Page 253 - FINAL_Guildhall Media Highlights 2019-2020 Coverage Book

is a play, he says, with its pointed absurdism, that you need to be in the room with. The Kiln,

formerly known as the Tricycle, has even been arranged for the first time so that Pass Over is

performed in the round.

“I think when you are looking at a play like this, which confronts face-on what it’s like to be

black and poor in America, and the racism that comes alongside that, it’s very easy from a
British perspective to do that thing of, ‘Oh, that’s over there, we don’t have this issue over here,

we never had plantations.’ Particularly if you have a play that is happening ‘over there’ in a

proscenium arch. Our space encompasses everybody, so I hope there is less of a sense of

remove.”

Yes, he says, British police don’t have guns and the play is metaphorical as well as directly

satirical. Yet Pass Over’s depiction of black people being treated unfairly chimed with his

background growing up raised by his mother, after his father stayed in Ghana. He won a
scholarship to the independent Forest School in Walthamstow, but he knew what it was like to

be young and black and feel hassled by the police.

“I grew up in a low-income family. The police were always a presence in my area. Grow up

somewhere like that and you don’t necessarily grow up thinking the police are there to protect
you; they are there to see what you’ve done. I don’t really want to go into literal instances I’ve

had with them, but it’s something to which I’ve always been in close proximity.”

Essiedu in Pinter One
When Essiedu was cast as Hamlet four years ago, much was made of him being the RSC’s first

black Hamlet. These days he is open about how wearing it was having white journalists keep

asking him the same questions. I tell him that I felt it would have been perverse not to ask him

about it. Reading about his discomfort, though, I tell him that I didn’t have the experience of