this is bbc news. we'll have the headlines and all the main news stories for you at the top of the hour as newsday continues, straight after hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk. i'm stephen sackur. what happens when art and politics collide? well, things can get ugly pretty quickly, with talk of culture wars and battles over values, identity and who gets to tell the stories that define us. if warfare is currently a dominant cultural metaphor, what does that make the artists? warriors? well, my guest is the ground—breaking playwright and artistic director of london's young vic theatre, kwame kwei—armah. in troubled times, can art be

persuasive rather than polarising? kwame kwei—armah, welcome to hardtalk. thank you so much for having me. it is a great pleasure to have you. now, you've been in the theatre business as an actor, a writer and a director for the best part of three decades. ijust used that phrase, some would call it a cliche, about the culture wars. does it feel to you that today there is a somewhat toxic culture war? i think you've framed it beautifully. it is toxic, but most importantly, it's disingenuous. in my humble opinion.

it's used to kind of create political fear. and ourjob as artists is, i think, fundamentally to take away that fear, to take away the binaries that i think this farce of the culture wars are. you know, i often hear politicians — and i'm not one to diss politicians, but i also often hear politicians use race or class or immigration or use history as a battering ram to get themselves into the hearts of the populist. but those issues you've just outlined — race, immigration — they are central to your work, because they're central to your own life story. yeah, totally and utterly. but... and have you been frightened off entering this territory at times? again, i think it's framed brilliantly. fortunately for me, or unfortunately, when i'm afraid of something, i have to run towards it. stephen chuckles i don't call that a virtue,

but it is fact for me. without a shadow of a doubt, even producing the play that's on at the young vic now, beneatha's place, i was worried for a while. i was worried that those of the right or even those of the left might come after me for some of the statements or some of the debates that the play wishes to catalyse. but i'm an artist. we're here to do nothing but catalyse. i can't run in fearfrom people trying to counsel you or use... ..use your work as an agenda for theirs. i want to talk more about beneatha's place, because i was lucky enough to see it just a night or two ago. so i do want to talk about it and the issues it raises. but before we get to that, just a more general point about your writing, because you've been at it for a long time. yeah. do you see yourself as something of a provocateur? i describe myself as a political playwright, that art is my tool for change — incremental change. all you can do as an artist

is catalyse the debate. and i don't see the point of me using my art if it's not to incrementally try and make the world just a little bit better. yeah, but there's a difference between catalysing a debate and putting across a very clear point of view. do you have a clear point of view on some of these issues that you just outlined, like race, justice, immigration, inequality? i absolutely do. i think as a playwright, however, myjob is to love every character that i put in any of my plays. and in order to create something dramatic, i have to make sure that all viewpoints are covered. and so whether someone sits in the far right, which is a different position to me, i still have to understand what it is i think they are saying, or what i think the land that they stand upon, what validity does it have? so, yes, kwame does have — sorry to speak about himself in the third person — does have his own political views. as a playwright, i have a point that i wish to catalyse,

but it has to be fair and almost democratic. kwame, you call yourself... i know. ..and of course you are kwame. but you were, as a kid, raised as ian — ian roberts — in west london, in southall — a racially, ethnically very mixed part of london, which at the time, in the �*70s and �*80s, was the scene of racist violence... yes. ..of real racial tension. to what extent has that shaped you? very much so. it hasn't defined me, i hope, but it has shaped me. i remember my father taking me to the top of our street at the time — i think it was in 1979 — and a pub called the hamborough tavern was aflame. and it was because the skinheads, or a skinhead group, had performed and then they had attacked the black and brown people close to it. and as my father took me to the top of the street and as i saw the pub burning — and i would have been about 12 —

