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Raising the Bar: 100 Years of Black British Theatre and Screen

Raising the Bar: 100 Years of Black British Theatre and Screen: The Big Time

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Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

09/11/2015

The Big Time

BBC Radio 4 Extra - Raising the Bar: 100 Years of Black British Theatre and Screen, The Big Time

Lenny Henry explores the breakthrough arrival of the play Elmina's Kitchen in the West End

4 Extra Debut. Lenny Henry explores the breakthrough arrival of the play Elmina's Kitchen in a West End commercial theatre. From November 2015.

In the first of ten programmes tracing a century of black British theatre and screen, Lenny Henry begins with the breakthrough moment when Kwame Kwei-Armah's celebrated tragedy Elmina's Kitchen, set on so-called Murder Mile in Hackney, was staged first at the National Theatre to great acclaim in 2003, and then - a first for a black British play - received a major West End transfer to the Garrick Theatre in 2005.

In this programme, Lenny talks to the actor, singer, playwright and now theatre artistic director, Kwame Kwei-Armah about that key moment in his career, and in the history of the black British stage; a moment described at the time by the Daily Telegraph as 'boom-time for black theatre'.

Elmina's Kitchen features an all-black cast of characters and is set in a Caribbean café in London, 
where family ties, gang violence, inter-generational conflict, tenderness and seething anger all mix in a classic story of jealousy, loyalty, masculinity and betrayal.

Series Consultant Michael Pearce
Producer Simon Elmes.

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Lenny Henry presents a series tracing a century of black British theatre and screen

Lenny Henry presents a series of programmes tracing a century of black British theatre and screen

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Raising the Bar: 100 Years of Black British Theatre and Screen

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