Conrad Murray’s life in the arts has been a battle. There have been plenty of high points, both in his individual theatrical pursuits and as artistic director of Battersea Arts Centre’s brilliant Beatbox Academy. A trilogy of Murray’s plays, all of which merge hip-hop, theatre and working-class stories, was published last year. He’s started composing rap, hip-hop and beatbox-infused scores for a number of increasingly high-profile musicals, including Michael Rosen’s Unexpected Twist. And perhaps most notably, in 2018, Murray found success with Beatbox Academy’s first professional production, Frankenstein. The show garnered five-star reviews, toured the country and was eventually transformed into a powerful documentary on BBC iPlayer.
There’s no doubt Murray has made it. But he’s still fighting. Fighting to tell stories that reflect the people he knows; in an tweet in the summer, Murray wrote: “Working-class voices in theatre are so unrepresented … there is no nuance or truth.” Fighting for respect from theatre practitioners who still don’t understand his process (lots of casting directors balk at Murray’s use of workshops rather than more conventional auditions). Fighting to create theatre that’s open to everyone (Murray has fought hard for “accessible” productions, which allow people to keep their phones switched on throughout the show, arrive late and generally act a little more freely).
But Murray – who talks passionately and quickly, as if always racing to the finish line – has had to fight his entire life for the things he believes in. Growing up on an estate two bus stops away from London’s Battersea Arts Centre (BAC), he was careful not to be too vocal about his passion for music: “If you played an instrument, you were gonna get beaten. That’s not a cool thing to do. Which is kind of sad.”
Murray let slip to his social worker that the only thing he really cared about was music and was encouraged to join the Brit school, a free arts school in Croydon, south London. It was a huge opportunity but a mixed experience: “It was life-changing – but a massive culture shock. The way other people speak. The way they act. Their approach to everything. There’s a massive difference between stage-educated kids and privately educated kids.”
Murray worked hard but couldn’t find anything that really spoke to him: “The one thing I did notice is that all the plays and all the shows – none of it was real. Nothing represented me. The music. The stories. It’s crap! The language is shit. There’s a massive gap here.”
He told a teacher about his desire to fuse drum’n’bass, hip-hop and theatre, but was immediately shot down. After getting in a fair bit of trouble (“Sometimes it was like I was being profiled”), Murray left the Brit school with no GCSEs. He finished his schooling at South Thames College, where he found himself making music alongside the kids he grew up with. It was while studying there that Murray first went to the BAC: “We watched a show that was completely in the pitch dark. It was all screaming and wailing. My brain was spinning out! This isn’t what I know theatre to be. But I like it! I liked it because I felt alive.”
We’re talking in one of the rickety rehearsal rooms in the BAC – shutters closed against the blazing August sunshine and blaring sirens outside – and Murray’s voice falls into hushed awe as he recalls that first visit. “I remember seeing that marble staircase for the first time and thinking, ‘I just need to be here. Somehow’.”
A friend mentioned the BAC was holding workshops, so Murray rocked up with some friends. They didn’t pay; they couldn’t pay. But they got stuck in. At the end of every session, the director always asked who wanted to show stuff and Murray and his friends always did: “We want to show. We want to show! We were just hustling to be there.”
Not everyone responded positively to Murray’s music. Some people found the rapping aggressive. Others thought he was just “messing around”. Eventually, the BAC found a new space for Murray and his pals to work in, free of charge. It was a generous gesture but also, says Murray, a missed opportunity: “When I think about it now, it was kind of sad because we slowly stopped being friends with everyone else. I missed it.”
Later, at Kingston College, Murray made a controversial but popular hip-hop show, Hitler Wrote 20 Pop Songs … Have You Heard Them?. The students loved it and posters quickly popped up in the college halls. The show then played at the BAC, where it was slammed in The Stage. Murray can still quote the review word for word. And he’s still not pleased: “I saw a show at the BAC where someone put pig’s blood in a vagina. But when they heard our jungle sounds – and saw our jungle theatre – they didn’t know what they were looking at? Just because it’s rapping! [Theatre critic] Mark Shenton said that by the time we worked out what we were talking about our careers would be over.”
But people at the BAC started to take notice and, in 2008, they asked Murray to lead the Beatbox Academy. It would run every week, cost nothing and be open to anyone aged up to 30 who wanted to make sounds with their mouths. Initially, the academy’s shows were a little too authentic for their own good: “I think you needed to be working-class and/or ethnic minority and possibly from the local area to get our early shows. The language was impenetrable. The outside world did not love it.”
Someone at the BAC suggested the academy work their shows around a classic text and, eventually, Frankenstein was born. The production was a huge hit, burning with ideas around isolation, aggression, identity and shame. This October, the academy will stage its second full-length production: a musical version of the Pied Piper. Murray will play the Pied Piper, leading the kids on a merry – and quite possibly deadly – dance.
The role shouldn’t be a stretch. After our chat, I watch Murray lead a workshop for the show. He commands the group with lightly worn authority, baseball cap perched on his head and hands always in motion. The session starts with some easy singing and rapping games but quickly builds into a complex piece of music, humming with energy and feeling. Murray just has to snap his fingers and the music flips, stops or whizzes off in a wild new direction.
There’s a healthy competitive buzz in the air but also humour, compassion and kindness. When I talk to some of the academy members during a break in rehearsals, they all stress the importance of mentoring and listening carefully to each other. Every one of them is utterly obsessed with beatboxing. Throughout our conversation, noises, beats – and even baaaahs – spill out of them, as natural as talking.
Academy member Alex Hardie explains how much beatboxing has come to mean to him: “It’s everything. I want so many more people to beatbox. It’s a language in itself and completely universal. No one has a [natural] aptitude for making weird noises but anyone can do it.”
I later discover that Hardie (stage name Apollo) is a bit of a hero to some of the younger beatboxers. Nineteen-year-old Isaiah Wamala has only been in the academy for six months but he wants to beatbox “till the end of my life”. It has given him a huge amount of confidence, ambition and direction: “My goal is to beat the best in the room, like Apollo. Just so that I know I’ve done it. I want to be able to feel like I’m standing tall next to them.”
As the academy members race back to the workshop, the music begins to bubble up again. It’s all a bit rough and messy at first. But even during these early stages, there’s a powerful and exciting energy in the air. With each new improvisation offered to the group, even the very youngest members (one is only eight years old) seem to grow in stature. They reach for more complicated rhythms and melodies, and joke and laugh as they stretch, tease and challenge each other. Murray couldn’t be more proud:
“If you see a finished show, it’s very tight – but if you see the ramshackle group that it takes to make that show, it’s all about being supportive and working together. There’s so much passion and hard work in everything we do. Some of the people on stage. Their lives. They go through so much … but they’re amazingly skilled at what they’re doing. They’re like a gift.”
Pied Piper: A Hip-Hop Family Musical is at Battersea Arts Centre, London, 24-28 October