he said, "this is your country, remember that." and i watched the police chase us down the street that i lived. and i saw skinheads armed with truncheons and shields. i didn't read this — i saw this. that completely and utterly shaped the way that i saw the world. you said earlier that when you are frightened, you tend to run to what frightens you rather than away from it. did you run toward trouble in those days? no. did you fight back? 0h. i mean, it depends on how you define fighting, right? i've never been a really physically strong guy. so the physicalfight was not my thing. did i have to run rather quickly when white skinhead culture at the time threatened the lives of everyone that i knew? yes. did i have to be able to defend myself to some degree? yes. but i think what happened to me,

and this was kind of shaped by my mother, is that she wanted me to be a lawyerfor socialjustice. of course, we didn't call it that then, but she wanted me to be able to fight for the community from which i came from. and when i discovered that my way of fighting was art and that my way of fighting was thinking, i went into deep training. interesting that you say you wanted to fight for your community. one thing you did, in a way, was, by changing your name, identify with a community that was your ancestral community back in ghana, rather than your immediate sort of family connection, which was to grenada in what was then the british caribbean. yes. why did you do that? was it fuelled by an anger, in a way, an anger at all that you knew your ancestors had suffered and a determination to be seen to reclaim that history?

yes and no. i like to frame it that i did it for me, that i did it for my children. my parents travelled 4,000 miles to raise me in the first world, to have the benefits of the first world. and i wanted to do the same for my children. i didn't want my children to inherit the name of someone who once owned someone in their family. and yet it was your parents' name. yeah. did it sadden them? yes, of course it did. but my mother understood. in particular, my mother understood, because at 12 she was there when i was watching roots and i saw kunta kinte being whipped until he would call himself toby. and i said, "mum, i'm going to trace our ancestry "and i'm going to take us back to the tribe that we came from." and so, in a way, when i did it, maybe ten years later, my mother could at least root it in a truth as opposed to a kind of newfangled politic. hmm. and you say that you rejected your mum's advice to enter the law

and become a sort of civil rights, human rights lawyer. you thought you could best represent your community by going into the arts, by going into the theatre. yes. but i would guess that, back in the �*80s and �*90s, when you were trying to make your name, it was kind of tough to be a young black man trying to persuade theatres notjust to hire you as an actor, but also a director as well. yeah, it was. i like to describe britain as being a colder land than it is now, but i was still standing on the shoulders of giants. there were actors of a previous generation to me who had kind of broken through. norman beaton, for example, was on tv very often, and in theatre, people were working. they were not being given the chances or the opportunities that i or many others receive today. but, you know, if you'd have asked me at 25, did i think i'd ever be the artistic director of the young vic, did i even think it was even possible? i would have said absolutely not, because i didn't see anybody in that arena. were you told that...?

and i know you've talked about it and it's somewhat difficult to talk about, but you were told that you didn't look right, that you were kind of too black in a way, that your voice wasn't right? all sorts of reasons why you would never make it in the theatre. yes. yeah. and, you know... does that still make you angry today? no. why? well, because... it's outrageous. yeah, it is outrageous. but i was taught to hate the sin and not the sinner. that it felt really important... that sounds very zen and very sort of detached and at peace with life, but can you really, honestly say that, deep down, there isn't still a burning rage at things you have experienced? i think that when i... once i traced my ancestry and once i gave myself a name that was not of someone who once owned me, ifound a peace, an inner peace, that said, "what is myjob? :myjob now is to make sure that i reap the benefits of a land

myjob now is to make sure that i reap the benefits of a land that once enslaved me, of a country that still, to some degree, discriminates against me and those who look like me. so what do i do? do i carry that anger? do i hold that in my heart? thatjust makes you heavier. what i try to do is pour that into my art and try and find avenues by which to make others look at themselves. that's what theatre is. theatre is the most magnificent mirror. you put it up to people and you say, "look at yourself. "i'm not going to tell you about yourself, "i'm just going to reflect you." mmm. and if, by chance, you see something that you don't like, then it's up to you to change it. there was a time when it looked like you were really going to make your name in the united states — cos you broke a really quite a dramatic glass ceiling in the us by becoming the first black director, artistic director, of a big us theatre. it was the theatre in baltimore, maryland. yes. you were there for quite

