When he was still in his 20s and studying for a master’s degree in acting, James Ijames was advised to take a swerve away from all things Shakespearean. His tutors thought his southern accent, the product of an upbringing in North Carolina, was not conducive to declaiming Elizabethan verse. Believing them, he did just one professional Shakespeare production in 10 full years of treading the boards.
Now Ijames is righting that old wrong, although he does not see it quite that way. Fat Ham, his latest drama, is based on Hamlet and features a queer protagonist called Juicy, who is commanded by the ghost of his murdered father to avenge his death. Significantly, Juicy hails from a Black American family in North Carolina. “The thing I kept hearing over and over,” he says, “was that my regionalism – the slowness of my southern accent – would make it difficult for me to do Shakespeare. I did avoid it for those reasons. That’s a little bit of what’s in this. I wanted to take this thing I was told I couldn’t access and see if I could make it work for me.”
