In 2011, when a 23-year-old Ryan Calais Cameron read Ntozake Shange’s 1976 choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf, he was awakened to how theatre and storytelling could depart from traditional conventions. “I was like, this is incredible; I didn’t know you could create a play outside of the context of a finite structure, that was just non-linear, heartfelt, honest, raw,” he explains as we sit in the upstairs office of the Royal Court theatre in Sloane Square, central London.
While researching the theatre piece’s impact in 1970s New York, particularly on Black women, Cameron began to wonder what it might be like to have a production that spoke to the experience of young Black men. Being from south-east London, he considered the epidemic of knife crime in the early 2010s and the 2011 London riots, both of which indicated to him that there needed to be “another way to get through to us as young Black men”.
