Having two cultures is cool, says man of many talents Arinzé
WHEN he was with his school friends, Arinzé Kene was just another jokey British lad. But once he got home to his family, things were strictly Nigerian.
Arinzé said he wasn’t really aware of this duality until secondary school, when he brought a mate home. ‘Soon as he walked in he was like: “You’re African!” He hadn’t noticed before.’
Kene, now an actor and writer, and I were chatting over a healthy breakfast at Shoreditch House. (Well, his was healthy . . . avocado on toast; I had the full English.)
‘My mum was cooking snails,’ he continued. ‘On the table were four large African snails. My friend was more interested in my house, and the kind of food we ate.
‘It was really cool to have this culture and the British side of me,’ added Kene, who arrived in now trendy Hackney at the age of four with his parents.
He doesn’t speak his parent’s Ibo dialect ‘but I could pick up some of what my mum and dad were saying . . . especially when I was in trouble’.
We spent a bit of time telling each other our birth names and joking about how we pronounce our names differently for different audiences. ‘The way the world pronounces Arinzé is not the way my mum pronounces it,’ he said. Our conversation had branched out somewhat from my mission to discuss his play Misty: a lyrical piece on all manner of things to do with identity. ‘ What it is to be a playwright who looks and sounds like me,’ he joked.
It begins performances at the Bush Theatre in West London tonight, three years after a 40-minute version played in the same venue, as part of the Radar Festival of new writing.
The earlier show was ‘quite wacky and weird and unfinished; but we knew where we intended to go,’ he said, referring to his dramaturge, Stewart Pringle.
Misty features music, singing and acting. ‘We’re not wedded to anything — we’ll take the show where it goes.’
In addition to writing several plays, Kene also appeared in One Night In Miami at the Donmar Theatre; and The Girl From The North Country, during its run at the Noel Coward. And he won an award for his performance, as a footballer, in the film The Pass.
He has a singing voice to die for, too. At the London Evening Standard Drama Awards he sang A Change Is Gonna Come with such passion he almost stopped the show.
We laughed about how certain cultural institutions, while meaning well, can come across as condescending when they ‘reach out’ to us about projects involving black people.
He recalled someone telling him about ‘a black play’ and he countered with a comment about ‘the white play’ he’d seen.
‘Why was it a black play? Because it has black people in it? And it’s by a black playwright? It’s a weird area to get into.’
I wonder if I should start referring to David Hare and Tom Stoppard as white playwrights. ‘They wouldn’t like it,’ Kene said, cracking up.