Kwame Kwei - Armah ]enjoys many things about living in Baltimore, but one of the things he enjoys most is the look on people's faces when he opens his mouth. Kwei-Armah, who was brought up in Southall in London, loves to talk and he has a rich and exact British accent. His voice confuses people here.
"You know Americans like to think of their society as classless, but I think class is just as strong here as in Britain," he says, "and sometimes it is conflated more easily with race. A very interesting thing happens to me here in that respect. Just occasionally one gets a sense that a certain kind of white American feels slightly inferior to an RP British accent, but feels slightly superior to the African American. So when I speak they don't know what the fuck to think. They stare at my mouth for a long time. It's funny but almost every black British actor that comes here you hear them speaking just a touch more correctly than they do at home. Not consciously at all. But it becomes a little statement: just know I am slightly different…"
Kwei-Armah, the multi-talented playwright and actor and critic and political activist, came to Baltimore having been invited to become artistic director of the state theatre here, Center Stage, the kind of offer he never received in Britain. We are talking in his office at that theatre, an impressive cultural hub in the heart of Baltimore's midtown just a few blocks from some of the wilder streets familiar to fans of The Wire. He has been here for three years, and in that time he has observed that open-mouthed curiosity about black Brits become something of a phenomenon. Idris Elba had started it, with his scene-stealing portrayal of Stringer Bell, the aspirational drug dealer in The Wire, but lately, with Elba's uncanny portrayal of Nelson Mandela in Long Walk to Freedom, and Steve McQueen's Oscar-tipped 12 Years a Slave starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, the influx is headline news.
"It has got to the point," Kwei-Armah suggests, "where the African American has started to become a little defensive in terms of the black Brit. I'm not sure that until recently they really knew we existed. People here discovered quite late on in The Wire's success that Idris was British. It shocked people, his accent was so good, he was such a superstar. And then they realised there were others: David Oyelowo [star of Jack Reacher and Lincoln and The Butler] coming through and Chiwi [Ejiofor]. It was like they were being invaded."
Kwei-Armah is often canvassed for his opinion on this phenomenon. He has had university cultural studies professors in here asking, "What is it about you guys, do you think you are a cut above or something?" He's heard American black actors and directors imply that the reason Brits are getting jobs is that they are "black other" and not as threatening as African Americans might be to those making decisions (they are also, pertinently, often not bound by quite the same labour laws). Before starting any new rehearsal these days he has become accustomed to cracking a joke: "Listen, don't believe what you've heard: I'm not here to take your jobs and your women." A keen student of racial comedies of manners, Kwei-Armah is amused by the fact that "all the stereotypes that used to attach to the Jewish community here, of culture and education and learning, have suddenly been attached to black Brits. We are given extra respect. It's hilarious really: we still cannot get through glass ceilings to save our lives back at home. But here we are natural Oscar contenders. You feel it when you walk down the street or into a room and start to speak. You have a currency.