a number of years. you talked about the joy you experienced when you arrived to a barack 0bama presidency, a feeling that america was really moving to perhaps a post—racial moment, as some put it. it didn't quite work out that way, did it? no, and i don't think i ever believed it was going to be post—racial. what i thought was that i was living in a country that actually allowed someone, unlike our country at the time, that allowed someone to negotiate the vagaries of racism, the vagaries of oppression. and that was really powerful and invigorating. you felt there was more? cos other actors have talked about this — david harewood, for one, a very distinguished black british british actor, who's described how he found it easier to work in the united states. and i'm just interested, now that you've reflected on both the culture in the us and the uk, whether you really feel that there is more opportunity,

less entrenched sort of assumptions about who you are in the united states. yes and no. without a shadow of a doubt, there's more opportunity. that's numerics, that's demographics, and it's also the enterprise culture that is the united states. and i found myself very comfortable in the united states. i like to create and i like to have ideas and i like to try and execute on those ideas. and so the culture of the united states says if the idea is good enough, i'm going to run at it. and sometimes i find in our country that it's notjust about the quality of the idea, it's about who you're connected to. and yet — i'm going to add an "and yet" — and yet during your time there, we saw the beginnings of the black lives matter movement, we saw the killing of a whole sort of series of young, black, unarmed men by the police in the united states in various different circumstances. we saw barack 0bama succeeded by donald trump and the rise of a very white conservative

movement addressing social issues, particularly in schools and universities, in a way which many black americans found to be deeply worrying, deeply racist. so, conclusion, for you — is america a more difficult place for you, for a black man, to thrive now than the united kingdom? again, the question is framed brilliantly, and i think that each land has its own travails. in britain, we're magnificent at the microaggression, we're magnificent at the kind of slight avoidance that race isn't as bad here as it is in the united states. and, yes, it is. yes, it is? yes, it is. absolutely. we just have to look at the statistics around the prison population, around mental health, around housing or on unemployment. we just have to look at the disproportionate number of young black men under 25 who are unemployed. we can see structural

inequality in exactly the same way as in the us. although i'm going to quote to you the words of tomiwa 0wolade, a young, talented black british writer who's just written a book, this is not america: why black lives matter in britain, where the argument is precisely that we shouldn't transport assumptions about the entrenched, racist post—slavery systems in the united states and think they translate to the uk. the uk, he says, is fundamentally different. and what i love is that we're living in a time where there can be diverse thoughts within the black community. i happen to fundamentally disagree with that. i think it's flawed in its analysis. but i'm overjoyed that he's able to find an audience for that kind of propagation. so, when he says, for example, that critical race theory, which is taught on campuses in the united states... which on the whole most people actually didn't know about

until the right started talking about it. right, but his argument is that it doesn't really have a place in the culture, the university culture or otherwise in culture in the united kingdom, because we didn't have slavery, at least not on our home shores, we didn't have official segregation as they did in the united states, and that burdening, for example, young people in the united kingdom with notions of white privilege, of white guilt is a mistake. again, i have to respectfully say that i fundamentally disagree with that. we had a colour bar in this country, and that's why we had things set up like the racial equality units that were set up from the �*70s and the �*80s. we absolutely have that. there is very little difference, in my humble opinion. and just because we didn't have slavery in this country — which, actually, technically isn't true, because that was up to a certain date — it doesn't mean that certainly up until recently, that the overwhelming majority of black people in this

country were descendants of those who were enslaved. and just because it happened offshore, in the gardens of europe, doesn't mean that notions of superiority were not exported from those gardens of enterprise back into the motherland. and i've experienced it in my own life. as you referenced right at the beginning, when i was at school — a private school, by the way — my head teacher said to me, "black people cannot speak english "properly, because your jaws are structured "in a way that doesn't allow proper pronunciation." i was 11 years old, and if you say that to an 11—year—old, you are burying inferiority into their minds and you are asserting your superiority. that is exactly the same thing that critical race theory is trying to frame. so, again, i say i respectfully disagree with the analysis. and yet, having just seen beneatha's place, this revival of a play you wrote actually a decade ago, which is on at the young vic

