He
was the first black actor to play a Shakespearian king
with the RSC. Now David Oyelowo appears in a controversial
BBC drama that has been accused of racism. He defends
its content to Jasper Rees
The BBC’s Shoot the Messenger is as much devil’s
advocacy as drama. In a picaresque tour of black Britain,
it depicts black boys failing in school and fetching
up in prison or psychiatric care, black women mothering
children by several different absent fathers, black
militant “community leaders” mischievously
stirring up trouble, black churchgoing pensioners who
put their trust in God, but not in black people.
Chief among the drama’s incendiary
statements is that some black people are steeped in
a blame-everyone-else culture and are far too quick
to play the racism card.
The film’s first public outing
was at the TriBeCa festival in New York. “Every
African-American has to see this film,” ran one
commendation. One of Spike Lee’s producers said
it built on the work of the pioneering director. But
when it was shown to a predominantly black audience
in London, the response afterwards was more hostile.
Chief among its critics is Ligali, an organisation set
up to “challenge the misrepresentation of African
people and culture in the British media”. It describes
Shoot the Messenger as “without doubt one of the
most sophisticated racist programmes to ever come out
of the BBC”.
People who take offence should be grateful
for one small mercy. The original script, which won
the Dennis Potter award for screenwriting for its writer,
Sharon Foster, went by the title F*** Black People.
Although the title became more subtly provocative, Foster
managed to smuggle that inflammatory message into the
main body of the drama.
It would be rather harder to fight
off a charge of racism if Foster were not black, as
actors who came to the auditions were relieved to establish.
So is almost everyone involved in the making of Shoot
the Messenger, but the messenger most likely to be shot
is not Foster but its lead actor, David Oyelowo. He
plays Joe, whose descent into hate and anger begins
when he is fired from the teaching profession he idealistically
joined to provide a positive role model for young black
men. One of his pupils is less than impressed with his
draconian example and accuses him of physical violence.
A tribunal finds against him. As a parting shot, he
graffitis the drama’s original title on the school
walls. Without the asterisks. Joe then travels through
seven circles of hell, including depression, unemployment
and homelessness, before a God-fearing matriarch sets
him on the road to economic, if not spiritual, recovery.
Later, after further exasperations in his new job and
his new relationship, he finds himself arguing at a
party that black people should “get over slavery”.
“The character says some pretty
on-the-nose, outrageous things,” says Oyelowo.
“The point at which I decided to do this was when
he said something hideous, and I actually out loud went,
‘No! You can’t put that on the BBC.’”
Whatever the politics, the actor in Oyelowo was undoubtedly
seduced by the meatiest part for a black actor on television
this year. But he had a deeper incentive: “From
my own experiences in this country, I felt it was saying
things I wanted to be part of saying.”
Though born in Britain, Oyelowo spent
seven formative years of his childhood in Nigeria, where
his parents originally come from. (They left only when
a corrupt military dictatorship made life difficult
for them.) At 13, Oyelowo moved from a culture that
values education to a tough boys’ school in north
London. “Like Joe, I was called ‘coconut’
because I didn’t swear at the teachers, because
I had aspirations to do well. I was constantly being
told, ‘You fink you’re white, innit?’
I didn’t have a minority mentality. I have to
say that all those boys who took umbrage were of West
Indian extraction, a lot of them from single-parent
families, and they had somewhere along the line decided
that being black equalled truancy, rudeness and wearing
your uniform skewwhiff, and they were bullying kids
who were bright.”
As a black actor in this country, Oyelowo’s
experiences have been unremittingly positive, and are
getting more so. He can shortly be seen as Orlando,
the romantic lead in Kenneth Branagh’s film version
of As You Like It, as well as in leading roles in The
Last King of Scotland, the film adaptation of Giles
Foden’s novel about Idi Amin, and London, a wide-ranging
portrait of an ailing city, written and directed by
Dominic Savage, one of the last of television’s
old-style auteurs.
Even more than his starring role in
the original cast of Spooks, the role that put him on
the map was in the theatre. In 2001, he became the first
black actor to play an English king with the RSC, for
which he won an Ian Charleson award. (His Henry VI preceded
Adrian Lester’s Henry V at the National by two
years.) “The day my dad came to see me in Henry
VI was probably the proudest moment of my life to date.
He said to me, ‘When I first came here, if they’d
ever told me a black actor would get to play the king
of England in this country, I wouldn’t have believed
it, let alone for it to be my son.’”
It was also a vindication of his son’s
desire to act. “My dad had three boys, and he
was adamant he wanted a lawyer, a doctor and an engineer.
I actually got in to do a law degree.” But he
was encouraged to try for drama school by his theatre-
studies teacher, who helped him apply to several colleges.
They all accepted him, but Lamda offered a scholarship.
“I think that was the turning point for my dad.
He thought of it as not a proper job. But if someone
is prepared to give you 21 grand to do some poofy acting
course...”
He was only 24 when he played Henry
VI. Five years on, despite never having gone back to
act there, he is on the RSC’s board of directors.
Spooks was his way of losing the label of Shakespearian
actor, though in the early episodes he had to shake
another tag. “Initially, Danny was a bit of rough.
He had a chip on his shoulder about having been employed
to fulfil quotas. And I quickly wanted to ditch all
that. I thought, ‘We have a black actor in a mainstream
series: does it have to be an issue? Can we just make
him a great spy?’” When he left, Oyelowo
was able to choose the manner of his character’s
death. “Partly because they didn’t want
me to leave, they said, ‘Can’t we just injure
him?’ I went, ‘No, blow him away.’”
The forthcoming crop of roles are Oyelowo’s
reward for having the courage to head for the exit.
But he admits this is a good time to be a black actor.
“When I was at drama school, what’s happening
now wasn’t happening. Adrian Lester, Lennie James
and David Harewood were visible, and I thought, I’m
training for something where there is potential. They
weren’t doing the kind of work where I thought,
that’s the pinnacle. I had to look to America.
Denzel Washington: that’s the pinnacle.”
Black actors may no longer just play
the bland sidekick, but the door could be nudged further
ajar. One of the reasons for the uproar about Shoot
the Messenger is the infrequency with which serious
television dramas look at the lives of black people
in Britain square on. “They come along maybe once
a year, and it has to be everything to everyone,”
Oyelowo says. “The black community want it to
be positive. But you can’t Disney-fy it to pacify
black people. I would hate to be part of something that
was patronising.
“Shoot the Messenger is commenting
on the blame culture within the black community. Everything
is someone else’s fault. It’s a complex
issue, and it’s going to take a lot of work, but
the beginning of the work is to talk about the fact
that we have some serious problems between each other,
and to let the world know that. Why pretend it’s
not happening?”
Shoot the Messenger, BBC2, Wednesday, 9pm
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