Ryan Calais Cameron: ‘I’ve yet to see an authentic depiction of young Black men on stage or screen’

“There are conversations that young Black men are groomed not to be able to have among one another,” Ryan Calais Cameron says. The playwright and founder of theatre company Nouveau Riche may have years of experience in the theatre industry, a space where the sharing of emotions is largely encouraged, but he’s been unable to get past those barriers within his own community. “I’m 33 years old, I’ve never, ever spoken to another Black man about love, about being hurt, being heartbroken,” he tells me over Zoom. “These are things that we are not allowed to talk about.”

His latest work, For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy, now showing at New Diorama Theatre, is an attempt to bring about that change. It follows six young men, each named after a different shade of black, taking part in a group therapy session for the first time. Put in a space where honesty is encouraged, they reveal emotion that flows out of them in the form of movement, monologues and music; trauma is mixed with unadulterated joy. The show has been described as a “Black boy fantasia”, but Cameron tells me it also feels like “open heart surgery”. “You’ve held all of these emotions and feelings for the last 20 years and then for two hours, you just go” – he releases an imagined tension – “and spill that.”

Cameron’s show takes its name from Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf, considered by many to have been a seminal play for Black women in 1970s America. When Cameron, who hails from southeast London, first read it around 10 years ago, he found himself questioning what the equivalent was for young Black men like him. The answer, he says, was that there just wasn’t one. A decade later, he’s yet to see “an authentic, nuanced depiction of young Black men” on stage or screen. For Black Boys, he’s sure, will change that.

On stage, Cameron has previously explored topics such as misogynoir – the particular discrimination that Black women face – in Queens of Sheba, and police violence, in Typical. He initially imagined For Black Boys out of a headline-making tragedy. In the wake of the 2012 killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, who was shot by a neighbourhood watch member while simply walking back from a convenience store in Florida, he recalls hearing the tragedy discussed in London. “I overheard a conversation that was happening on the Tube, where people were going, ‘Yeah, well he’s a young black guy in a hood, what do you expect?’” Cameron was shocked. “I was like, wow... I’m a young black guy. The moment I put a hood on my head, do I become this deviant monster, this criminal?” he says. Black men were seen as “a monolith” to be feared – the idea that they would feel and struggle with their mental health was unthinkable.

So he sought to create a play that depicted these problems and showed the rich variety of the Black experience. The group therapy setting, he says, was integral to both its message and its development. In the early stages of creating For Black Boys, Nouveau Riche ran therapy workshops like the one that plays out on stage. The results were astounding – once these men were given permission to speak, you couldn’t shut them up. One three-hour session ended up lasting for six, and spilled over into a nearby bar, the men telling each other things they’d “not shared with anybody else in the whole entire world, not even your girlfriend, your wife, your mom, your dad”. On the stage, this brotherhood plays out in movement, with Cameron explaining: “[Seeing] six young Black bodies move together, dance together, harmonise with one another, physically lift one another up, [it’s] such a beautiful sight.”

open image in gallery

In earlier versions of For Black Boys, which Cameron sees as “the most important thing I [will] ever write”, the focus lay predominantly on homicide. But as the conversation around mental health changed and Black communities began talking about suicide for the first time, that interest shifted and the two became linked. “If you do not find any value in yourself, then you definitely don’t find any value in anybody that looks just like you, and homicide or suicide become almost one and the same,” he explains. “I’ll take my life because it doesn’t mean anything, and I can also take yours because it was never meant to mean anything anyway.”

In recent years, we’ve seen the conversation around mental health focus more specifically on men in response to rising suicide rates. We’ve been told that notions of masculinity prevent men from talking about their feelings, and Cameron says this issue affects Black men in a particularly vicious way. He recalls an encounter a couple of years ago in which a doctor told him: “‘Isn’t it funny that the guys most scared of the injections are big Black guys?’ The way he just said it sort of willy-nilly… I was like, OK, we need to come away from that because that is what’s stopping young Black boys from being able to talk.”

But if For Black Boys sounds like yet another example of the so-called “trauma porn” we’ve grown used to seeing on screen in recent years, Cameron is keen to dispel that idea. While “the history of black people, especially here in the west, is incredibly traumatic”, he wanted to show a different side in his show – “Black boy joy”, to quote a popular hashtag. “We don’t go every single day, 24 hours, just like…” – he groans dramatically – “When we are not going through the most traumatic day of our life, we are actually having the best day of our life. There’s so much joy in the pain, the difference is that we find our own joy… through dance, through song, through poetry, through storytelling.”

‘For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy’ runs at New Diorama Theatre until 6 November