Born in Tooting, London in 1988, Ryan Calais Cameron is a playwright, actor, director and producer. His breakout playwriting hit, For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy, blends poetry, physical theatre and raw confessional in a multifaceted exploration of black masculinity and has recently started its second West End run. Calais Cameron is also the producer of theatre company Nouveau Riche, which supports emerging artists of colour. He’s a writer on new BBC series Boarders, as well as the forthcoming Channel 4 adaptation of Candice Carty-Williams’s Queenie. He lives in London with his wife, Shavani, and four children.
For Black Boys… started out in the 80-seater New Diorama theatre in 2021. Did you know back then that you had a hit on your hands?
I always feel like black men are conditioned not to articulate our emotions, and that was the impetus for me to write the play. It felt very desperate, this need to start talking about our feelings in whatever form that might take. But when we put it out there we were getting our arse beat, man. We were getting two-star reviews across the board. I thought: “OK, this is my last play!” But the audiences still came, because they understood it was something created for them. And that gave me the courage to keep reworking it, until it got picked up by the Royal Court.
