by Don’t ask Kwame Kwei-Armah about the pressures of running. He’ll raise his eyebrows, square his shoulders and make it clear that it was never a problem. “I’m a black man of a certain generation,” says the 57-year-old artistic director dryly. “I grew up running for my life from white skinheads. Running a theater?” He shakes his head. “That was the burden of life. That’s the burden of art.”
The writer, director and occasional actor has held the reins at the Young Vic since 2018, after running Baltimore Center Stage for seven years. “My father worked in a factory, my mother as an auxiliary nurse, and here I am directing theatre,” says Kwei-Armah, leaning back in a messy rehearsal room after a long day, surrounded by scripts and sheet music. “That doesn’t mean it’s not hard. That doesn’t mean the problems aren’t real. But compared to this,” he makes a dismissive gesture, “I’m doing a job I love, a job I didn’t even think was possible for someone like me. I’ve always just felt blessed to be given the space to do it.”
Kwei-Armah’s easy confidence fills the room, but his time at the Young Vic did not start smoothly. When he took over the job from David Lan, who had held the post for 18 years, Kwei-Armah programmed a season along the lines of his predecessor. “I was nervous and wanted to buy confidence,” he says. “I sat in David’s chair, saw the puffy-eyed people from his going-away party the day before and just thought, ‘Oh, shit. I’ll never be David, so why am I trying?'” Kwei-Armah called the artists he had commissioned, pulled their shows and begged for forgiveness. “I didn’t do it out of honesty,” he admits, “I did it out of fear.”
Whether insightful or reckless, that rocky beginning led to six years of artistic flourishing, with Kwei-Armah’s leadership building the Young Vic’s reputation as a centre of dynamic, benchmark-setting work. During his tenure, he oversaw the UK premiere of Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Fairview, which confronted white audiences with their own whiteness in a way theatre had rarely done before, and Cush Jumbo’s brooding, gender-blind Hamlet. He supported the West End transfer of Daniel Fish’s rollicking, revived Oklahoma!, which gave the world a fresh look at an old-fashioned musical, and oversaw the dizzying long-running show The Second Woman, in which Ruth Wilson repeated a single scene with a rotating cast for 24 hours. “I was so excited by the crowds that crowded around the theatre for that,” laughs Kwei-Armah. “I got my camera and ran around filming everyone.” As he raced around a corner, he tripped, fell into the street and broke his ankle. He still managed to watch 22 hours of the show.
Kwei-Armah describes the job of artistic director at the Young Vic as “his dream job”, but he has decided to step down at the start of 2025. “One day I woke up and thought, ‘I see too much fear around me’,” he says, choosing his words carefully. “Not just at the Young Vic, but across the industry. We’ve been hit hard since austerity at subsidy levels and that leads to a conservatism.” He frowns. “Even if you don’t see it in the programme today, you will see it in the programme very soon.”
Over the past 14 years, cuts in the subsidy sector have put artists and theatres under increasing pressure, upsetting the classic funding method that is one-third charity, one-third subsidies and one-third box office revenue. “I believe our sector was created to expand the canon and reshape the work of theatre,” says Kwei-Armah, “but audiences are demanding stars and people are afraid to experiment.”
When funding shrinks, risk-taking also shrinks, and a lack of adventurous spirit is of no interest to him. “I don’t have to be swimming in money to do the best work possible,” he clarifies. “But we have to be able to find a balance.”
He insists he is not avoiding the problem. “There is a moment when you think you can overcome gravity,” Kwei-Armah says quietly. “When you think, ‘I made wine out of water, so I’ll be able to do this forever.’ As an industry, we’ll be able to do this forever. But then…” he pauses, “you become complicit.”
Much of Kwei-Armah’s career has been defined by a hatred of complaining. “As soon as I start complaining, I have to leave,” he says firmly. “When I was an actor, I complained that there weren’t enough black writers, so I started writing. When I was a writer, I complained that white directors always directed black plays, so I learned to direct. Then, as a director, I wanted to know why the plays were put on the program the way they were, so I learned to be an artistic director.”
