Rodreguez King-Dorset is in a reflective mood ahead of his performance at Windrush Secret at Jacksons Lane this week. “I confront my daily life memories, some of which still haunt me today,” the playwright and actor tells me.
We meet in London, where he has just arrived after his successful three-week run off-Broadway. The production was praised by the NY stage review, which stated: “There may be no better performance on the New York stage at this time than his.”
Windrush Secret, the drama about the scandal that first emerged in 2017 and the ongoing tense race relations in modern Britain, first premiered in London in 2020, returning to the city for one night only on Thursday ahead of Windrush Day on June 22. is turning.
The timing couldn’t have been better: the game seems to have uncannily predicted the world of 2024, where the Far Right has wreaked havoc on Europe. One of the play’s main characters is a far-right party leader who King-Dorset admits is the “smoothie” of Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson, and his normalization of his divisive and incendiary language draws heavily on Farage’s current tactics as leader of Reform UK. It looks similar. .
The playwright adds new urgency to his message by voicing his great concern about the rapidly growing popularity of the nationalist party and the gains of the far right in the EU elections. “Nothing has changed,” he says of the racism prevalent within certain communities, as he explains the “disgusting” and “disturbing” context behind his play.
The Windrush Secret was originally conceived as an educational piece for children and was performed at the National Maritime Museum for the Windrush Day event. During the second national lockdown that year, King-Dorset returned to Windrush Secret and revamped it following the killing of George Floyd and the media’s focus on race relations in the US and beyond.
This time he developed the play to explore politics, trauma and morality; His “firsthand experiences as a black child growing up in a racist country” became the fuel for fully fleshed out solo work.
King-Dorset was born in the UK to Caribbean parents who arrived on the HMT Empire Windrush. He talks about his memories of being a young boy growing up around first-generation Windrush Brits and hearing the stories of his parents, family friends and community who later came into the public eye during the 2018 Windrush scandal.
Theresa May created a system in which Home Office officials deliberately made it difficult for British Caribbean people to prove their citizenship.
Rodreguez King-Dorset
In Windrush Secret, a one-man show, King-Dorset plays three characters: a Black Caribbean diplomat and a white Home Office worker, alongside the far-right party leader, addressing the assembled crowd in 2018.
By then the Windrush scandal had turned into a full-blown political crisis after it was revealed that Commonwealth citizens, many of them from the Windrush generation, had been wrongly detained and deported as a result of the government’s ‘hostile environment’ policy first announced in 2012.
King-Dorset points out that six years after the play was staged, headlines about the scandal continue to appear in newspapers, such as Theresa May’s recent admission that she had made mistakes regarding the policy in question. “Look at the red tape the Windrush generation had to endure to prove their relevance,” he says.
“He has created a system in which Home Office officials have deliberately made it difficult for British Caribbean people to prove their citizenship,” May adds, highlighting cases this year in which Windrush parents were asked to take DNA tests to claim their children for compensation. scandal.
He says there’s something cathartic about being able to escape his own experience and at the same time explore the psychology of darker, more sinister characters. “On the theater stage, I understand the dramatic themes of the play from three different perspectives, both as an actor and as an individual,” he says. “I hope I can offer the same opportunity to my audience.”
Although the game was a way of self-healing, its boldness shocked some viewers. “The biggest problem I encountered was that one of the characters used explicit language throughout the play, especially the letter N. “When they were in America, it was a lot more loaded because of their history with that word,” he says.
Thanks to the far-right character, the N-word is said more than 30 times throughout the game. “It’s not an insult, it’s your history,” he says of his decision to use the term in front of a mostly white audience; Even as a child, he says, he was called insults many times.
Although it draws on its own and more global history, King-Dorset makes clear that Windrush Secret is not rooted in the past. He is adamant that the Windrush scandal is far from over and that his play’s important message can be applied to countless global political issues.
“My play looks at the moral compass of three individuals… and how a misguided and distorted set of beliefs about immigration and what is right and wrong about immigrants can be used to justify immoral actions with impunity,” he says.
“The story is about Windrush, but the feel of it is bigger than Windrush. This feeling is about humanity… Look at Rwanda in the nineties, look at Taiwan and China, look at Palestine today. We don’t learn from history.” He later adds: “People often distort the facts of the past to further their own political and social agendas.”
His comments appear prescient at a time when the Reform Party, which has run a nationalist and anti-immigrant campaign, is gaining ground in the polls, challenging the Conservatives in some constituencies.
“Nigel Farage is a manipulator and a master magician,” says King-Dorset, referring to the party leader’s rhetoric on immigration to shake up politics since UKIP. “The same man is using the same strategy with the same Conservative party. But he’s a one-trick pony in that sense.”
“Twisted words are stitched into a political narrative that becomes a vehicle for national identity and legislation,” King-Dorset continues. “The result is the belief in one’s own superiority and the distorted right to achieve moral superiority before committing immoral acts and crimes against humanity. All nations are guilty of this to some degree. From where? Because we are humans and humans can make mistakes.”
Reflecting on the ongoing trials of victims of the Windrush scandal and ongoing human rights crises around the world today, he concludes: “You can’t just get rid of the prime minister and the problems will be solved. This is the system. Unless this corrupt, distorted system is changed, it will always rear its ugly head.”
Windrush Secret is at Jacksons Lane on June 20 and on tour in October and November