Street Life: Black Masculinity and Youth Violence in Roy Williams’ ‘Urban’ Plays

Abstract

Roy Williams is one of the most successful black British playwrights ever and is highly commended as one of the most valued and articulate new writers in contemporary British theatre. His emergence in the mid-1990s coincided with a surge in new writing and ‘in yer face’ theatre by white playwrights such as Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill and Jez Butterworth, and his achievements may well have influenced the new generation of black playwrights to emerge in the early 2000s. After examining his parents’ generation and experiences of migration from the West Indies to Britain in his first three plays (The No Boys Cricket Club (1996), Starstruck (1998) and The Gift (2001)) Williams has gained the most recognition for his portrayals of race, masculinity and national identity in new millennial Britain, which are the focus of my discussions of his work in this book. His portrayals of second- and third-generation experiences of contemporary black masculinity mark new territory in the landscape of black ‘identity politics’ plays that are grounded in negotiating ‘Britishness’ within multiracial urban contexts. Williams drew inspiration from white playwright Barrie Keeffe’s portrayal of disaffected youth in plays such as Sus (1979; revived Young Vic 2010), which depicted the police application of a harsh stop and search arrest on a black man on election night in 1979 when Margaret Thatcher was being elected as Prime Minister.