"It's good to be home: it's good to be in Catford. It's good to be at the theatre, and it's good to be on Broadway!”
Double Olivier Award nominee Ryan Calais Cameron cuts an unassuming figure, sat alone on stage at Lewisham’s historic Broadway Theatre. But for the up-and-coming writer, actor and director, the scene is set. The Broadway is ground zero, and Catford is home.
"This is down the road from where I grew up. It's that massive homecoming, you know? I feel like I've been privileged enough to have flown around the whole entire world in the last ten years, but to come back and to be bringing, you know, parts of my craft, people that I've met, a whole entire community into our backyard, is just a dream come true for me."
For Ryan, who describes careers advice at his school as ‘locking’ him out of his dream career, coming to AUB to study a creative subject like Acting was a brave step.
“Before AUB, I trained as an electrician and I said to myself, I can do this for the rest of my life, but I don't know if I'm going to be happy. You know, coming from working class roots, it's embedded that you need a job, so get a job, get a trade and you'll be fine. And I'm like, what if I want more out of my life than that? What if I want to be happy. When the career adviser at school told me that I could never make it as a theatre artist or actor, it wasn’t coming from a negative place, it was coming from a realistic place – these things don’t happen. It just happened that I’m stubborn!
“With AUB, I wanted to get some insight. I was at 19 at the time, never been outside of my neighbourhood and was like, hey, how about going to a seaside town for the next three years? Meet some different people and get some different life perspective and see how that can add to my artistic value. And I did, man. I met people from all over the world that really gave insight into the kind of work what I wanted to make, and myself as a young man. I graduated, I came back to London geared up, really, really geared up, to try and show the industry something.
"So, I went to the industry, and they said “Who's this guy? We’ve never heard of you. Everybody we’ve been taking note of went to Central, RADA…we just don't know who you are.” But I was determined, and I got a lead role in a Royal Court play in 2011. That was about two months after I graduated."
But after using his skills to build his acting profile, Ryan soon found himself struck by a barrier commonly experienced by Black British actors – he describes it as the ‘Jamal role’.
“I got an agent, and I spent the next five years acting. I was doing well as an actor, but I still felt frustrated in the fact that roles got to a point where I had played the same character so many times… I was getting bored.
“The cheeky Jamal character. You know, the guy that does drugs on the side, but he'd also say a couple of jokes. I’m friends with another actor who’s really made it now, and we used to have this back and forth where he would say “Oh did you get the part? Cheeky Jamal role?”. You'll get a couple of lines, and that’s all. Something that I always used to question was where's that backstory? How did you get to that point? Otherwise, the narrative is that all boys that look like this are just that way."
Despite the misjudged appearance of success it gives, for many Black British actors, the way forward often lies amid the palm trees, sun-soaked boulevards, and supposed glamour of Hollywood.
"Most people I knew were like “Okay, right, it's time for you to go to America. Now.” Even my agent was like, “Okay, cool, we're going to send you out to pilot season in March. Go out there to the US. But it’s just so sad that young British black actors must leave their home to find work, when there's so much creativity here in the UK. I was like, I know people that are smart, people that had a little bit of money, and people that had loads of creativity, so how about we see what we can do about this?
“From that, we started a company called Nouveau Riche, and that was six years ago now. We set out to create more narratives for young black actors specifically. We grew that vision. How do we give life to every character on every walk of life? How do you understand if somebody is a gangster or a drug dealer; where did they come from? What are the conditions? How is society playing a part in this? We just really needed to get audiences to understand things much better.
“Can we look back at how people were telling stories a thousand years ago? How stories have been told in Botswana, in Ghana, in Nigeria? How do we just add more value to what we are getting as actors?"
Ryan’s company Nouvelle Riche was initially planned as a small side project, in between acting jobs – something to tide things over further work came calling from elsewhere. But six years passes in the blink of an eye and Riche is on the rise.
Keen to speak for the communities that had a hand in his upbringing, it made a lot of sense for Ryan to start crafting his stories from the richly diverse tapestry of Inner London narratives, voices, and cultures he grew up a part of.
“I live in those communities. I hear those conversations, you know, so when we made Queens of Sheba, about misogyny and racism, we made the show whilst people were having those conversations. The MeToo movement happened about six months after we started Queens of Sheba. So, by the time we had this show, and the movement came out, we were ahead of the game. We made the shows because we knew we were in those communities, and we knew that this was going to come. This was bubbling up. It was the same thing with what we all went through in 2020 with George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement. We made a play called Typical just six months before that had happened, about a young black man died in police custody.
“These were the conversations that we were having on base level. These were the things that were bubbling up. And then you have that happen and then you go, you know, these are the shows that our community want because this is what's affecting their lives on the outside. You turn on the TV and you go “I want to get into someone’s life that I can relate to…”. I’m hoping people can now see people they relate to; whether that’s race, sex, socio-economic backgrounds – people that look like you, that are doing the things that you dream of."
So are things really changing? Is it easier to ‘make it’ as an artist now, and what principles guide forward the next generation of authentic voices, faces, narrators, and storytellers?
“The time we are in now is very different to when I grew up. Being in Catford with my company and the artists we bring here, the ambition of that is that anyone can walk down the street, get coffee here and see artists that are working at Paramount, AMC in New York or LA, in this community. OK, I’m not that old, but we didn’t really have YouTube growing up… You couldn’t just search “How do I?” and find something. If you can think it, then it can come to pass.
"A lot of the time, when you see an artist’s journey, you only see where they’re at now, and people think they can leave their job and the next day be running Broadway. But it took me six years.
"Four of those, I worked nights with young people. It was an amazing job, but it was always part of the plot and part of the plan. I’d get to work early, I’d make sure everyone was checked in, I’d do all my work, and then I’d have about two hours in the office with a computer and a printer writing scripts. The plan was that, even though this was great, I was going to create professional work that I could eat off. And if that day never came, those two hours allowed me to express myself as an artist and creative.
"Nowadays, people don’t often give themselves time, it’s all about the glory. But are you an artist? Do you really want this? If you do, take your time, find out what’s unique about what you do and what you can give to the world that no-one else can."
Just like Ryan, the journey for Olivier-Award nominated For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy wasn’t quick nor easy. In fact, the play grew and developed alongside him over the course of a decade.
“It's taken ten years to write For Black Boys, and that’s come from so many perspectives; finishing university, having children, getting married, leaving a community, and coming back to it, to being poor and having some money.
"The first draft was done in 2014, but I put it in a drawer because I didn’t know enough. I came back to it five years later because questions that I couldn’t answer then, I could answer now. And when we played it to 80 seats at New Diorama Theatre, 80 per cent of audiences were working class and black. But when you talk about it going to the Apollo Theatre in the West End, you go “that can never happen”. Yes, it can. If you make the work, the people will come.
"It took us a year to get it to the West End because a show like this, which isn’t just about having black people in it, is unique in its Black Britishness. It doesn’t relent from that, and it’s in one of the West End’s most prestigious theatres. It’s unheard of, but audiences are showing up, they’re saying that if we make the work that speaks to them, they will come.
"That’s a message to everyone on the outside to everybody on the inside; expect to see more stories like this that showcase you in these wonderful ways, because we’re not going to stop!”
