he points out, the best publicity is enthusiasm. "If word of mouth doesn't work, you're sunk."

. Aleks Sierz is contributing to a forthcoming book, Black Theatre in Britain, to be published this year by Rodopi. Elmina's Kitchen is booking at the Garrick Theatre (0870 8901104) until 27 August. The Big Life previews at the Apollo Theatre (0870 8901104) from 11 May.

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