ARTS WEEKLY/BRITAIN: Trauma of Black Youth Comes to Stage

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Beverly Andrews

LONDON, Jul 22 2003 (IPS) - Black British playwright Roy Williams has often been compared with the legendary African-U.S. storyteller August Wilson.

Like Wilson, his plays chronicle key moments in his country’s history, but unlike August Wilson who does this by setting each of his play in a specific decade, Roy Williams appears to be more influenced by the news stories splashed on the front pages of newspapers.

His latest offering, ‘Fallout’, at London’s Royal Court Theatre closely echoes the Damiolla Taylor case and in doing so paints a very disturbing portrait of British youth today. Taylor was beaten to death by a group of boys in London when he was just 11.

Set in the round, with the audience seated perched above the action, the play opens with a loud crack, and the apparent sound of a gunshot. We then see the guilty boys as they run away from the scene of the murder.

Angry, disillusioned and trapped by social and economic circumstances even before this murder has taken place, it is obvious that these kids are headed for a life of unemployment or worse, languishing in prisons.

But at this point Williams achieves an almost impossible feat. He takes the audience inside the lives of these troubled teenagers and you are not only led to understand their actions but despite the horrific crime they have committed you begin to care about their future.

One has a drunken, homeless father who begs on the council estate where the boy lives, another is desperately in love with a girl he feels unworthy of, so he feels compelled to commit ever more outrageous acts to prove his manhood to her. A pair of policemen, one white and the other black watch over this disaffected group as they fight their own tribal war.

The events of the play closely follow the real-life Damiolla Taylor case, where a young Nigerian boy living on council estates was stabbed to death and left to die by a group of teenagers.

In ‘Fallout’ as in the real life case, it is never made apparent why the boys do what they do except perhaps that they felt compelled to destroy a teenager who unlike themselves had the possibility of a hopeful future.

Fallout has many similarities to earlier work by Roy Williams, particularly his critically acclaimed play ‘The Gift’ which looked at the infamous Stephen Lawrence murder. Lawrence was a 17-year-old killed by a white gang. ‘The Gift’ looks at the possibility of something positive coming out of tragedy. ‘Fallout’ takes a head-on view of nihilism today.

‘Fallout’ is graced by the presence of TV and theatre star Lenny James, in the role of the angry black policeman. The powerful portrayal of this troubled man caught between opposing forces was thought-provoking, but the production really belongs to the young actors who portray the killers.

Their honest portrayals of disaffected youth are haunting. They help to bring alive a world where violence is constant and where the worst insult that can be hurled against anyone is to call them "soft", and that they unfortunately are still capable of feeling compassion.

‘Fallout’ is not an easy play to watch. Its violence is stomach churning and its portrayal of youth is deeply disturbing.

But in the Britain of today with rising crime, with teenage violence more prevalent than ever before, the play takes a searing look at what becomes of those excluded from society. And perhaps the message of ‘Fallout’ message is that society leaves these youngsters to languish without hope at its own peril.