‘They said I was trying to make it the Black National Theatre’: Kwame Kwei-Armah on his trailblazing Young Vic tenure

Don’t ask Kwame Kwei-Armah about the pressures of leadership. He’ll raise his eyebrows, square his shoulders and make it clear that’s never been a concern. “I’m a Black man of a certain generation,” the 57-year-old artistic director says drily. “I grew up having to run for my life from white skinheads. Running a theatre?” He shakes his head. “That was the burden of life. This is the burden of art.”

The writer, director and sometime actor has held the reins at the Young Vic since 2018, after seven years running Baltimore Center Stage. “My dad worked in a factory, my mum worked as an auxiliary nurse, and here I am running theatres,” Kwei-Armah says, sitting back in a messy rehearsal room after a long day, surrounded by scripts and sheet music. “It doesn’t mean this isn’t hard. It doesn’t mean the problems are not real. But in comparison,” he makes a dismissive motion, “I am doing a job I love, a job I didn’t even think was possible for someone like me. I’ve always just felt blessed to be given the space to do it.”

Kwei-Armah’s easy confidence fills the room, but his time at the Young Vic didn’t get off to a smooth start. When he first took on the job from David Lan , who had been in the post for 18 years, Kwei-Armah programmed a season in the model of his predecessor. “I was nervous and I wanted to buy trust,” he says. “I sat in David’s chair, saw people puffy-eyed from his leaving party the day before, and I was like: ‘Oh fuck. I’m never going to be David, so why am I trying?’” Kwei-Armah called the artists he’d commissioned, withdrew their shows, and begged forgiveness. “I hadn’t done it out of truth,” he concedes, “I’d done it out of fear.”

Revelatory or ruthless, that bumpy beginning led to six years of an artistically thriving theatre, with Kwei-Armah’s leadership extending the Young Vic’s reputation as a hub of dynamic, bar-raising work. During his tenure, he has overseen the UK premiere of Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Pulitzer-winning Fairview, which confronted white audiences with their own whiteness in a way that theatre had rarely explored before, and Cush Jumbo’s brooding, gender-blind Hamlet . He supported the West End transfer of Daniel Fish’s rollicking, revitalised Oklahoma! , which made the world see a fusty old musical anew, and shepherded the dizzying durational show The Second Woman , in which Ruth Wilson repeated a single scene with a rotating cast of actors for 24 hours. “I was so excited about the crowds wrapped round the theatre for that,” Kwei-Armah laughs. “I got my camera and ran around filming everybody.” As he tore round a corner, he tripped, fell into the road and fractured his ankle. He still managed to see 22 hours of the show.

Kwei-Armah describes the job of artistic director of the Young Vic as “the dream gig”, but he has chosen to step down at the start of 2025. “One day I woke up and I went: ‘I’m seeing too much fear around me,’” he says, picking his words carefully. “Not just at the Young Vic but in the sector. We’ve been battered at a subsidy level since austerity and that’s creating a conservatism.” He frowns. “Even if you don’t see it in programming today, you will see it in programming very soon.”

Over the last 14 years, cuts to the subsidised sector have put increasing pressure on artists and theatres, unbalancing the gold-standard funding method of one-third philanthropy, one-third subsidy and one-third box office. “I think our sector has been created to extend the canon, to reshape what theatre does,” Kwei-Armah says, “but audiences are demanding stars and people are afraid to experiment.”

When funding shrivels, so does appetite for risk, and he is uninterested in a lack of adventure. “I don’t need to be swimming in money in order to make the best work that I can,” he clarifies. “But we do need to be able to balance.”

He insists he’s not just walking away from the problem. “There’s a moment when you think you can defy gravity,” Kwei-Armah says softly. “When you think: ‘I have made wine out of water, so I’ll be able to do that for ever.’ We’ll be able to do that for ever as a sector. But then … ” he falters, “you become complicit.”

Much of Kwei-Armah’s career has been fuelled by a hatred of complaining. “The moment I start moaning, I gotta go,” he says definitively. “When I was an actor, I was moaning about there not being enough Black writers, so I started to write. When I was a writer, I complained about white directors always directing Black plays, so I learned to direct. Then as a director I wanted to know why plays were being programmed as they were, so I learned to become an artistic director.”