at the moment here in london, you also clearly have some scepticism, some doubts about elements of the ultra—progressive, some would say "woke", mindset that we see in some liberal circles on campuses, both in the united states and the united kingdom. you create this imagined debate about african—american studies on campus. and you wrestle with the notion that white professors are now dominant in this department. you're kind of mocking it. you're almost mocking an ultra—woke agenda. well, i slightly rebuke the term "woke", and my generation was slightly before the woke generation. we used to call ourselves conscious, which literally means the same thing. that's been hijacked by the culture wars. and as far as i'm concerned, myjob as a playwright is to look at everything in totality and then pour it into the pot

and put some flames on it. and what i would say is that we progressives — and i define myself as a progressive — sometimes we forget that there is a need for conservatism. conservatism sometimes is just a really good braking mechanism so that human beings can adjust to change. and i think that's what i feel as kwame, and it's certainly what i put in the play, that there are conservative notions that we should pay attention to or we progressives or the next generation will pay the cost, ie a donald trump after a barack 0bama. what does being a progressive mean in terms of running a theatre? does it mean you believe in race quotas, in race equality across casting, you know, whatever the play, whatever the actual subject matter, that you insist on 50—50 casting, for example? no. let me frame it this way. i describe myself as a black postmodernist. thatjust means that i can just do anything and everything

and it doesn't matter. i don't define myself through my blackness. my blackness is just part of who i am. so as a leader, i believe that a theatre space is there to be the hub of a community. and a community in london is as diverse as it gets. so it means i want my theatre, from my staff to who's on my stage to who directs to who writes, i want it to reflect the london of now, the britain of now and possibly... right, but this isn'tjust about kwame kwei—armah, is it? it's about systems and it's about equality across the piece. so, i've spoken in the past to greg doran at the rsc, i've spoken to actors like rupert everett. rupert everett has a strong feeling that we are getting far too hung up on this sort of notion of authenticity and lived experience when it comes to casting, ie you don't have to be gay to play the part of a gay person onstage. i wonder whether you share that feeling or whether you think authenticity requires

that sort of thing. i think it depends on the play, it depends on the artist and it depends on the audience. as far as i'm concerned, when you walk into a theatre, you hang your literal boots up at the door, which for me means that most people should have access to most things. there are protected characteristics in which, if i'm going to cast a white actor to play a black character as written, i will think about the history of discrimination, i will think about how my audience might respond to it and if, ultimately, it will serve the play. in a similar way, if i had a black actor in a part that might be traditionally from another culture and if it gets in the way of the play, then i won't do it. i'm there to serve the art. but what i also have to do is understand that audiences want to incrementally be brought forward. they don't want to sit where they were. they come into spaces like the young vic in order to say,

"challenge me, take me to that next place." have you changed the profile of the audience at the young vic? because traditionally theatre in london is dominated by white, middle—class people. have you changed that? i don't know that i've changed it. i inherited a diverse audience. it was one of the reasons why i wanted to lead the young vic. and i would say that we have augmented that. i'm really proud, actually, of my staff. when i walked in the door, actually, it is not as diverse as it looks today. i walked in and i said to all of my senior managers, "i want people in here who look like my mother, "who are making decisions. "i want people that look like my cousins." and i would say if you walked into my administrative bay now, you would see that. so have we made structural changes? absolutely. have we demanded it via quotas? absolutely not. we have demanded it by seeking excellence. do you think the theatre has much of a future? yeah! well, look around you. look at the way in which so many talented actors and directors seem to be drawn to streaming platforms,