Structural inequality and racism followed him to the top job. A year into his tenure at the Young Vic, a board member took him aside. “They said it was difficult to fundraise because their friends said I was trying to make it to the Black National Theatre.” The same comment had been made in Baltimore a year after he took office; it no longer shocked him the second time. The board member did not stay in his position long, while increasing diversity remains one of the aspects Kwei-Armah is most proud of at the Young Vic. Offstage even more so than on. “When I first came in, there was no one who looked like my mother or my sister,” he recalls. “When I leave, backstage feels like London.”
There were times when my heart was glad and times when my heart was broken
Kwei-Armah was 20 when he decided not to follow his mother’s dream of becoming a social justice advocate. He tried to break into the music industry, then became an actor, notably in a role in Casualty. “I was always just mediocre,” he laughs. He found his voice through writing, exploring violence and responsibility in his play Elmina’s Kitchen and the intimacies of care in Let There Be Love. Eventually, after frequently being relegated to the role of “cultural adviser” on shows, the director of Elmina’s Kitchen fell ill and was given the chance to take over. In addition to his hard work and skill, Kwei-Armah credits the change in the late ’90s, when Culture Minister Chris Smith strongly supported – and funded – the importance of diversity and inclusion in the arts. “That was a massive shift,” he notes. “It was a bit of political engineering that allowed potential to be unlocked.”
You could think of Kwei-Armah’s tenure at the Young Vic as a three-act play. The first act was about laying out his intentions, bringing joy with a light-hearted, musical production of Twelfth Night and raising the stakes with Fairview’s confrontational politics. Covid has disrupted any plans, but he is incredibly proud of Best Seat in Your House, the streaming service the Young Vic created during lockdown. His second act was about the “play well done”, with transfers helping the Young Vic recover from the financial devastation of the pandemic, which left the theatre with a £2.5m deficit in 2022-23. It was around this time that controversy erupted over Tree, a show beset by allegations that Kwei-Armah and collaborator Idris Elba had wrongly removed two of the show’s writers from the project after four years in development. “I feel like I’ve already said everything I need to say about the turmoil that surrounded the project,” says Kwei-Armah. “But when I look back on the work, I’m extremely proud of it, both as a director and as a conceptual designer.”
When he leaves, Kwei-Armah finds himself in the middle of his third act. “I don’t know if I accomplished the mission,” he says. “The third act was about being as diverse as possible, and I think the economic environment we were in didn’t allow me to do that.” For his last show as director, he has chosen A Face in the Crowd, a musical by Elvis Costello and Sarah Ruhl. He used to hate musicals. “I’m an August Wilson guy,” he exclaims. “I want the deep shit!” But his views have changed in recent years. “I love it when people breathe in the joy that comes from the music,” he says. Based on Budd Schulberg’s 1953 short story that led to the 1957 film, he says it serves as a reflection of our political situation today: “It asks whether we’re getting the governments we deserve.”
The change of government in the UK came after Kwei-Armah resigned, but he is confident that the Labour government will introduce positive changes for subsidised theatre, “so that something is possible not only in the commercial sector”.
But for now, that’s his goal, with new projects waiting on both sides of the Atlantic. He will write films in LA, expand a film and television company with a new studio in Barnes, and start a commercial theater company that will work from London and New York. Nadia Fall, previously artistic director at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, will take over the baton at the Young Vic from him in January 2025.
Looking back, the unique rollercoaster ride of The Second Wife – with its scale, its agony, its pleasure and its exhaustion – perhaps sums up Kwei-Armah’s tenure at the Young Vic. “There have been times when my heart has been happy and times when it has broken my heart,” he says, nodding approvingly at the past six years. “Shows that have built me up and shows that I thought would break me.” But he found himself starting to complain, and so, by his own decision, it’s time to move on.
“I’m really proud of what we’ve accomplished,” he says, “and I’m ready to take the fight elsewhere.”
“A Face in the Crowd” runs until November 9th at the Young Vic in London.
