This Play Isn’t Set in the 1970s - These Events are Happening Now

By Keith Saha - Co–Artistic Director of 20 Stories High and writer of BLACK

My latest play BLACK is nearing the end of its tour and is proving to have different reactions wherever it goes.

The play was originally written for a short run in Liverpool, but after strong audience reactions to the piece we decided to give it a full national tour, and although a Liverpool story it seems to resonate on different levels everywhere we go, and as I'm finding out, that isn’t always a good thing.

Without giving too much away, Black is a story that centres around a young white woman called Nikki who lives on a predominantly white estate, when a Zimbabwean family move onto the close she turns a blind eye to the racism they face.

It’s a challenging piece, and the two actors that portray Nikki and the Zimbabwean teen Precious have an astonishingly challenging job to do in terms of the emotions it throws up for the audiences everywhere they go.

Nikki doesn’t hold any punches in her language she uses, she is uncensored and hearing language like this has sometimes been difficult for some audiences.

I wrote this play in response to a real event a youth worker friend had told me about. She told me about an African family who had moved onto the estate where she was working, and they were met with hostility by a lot of the local community. On hearing this I was shocked and saddened, but not surprised.

On doing further research with young people in Liverpool, I soon learnt that violent racist attacks were common, everyday casual racism was even more common. But often people didn’t talk about it.

So I wanted to write a play about what was happening and explore it deeper. And as with all my plays they are a combination of what challenges young people face now but also resonate with my own personal experiences.

It took me back to an incident that had taken place in Birkenhead in the late 70s when I was growing up. A Black family were moving in over the road and all of the street had come out to have a look. A husband and wife and two little boys the same age as me 4 or 5. The name calling started , the N word was being shouted, then the stones started to get thrown, the Mum and Dad hurriedly took their kids inside. I was one of the kids that was also throwing stones. After the family went inside, one of the older lads turned and pointed at me What about him? What about the Paki? They all looked at me, and then pounced I was thrown on the floor and was about to get a beating but fortunately the older kids in my family jumped in and protected me. At that time my family I was living with was all white, and I had not fully understood that my mixed heritage of Indian and English/Irish was an issue.

1 What I did when I picked up that stone was follow the herd. It wasn’t until I was confronted with my own heritage that I started to question the complexities of what was happening.

The next week I went home crying because the Black lad over the road had called me the N word. I also remember after we used to get bricks through our window.

All of this happened in the late 70’s but also throughout the 80’s casual racism for me was everywhere. The N word or some derivative was an everyday occurrence and being called a paki felt like it had happened so often that by time I left school I had become immune to it or learned how to cope with it.

By the end of the 80s I felt like I had come out unscathed I was glad to leave school it was 1989 and it was the second summer of love, Bernard Manning had gone from our TV screens, the NF had stopped marching and it felt like those bad old days had gone. And throughout the 90’s it felt like the UK was moving forward and multiculturalism had been fully embraced. Maybe its because by this time I had moved to London and was living in Brixton and Hackney that I had naively thought things were getting better.

When I moved back up to Liverpool in 2006 I was acutely aware of the growing racial tensions that were coming back on a national level. Heightened by 9/11 and the global recession the rise the BNP and the EDL started to look ugly on the streets

The threats of physical violence now felt more imminent, casual racism had started to come back and was more accepted. “Gollydolls” were back in gift shops up and down the country, and people were blacking up on TV albeit in the guise of post modernism, but I’m sorry I didn’t see the irony, or felt it was lost on many.

10 years later with the collapse of the BNP and the EDL we now have the acceptable face of racist views. UKIP and Britain First.

According to the 2013 British Social Attitudes Survey, 1/3 of Britons would describe themselves as racist. Combine this with the statistics that racist attacks are also on the increase. And the landscape looks startlingly bleak and akin to that of where we were in the 1970s.

So what to do with this information? I wrote BLACK.

I wrote BLACK from the perspective of Nikki a young woman who was in the middle of all this. She is based on some young women I knew growing up and she also exists in the here and now. BLACK is based on events that are happening now.

2 On a scratch performance of BLACK many audience members came up to me and asked me if the play is this set in the 1970;s or 1980’s? and responded with I don’t think this happens were I'm from. Unfortunately in many places it does. And 18 months ago before I was told the story by my Youth Worker friend I too was naïve to scale of which this was happening.

It feels like the media do not report what’s happening enough. And unless you know from personal experience that it is happening, then how would we know?

As the tour carries on the tour continues, the reactions from the audience differ night to night and can be radically different even in the same location. A mix of people unaware of the situation, of young Black people who are acutely aware and also young people like Nikki who are working their way through defining who they are and what their views are on immigration and a multi- cultural Britain.

The play has had positive feedback from theatre venues, young adults, traditional theatre goers, social workers and teachers . Many who have said we want more people to see this and can you come back and tour it again next year.

My hope is that we don’t need to tour BLACK again or it shouldn’t be a show that will still be relevant in a few years. It will be a period piece. There are no easy answers but one thing I have learned over the past few weeks, talking openly about these things on a community level helps, highlighting these issues on social media helps, speaking out against racism and direct action helps.

If you want to help, get involved or have any experiences or issues you need help with the contacts are here

Stop Hate - www.stophateuk.org/ 0808 801 0661

Victim Support - www.victimsupport.org.uk / 0808 1689 111

Unite Against Facism http://uaf.org.uk/

Anthony Walker Foundation http://www.anthonywalkerfoundation.com/

3