Structural inequality and racism continued to follow him into the top job. A year into his leadership at the Young Vic, a member of the board took him aside. “They said they were finding it hard to fundraise, because their friends were saying I was trying to make it into the Black National Theatre.” The same comment had been made a year into his tenure in Baltimore; second time round, it didn’t shock him any more. The board member did not retain their role for long, while increasing diversity remains one of the aspects Kwei-Armah is most proud of having influenced at the Young Vic. Off stage even more so than on. “When I first walked in, there was no one who looked like my mother or my sister,” he recalls. “As I leave, it feels like London backstage.”

There have been times when my heart has been elated and times when my heart has been broken

Kwei-Armah was 20 when he decided he wasn’t going to follow his mother’s dreams for him to become a lawyer for social justice. An effort to break into the music industry shifted to acting, notably in a role on Casualty; “I was only ever mediocre,” he chuckles. He found his voice through writing, exploring violence and responsibility through his play Elmina’s Kitchen and the intimacies of care in Let There Be Love . Finally, having been frequently relegated to the role of “cultural adviser” on shows, the director of Elmina’s Kitchen fell ill, and he was given a chance to lead. Alongside his graft and skill, Kwei-Armah credits the shift that came at the end of the 90s when culture secretary Chris Smith firmly supported – and financially incentivised – the importance of diversity and inclusion in the arts. “That was a seismic change,” he notes. “It was a bit of political engineering that allowed potential to be released.”

You could look at Kwei-Armah’s tenure at the Young Vic as a three-act play. The first was about setting his intentions, bringing joy with a bright, musical production of Twelfth Night , and raising the stakes with the confrontational politics of Fairview. Covid ripped up all the plans, but he is incredibly proud of Best Seat in Your House , the streaming service the Young Vic created during lockdown. His second act was about the “well-made play”, with transfers helping the Young Vic recover from the financial devastation of the pandemic, which saw the theatre hit a deficit of £2.5m in 2022-23. It was around this time that controversy occurred with Tree , a show frayed by an accusation that Kwei-Armah and his collaborator, Idris Elba, had unfairly removed two of the show’s writers from the project after four years of development. “I feel like I’ve already said everything I have to say about the turmoil that surrounded the project,” Kwei-Armah says. “But when I look back at the work, I am extremely proud of it, directorially and conceptually.”

As he leaves, Kwei-Armah sees himself as being midway through his third act. “I don’t know that I’ve completed the mission,” he says. “Act three was about being as eclectic as fuck, and I think the economic environment we found ourselves in meant I couldn’t do that.” For his final show as director, he has chosen A Face in the Crowd, a musical by Elvis Costello and Sarah Ruhl. He used to hate musicals. “I’m an August Wilson guy,” he cries. “I want the deep shit!” But his views have shifted in the last few years. “I love that people inhale the joy that comes from music,” he says. Based on Budd Schulberg’s 1953 short story, which led to the 1957 movie, it serves, he says, as a reflection of our political situation today: “It asks whether we get the governments we deserve.”

The change in UK government came after Kwei-Armah’s resignation, but he is hopeful the Labour government will introduce positive change for subsidised theatre, “so it’s not just the commercial sector that can be adventurous”.

For now, though, that’s where he’s heading, with new projects waiting on both sides of the Atlantic. He is off to write movies in LA, to expand a film and TV company with a new studio in Barnes, and to set up a commercial theatre company that will work out of London and New York. Nadia Fall, previously artistic director at Theatre Royal Stratford East, will take the baton from him at the Young Vic in January 2025.

Looking back, perhaps the once-in-a-lifetime rollercoaster of The Second Woman – with its scale, agony, delight and exhaustion – serves as a summation of Kwei-Armah’s tenure at the Young Vic. “There have been times when my heart has been elated and times when my heart has been broken,” he says, nodding an affirmation to the last six years. “Shows that have lifted me and shows I thought were going to break me.” But he caught himself starting to complain so, by his own ruling, it’s time to move on.

“I feel really proud of what we’ve done,” he says, “and I’m ready to take the fight elsewhere.”

A Face in the Crowd is at the Young Vic, London, to 9 November.