Kwame Kwei-Armah will resign as artistic director of the Young Vic, one of London’s leading theatres. In the announcement, made six years after taking on the role, he said it was the “honour of a lifetime” and that he was proud of the theatre’s achievements in terms of “innovation, access and community”.
However, it dramatically outlined the dire situation facing the UK theater industry and called for government intervention to help a sector still struggling to recover from the pandemic and facing pressures from rising energy costs, inflation and cuts to arts funding.
“The painful truth is that I am leaving a subsidized industry where 13 years of continued funding has had negative consequences,” he said. “The theater industry has nurtured the UK’s world-renowned creative industries for decades, providing vital pathways for artists to develop from state-funded theater to the West End, television and cinema. But without investment, we could lose this talent pipeline within a generation. “I hope this can and should change, but it needs genuine government intervention.”
In the Young Vic’s accounts to March 2023 submitted to Companies House, its chairman Glenn Earle said the theater and the whole sector were facing “significant challenges and shocks”. As reported on Stage, Earle emphasized that the venue “has been disrupted by the ongoing aftershocks of the pandemic – both due to audience booking patterns and regularity and company illnesses and ill-health.” The Mandela musical, premiering in winter 2022, had to cancel 41% of performances due to illness. The theatre’s net result in 2022-23 was an in-year deficit of £2.5 million, compared to a surplus of £2.4 million in 2020-21.
Kwei-Armah, who started out as an actor and gained critical acclaim as a playwright and director, ran Baltimore’s Center Stage theater from 2011 to 2017 before returning to England. He began his Young Vic tenure in 2018 with the emotional musical version of Twelfth Night, which he co-directed. Subsequent productions include Fairview, Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play about racial prejudice; a Covid-delayed Hamlet starring Cush Jumbo; and Kwei-Armah’s play Beneatha’s Place, which tells the story of a character from Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun.
James Graham’s Best of Enemies featuring William F Buckley Jr and Gore Vidal, and a new remake of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! Co-directed by Daniel Fish and Jordan Fein, the film both transferred to the West End and received enthusiastic reviews. The Young Vic’s 24-hour production of The Second Woman, starring Ruth Wilson, was one of the biggest theater events of 2023. But 2019’s Tree, Kwei-Armah’s collaboration with Idris Elba that screened at the Manchester international festival and the Young Vic, sparked controversy over authorship after Sarah Henley and Tori Allen-Martin said they had conceived the project and were removed from it. Kwei-Armah denied his version of events.
A statement from the Young Vic on Thursday said that during his tenure, Kwei-Armah produced 40 productions on theater stages, 30 of which were in the main house, where more than half of the playwrights and directors were women. Black and international-majority artists directed more than half of their headline shows and wrote nearly half. Offstage, the Young Vic’s majority black and global staff has increased from 11% to 44%, with senior management rising to 40%. “I step down knowing that our team and artists represent London and that we continue theatre’s incredible contribution to this industry and our community,” he said.
Glenn Earle said: “Kwame led the Young Vic through one of the most challenging periods in the theater business in living memory, and he did so with great skill, courage and clear vision.”
The Young Vic has received two grants (£950,636 and £219,845) from the government’s cultural recovery fund, which supports organizations affected by the pandemic. It received an additional £475,318 in continuity support available to organizations that can demonstrate that more funding is needed to operate on a viable and sustainable basis. “The Fund has been a lifeline as we continue to navigate the most challenging period in our 50-year history… It has given us the path to rebuilding as a stronger, more accessible and innovative organization,” Kwei-Armah said in 2021.
Alongside the announcement of his departure, planned for the fall, Kwei-Armah also revealed the final season of shows that “mean the world to me and encapsulate what a building like this can do.” The theater will feature the Tony-winning rock musical Passing Strange; Adaptation of the movie A Face in the Crowd, directed by Kwei-Armah; and Lillian Hellman’s Little Foxes.
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Kwei-Armah’s appointment in 2017 was celebrated as a major step forward for diversity as he became the first African Caribbean director to lead a major British theatre. In the years since, there have been a number of high-profile appointments of black artistic directors; the most recent of which was the selection of Indhu Rubasingham to direct the National Theatre, following her leadership of the Bakery.
The last 12 months have seen an extraordinary number of trips to and from top jobs at major theatres, including the Royal Court, Donmar Warehouse, Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, Chichester Festival Theatre, Theatr Clwyd and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Some theatres, such as the Royal Exchange and Contact in Manchester, are introducing new leadership models rather than having a traditional artistic director. The recruitment process for Kwei-Armah’s successor at the Young Vic will begin from next week.