Page 252 - FINAL_Guildhall Media Highlights 2019-2020 Coverage Book

“My art and my politics are not divorced from each other,” he says. “The work you do can affect

people as literally as a doctor. You can inspire people to do things they would never normally

do, debate things they’ve never debated.”

If that makes him sound slightly earnest, yes, that’s a gear that this 29-year-old can certainly go

into. Yet he’s also figuring out what sort of things he can talk about when he talks to the press.
When he became the first black actor to play Hamlet for the RSC, in 2016, he was bored and

disillusioned by how many journalists asked him about this. The same happened when he

returned to the role for a tour of Britain and the US in 2018.

Essiedu as Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company
RSC
As it happens, I was one of the journalists whose questions would come to irk him — more of

which later. Yet as we meet in a cramped backstage room in the Kiln theatre in north London,
he is friendly with great comic timing when he chooses to use it. He offers me some chips from

his Nando’s takeaway bag — Nando’s is surprisingly good for vegans like him, he says — and

mucks in to help without delay when I manage to kick over a jug of water on my way out.

He’s here to take one of the lead roles in Pass Over by the American playwright Antoinette

Nwandu, partly because of what it has to say about the black American experience and,

indirectly, the black British experience. He’s also here, though, because he thinks it’s a terrific

play. A funny play too, loosely modelled on Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, except instead of two
tramps standing by a tree there are two young black American men standing next to a street

sign. A white character turns up to meet our two heroes. “My name is Master,” he says. “What

the f***?” they say.

If you have Amazon Prime you can see the American production as filmed by Spike Lee. Yet
not only has Essiedu not wanted to cloud his judgment by seeing another actor play his part, this