Kwame Kwei Armah

Early life

Kwei-Armah was born in Hillingdon Hospital and named Ian Roberts. He changed his name when he was aged 19 after tracing his family history (in which he first became interested as a child after watching the TV series Roots), through the slave trade back to his ancestral African roots in Ghana, descendent of Coromantins. His parents were born in Grenada, then a British colony. His maternal grandmother moved to Trinidad, where she died, leaving her five children including Kwei-Armah's mother as orphans in Grenada. Kwei-Armah's mother moved to Britain in 1962. His father, Eric, moved to Britain in 1960, at a time when there was high unemployment in Grenada, and found work in London at the local Quaker Oats factory.

When he was one year old, Kwei-Armah's family moved to a two-storey terraced house in Southall, London, where they let two rooms to help to pay for the mortgage. Kwei-Armah started at his first primary school as a five-year-old, and after a teacher disciplined him by kicking him in the back, his mother took on three jobs to pay for him and his two siblings to go to a private stage school, the Barbara Speake Stage School in London – working as a child minder, as a night nurse at Hillingdon Hospital, and doing some hairdressing work. He also attended The Salvation Army, and received musical training there. At the age of about 35 years his mother had a stroke leading to left-sided weakness, from which she slowly recovered.

Kwei-Armah grew-up in Southall in the 1970s at a time when Asian families were moving in and white families were moving out, and he perceived animosity from the Asian community towards the Afro-Caribbean community. One day, at the time of the April 1979 Southall riots, his father came home after the evening work-shift and took him out to see the Hambrough Tavern on fire. Kwei-Armah saw a police van arrive, and when the police started to charge at the crowd using batons and shields he ran home frightened. From the upstairs front room he claims to have seen the police chasing black and Asian boys along the street followed by skinheads, who also had batons and shields, chasing behind the police. The event shocked him making him feel that he was living in an alien environment, and reinforced his resolve to do well in his education. He later wrote about the event in his first play, A Bitter Herb.

Appearances on stage, television and radio

Kwei-Armah appeared in the original London production of Elegies for Angels, Punks and Raging Queens, which played at the Criterion Theatre in 1993.

Kwei-Armah first achieved fame playing the paramedic Finlay Newton in the BBC drama series Casualty from 1999 to 2004. His other television credits include appearances in episodes of Casualty′s sister series Holby City, the BBC's Afternoon Play, Between the Lines and The Bill. In 2003 he appeared as a contestant on the Reality TV programme Comic Relief does Fame Academy and subsequently released an album, Kwame. In 2007, he starred as "E. R. Braithwaite" in the two-part BBC Radio 4 adaptation of To Sir, with Love.

Kwei-Armah was seen in the episode "Who Shot the Sheriff?" in the 2006 BBC One revival of Robin Hood, as an ambitious town planner in Lewis, and in the feature film Fade to Black opposite Danny Huston, Christopher Walken and Diego Luna. He is also a regular on TheatreVoice.

He presented 15 February 2009 episode of the Channel 4 documentary Christianity: A History, during which he spoke about his own Christian faith and African identity, in addition to the African origins of Christianity in Ethiopia.

In the summer of 2009, he presented the Channel 4 series, On Tour with the Queen, which looked at the impact of Queen Elizabeth II's tour of the Commonwealth that took place between November 1953 and May 1954. He also met with King George Tupou V of Tonga, Sitiveni Rabuka and Queen Elizabeth II herself on the trip. In March 2010, Kwei-Armah appeared in the penultimate and final episodes of the fourth series of Skins.

For a number of years Kwei-Armah has appeared as a panellist on the arts discussion show Newsnight Review. He also appeared on Question Time on two occasions and reported for The Culture Show.

On 15 May 2011 he was the stranded person on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs. His musical selections included the political power-rap of Chuck D and his band Public Enemy, Marvin Gaye, Bob Marley and Lord Kitchener. Kwei-Armah said living with his parents was like existing with two very different types of theatre in the family home: he would be serving rum to his father and his pals, while his mother was hosting church meetings in the living-room.

In 2011 Kwei-Armah chose Marcus Garvey as his subject for BBC Radio 4 Great Lives.

Work as a playwright

Kwei-Armah's first play, Bitter Herb (1998), won him a Peggy Ramsay award, and was subsequently put on by the Bristol Old Vic, where he also became writer-in-residence. His Blues Brother, Soul Sister was produced at the Theatre Royal, Bristol, in 1999, and Big Nose was performed in 1999 at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry.

Kwei-Armah's fifth play, Elmina's Kitchen, premiered in May 2003 at the National Theatre, and was shortlisted in the "Best New Play" category at the 2004 Laurence Olivier Awards. That same year, Kwei-Armah received the Evening Standard Award for the Most Promising New Playwright of 2003. In 2005, he was nominated for a BAFTA award for the television version of Elmina's Kitchen.

Walter's War, a drama written by Kwei-Armah and based on the wartime experiences of footballer Walter Tull's life, was made by UK TV channel BBC Four and screened on 9 November 2008 as part of the BBC's "Ninety Years of Remembrance" season in November 2008. Kwei-Armah also had a cameo role in the film.

Kwei-Armah is a member of the board of the National Theatre and was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Open University in 2008, and in 2009 was a judge for the BBC World Service's International Radio Playwriting Competition. On 28 February 2011, he was named as the new artistic director at Baltimore's Center Stage Theatre, replacing Irene Lewis, who served in the position for 19 years. Kwei-Armah is no stranger to Center Stage, where his play Elmina's Kitchen was staged in 2005, followed by Let There Be Love in 2010, and in 2007 he directed Naomi Wallace's Things of Dry Hours.

Kwei-Armah was involved in the Bush Theatre's 2011 project Sixty-Six Books, for which he wrote a piece based on a chapter of the King James Bible.

He is also a patron of the Shakespeare Schools Festival, a charity that enables school children across the UK to perform Shakespeare in professional theatres.

In October 2016 Kwei-Armah directed the European premiere of One Night in Miami by the award-winning, black, US playwright, Kemp Powers. One Night in Miami ran 6 October – 3 December 2016 at Donmar Warehouse in London's West End. The all-black cast portrays the friendship between four of the most celebrated black icons in American history at a pivotal moment in their lives: 22-year-old boxing champion Cassius Clay, on the brink of becoming Muhammad Ali, celebrates his momentous world heavyweight championship title with controversial civil rights activist Malcolm X, along with influential singer songwriter Sam Cooke and NFL champion footballer Jim Brown. The action takes place in a Miami hotel room, watched over by Nation of Islam security.

Plays