Roy Williams: "I write what I don’t see"

Roy Williams OBE will be bringing his latest play, All Roads, to the Bernie Grant Arts Centre this month – Miriam Balanescu spoke to him ahead of the show

All Roads production shots / Credit Mullineaux Productions

While Roy Williams OBE has had his plays performed in some of the most highly-reputed venues in the UK – from the Royal Court Theatre to the National Theatre – what he is most passionate about is bringing his work to smaller, less traditional venues, reaching out to new audiences and “taking the play to them”.

Roy’s latest play, All Roads, is ready to set out on a four-week tour and do exactly that. The project is a partnership between Attic Theatre and Tramshed aiming to seek out fresh audiences around London, fostering a love of theatre in the next generation. This new work itself is about the youngest generation, Roy said, explaining his starting point was “me acknowledging myself getting older, realising so much has been spoken and written about the Windrush generation, which my parents were a part of. They came here and had their children, the second generation, which I’m a part of. That’s been kind of running around my head for several years, brought on by the fact of me losing both my parents. I slowly realised we’re the old farts now.”

He adds: “It got me asking questions about the next generation, the third generation: who are they? And how British do they feel, as well as being Black? How do they view us as well? Are they frustrated with us, as we were frustrated with our parents?”

All Roads is a fraught love story between two Black teenagers living today, dealing with the fallout of tragedy. Roy said: “They’re fighting against a lot of stereotypes that have been imposed on them by other people, Black and white.”

The BAFTA and Olivier Award-nominee has written plays both contemporary and historical, allegorical and realist. “The difficult thing for me is I’m writing about young people who are considerably younger than myself now. I just wanted to get it right – get their lingo right, their attitude.

“One can’t be 100% authentic. That’s impossible, but you will at least try to get as close as you possibly can.” Roy’s plays, he claimed, always explore similar conversations – those of race, identity, nationalism and dislocation. “As long as I still feel I can tell stories within that world, I will continue to do so,” he explained. “It’s looking at the complexity of all of these themes and there’s so many. So, I think it’s a writer’s job to find those differences, those complexities in each story that I tell, and it helps telling it from a different perspective, a different attitude.”

The play is a two-hander, meaning only two actors take on all the characters – they have to shapeshift between roles. When asked whether this made it a challenge to propel the plot forward, he said: “That’s standard for any play, regardless of how many characters you have – you’ve got to keep up the momentum. I did begin, actually, with an early draft with four characters, [including] the parents of each of them. As most writers will tell you, the more drafts you do, it becomes all about discarding what characters you don’t need and bringing in what characters you do need.”

It felt important to Roy to put these characters on the stage: “I don’t think I’ve seen characters like this portrayed before, at least not to my satisfaction. I just thought, I want these characters to be heard. I’ve seen them, I’ve heard them. We haven’t seen enough of that perspective. That’s a driving force in all of my work – I write what I don’t see.”

As discussion around ‘levelling up’ the arts and reaching audiences less likely to access theatres has increased, bringing All Roads to the Bernie Grant Arts Centre felt like the right fit. “I knew instinctively the kind of audience we would attract would be exactly what we’re looking for with this play,” Roy said. “That’s the vision: to inspire another generation to love theatre. That’s what I wanted to write a play for in the first place.

“Theatre is not about the West End, it’s not about the National Theatre or the Royal Court, even though they are strong, important venues.

“We’re in for a rough time and so many theatres I know and respect have had their funding completely cut. For some frustrating reason, new writing always seems to be the first to bear the brunt of it. I’ve never understood why because everything begins with the written word, everything begins with a new play.”

Despite having made home for his work on screen and on radio, Roy insisted he owed his career to the stage: “I wouldn’t be here talking to you if it wasn’t for theatre. It’s the only form I would say where the writer will have a feeling of being the most important person. In theatre it’s all about serving whatever the writer has written.”

All Roads runs at the Bernie Grant Arts Centre from Thursday, 30th March – Saturday, 1st April.

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