to the money and the resources and the potential that is offered by something that, frankly, threatens the future of the theatre. stephen, it's a brilliant question, because, in truth, it's quite hard. i mean, there's a strike happening right now, but it's quite hard to get writers for the theatre who are of a certain level, purely because theatre pays very little and tv pays a lot! and similarly, for actors... you've dallied with tv and film yourself. i write tv and film right now. but the truth of the matter is this is an art form that has existed from ancient egypt right up to today. i do not believe that the challenge of streaming or the challenge of another technology will get in the way of the human being staring at another human being telling a facet of their story. 0urjob — which is why i really appreciate the question — ourjob is to understand where our audience is and to reach and find them and speak to them

in a way that says it's worth leaving your house to come and see a reflection of yourself in 3d. we have to reach through all of the barriers and make ourselves continually valid. we have to end there. but, kwame kwei—armah, it's been a pleasure. thank you for being on hardtalk. an absolute pleasure. thank you so much, stephen. hello there. for most places, sunday was a drier, brighter and calmer day than saturday was, but it wasn't particularly warm. as we head through the next few days, though, it does look like we'll see something drier and warmer

developing, for a time at least. in the short term, actually quite a cool and fresh monday morning under this ridge of high pressure but there is a frontal system, you'll notice here, that will be moving its way in from the west. so, for monday, some spells of sunshine around. scattered showers, but not as many as we saw during sunday. however, as this weather system approaches from the west, we'll see thickening cloud and perhaps some misty, murky conditions across parts of south—west england, south—west wales and later into northern ireland, the odd splash of rain here late in the day. temperatures 17—21 degrees. through monday night, we will bring this weather system eastwards. not a huge amount of rain with it, there will be some showery rain, but it's certainly going to bring a lot of cloud, some mist and murk, particularly around the coasts and over some of the hills. northern half of the uk, though, the far north of england, northern ireland and scotland, likely to see quite a lot of sunshine on tuesday,

of scotland. temperatures generally between 16—20 degrees in most places. now, through tuesday night, as we bring some increasingly humid air in from the south—west, i think we'll see some fog developing around some of the coasts of south—west england, through the bristol channel up into parts of wales, quite murky over some of the hills as well. and this zone of somewhat cloudier weather will push a little further north—eastwards through the day. could generate the odd light shower, some bits and pieces of rain. but most places dry on wednesday, and certainly across the southern half of the uk, and actually even up into parts of northern ireland, it's going to start to feel quite a lot warmer, and scotland will turn warmer, too, as we head into thursday. all of us getting into more of a southerly flow, and that will cause the temperatures to rise. some areas of fog and low cloud to start thursday morning. tending to break up to reveal large amounts of sunshine, but temperatures may be up to 26 degrees in some western parts of scotland. we could see highs of 27

or 28, given enough sunshine and thursday night is going to be a very muggy affair indeed, temperatures not dropping very far, down to around 15 or 16 degrees. but, that warm and muggy feel will not last. on friday, we will see this weather front pushing in from the west. this is a cold front — it will bring a change to fresher, cooler conditions as the wind direction changes, and we bring in a westerly wind off the atlantic. so, this band of rain pushing its way northwards and eastwards. some showers following on behind, some spells of sunshine, too, but while eastern parts of england may still get to around 2a or 25 degrees, out towards the west, it will start to feel cooler and fresher. and that takes us into the weekend, and the return of low pressure, which will, at least to some extent, be in charge of our weather, bringing some rain at times, and some brisk winds. but high pressure isjust to the south of us, and if this high is a little bit stronger and exerts a little more influence, there is a good chance that some southern parts will at least see some spells of sunshine and some relative warmth. the further north and west you are, though, through next weekend, into the start

of the following week, it does look like we'll return to something more unsettled, and a bit cooler, as well. bye for now.

welcome to newsday, reporting live from singapore. i'm mariko 0i. the headlines: niger's military leaders close its airspace, blaming threats of intervention after a deadline to reinstate the ousted president expires. rescue efforts continue in china after typhoon doksuri batters the country's northeast. in the uk — the first group of asylum seekers to be housed on a boat are expected to be moved there on monday. and barbie hits $1 billion at the global box office, making history for its director, greta gerwig. live from our studio in singapore, this is bbc news. it's newsday.