The actor and playwright discusses the joy of putting the Black queer experience on stage (and the pain of turning down 'The Bill')
, opening next week at London’s Royal Court, a playwright — Danny Lee Wynter was an usher at the theatre that would end up staging his debut. It was the early 2000s, and he was studying on a scholarship at Lamda, the prestigious London drama school whose alumni include Benedict Cumberbatch and Chiwetel Ejiofor. But the ushering gig, he says, sitting in his airy living room in Forest Gate, east London, groaning bookshelves on one wall and a cluster of pictures over the sofa, was transformative.
“I can’t overstate it — the job at the Royal Court sits alongside my experience of going to drama school. Seeing those plays and being around actors, directors, and the whole creative teams around them, that’s a big deal,” says Wynter, who wears a bright white T-shirt and mauve nail polish. “I remember, at the premiere production of, the Caryl Churchill play, selling ice creams and seeing an older guy stood there in tears. I asked if he was all right and he said,‘Yeah, that’s my son.
Wynter, 40, who has an easy manner and the steady enunciation of the classically trained, calls himself “fake posh”: he grew up on an Essex council estate, with “quite a dysfunctional mother-father unit”, where “all the art we received came through the television”. Yet he showed ambition, and resolve, early on. While a performing-arts student at Middlesex University, he took out an ad in Spotlight, the actors’ directory, and was offered a role in.
, in which Wynter will also star, is a stirring, funny and sexually charged drama about a group of Black and mixed-race male actor friends whose dynamic is disrupted when new feelings develop between them and, as Wynter describes it, “a grenade is thrown in”. His time at the Royal Court again proved instructive: “I would watch plays on a regular basis, sometimes 15, 20 times over, and I quickly realised that the white queer experience was very well represented at that time.
After Wynter wrote the bulk of the play during lockdowns, a friend passed it on to the artistic director of the Royal Court who, within two weeks, set up a phone call. The circularity of it all is pleasing, Wynter says: “The theatre I had my beginnings in staging my play is definitely pretty up there for me.” As for how it is received, he is resolute; whatever anyone thinks of it, the very fact of its existence is a win.
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