Posted on 12-2-2004

'Who do you think you are?'

Lennie James jumped at the chance of travelling to New Zealand to write a play about its teenagers. He didn't expect to be accused of plundering their stories...

The Sons of Charlie Paora: 'as much about south London as it is south Auckland'

I am in a karaoke bar in Auckland, New Zealand. Mostly brown faces, singing mostly R&B. Maori, Samoan, Fijian, Tongan and every derivation in between mix with white. I'm waiting with my friend Jason to give our ultra-falsetto rendition of Kiss by Prince. Everyone loved it the last time we were here. They laughed like they loved it - or maybe they just laughed.

We have come here after the party for my play, The Sons of Charlie Paora, on its second run in Auckland. The Sons tells of the events over one night in a garage in Mangere, south Auckland. Charlie Paora is dead. Five young men, the only remaining members of his successful school rugby team, gather in the Mangere garage to acknowledge the passing of their mentor, father figure and rugby coach. They have come to eat, drink, laugh loud and, as one character says, "remember ourselves". That is the plan, but everything changes when Charlie Paora's real son and daughter arrive to share the evening.

I am two Jack Daniel's into the karaoke bar when a Samoan actor, let's call him Wiri, is introduced to me. I had no idea of the blows I was about to take. Wiri opened with a straight jab. "It's funny, all of your cast has said hello to me, but I had to be introduced to you." The Jack Daniel's, and the slightly flat Alicia Keys wannabe, had me not quite catching his drift. He threw it out again: "I had to be introduced to you." I repeated my answer: "I don't know you!" That squared him up to me. Not literally, but in his eyes. "Do you want to know me? Do you?" he demanded. Whiskey makes me honest and I'm not good at being threatened. "What is your problem?" And that was all he needed.

His problem was me. I had come - no, I had been brought by the powers-that-be - to NZ. I, the big first world playwright, had come over to show the natives of the second world how to tell their own stories. I had had the audacity to write a Polynesian story. "Like the story wasn't always there for us to tell!" he said, poking me. "Like it only has worth if it's told by an Englishman." He made it clear to me that a Polynesian writer could have told the story of my play just as well as I did. I told him that I didn't doubt it for a second, but he was in his stride. "I mean, what is your deal, Lennie James? Are you going to travel the world stealing people's culture?" When I was thrown out of the club to avoid any more "trouble", Wiri followed me out, screaming my name at the sky and wishing me well in my quest to rob the "lesser" cultures of the world of their stories. "You go Lennie James! You go, bro!"

The next day, apologies, explanations and excuses came from all directions: theatre staff, the cast, Samoan elders and many others. Wiri was drunk, an idiot, jealous. But he also had a point. He had bluntly said what more than a few people had tiptoed around since The Sons had opened in Auckland and played around the region. No one said "cultural appropriation" out loud, but somewhere in the ether around me, there was the question: "Who do you think you are?" I had travelled halfway around the world to a country I was previously ignorant of. I spent three weeks there, and then I had the gall to believe I knew enough about the place to write a play about its brown population. Who do I think I am?

The short answer is, I didn't write about brown people. The longer answer raises, or raised in me, some contradictory notions of culture, the role of the writer and the adventure that is this play. In the summer of 2001, I flew to New Zealand on the invitation of Sam Scott, a director, and her company Massive. Sam had seen my film Storm Damage when she was in London. She took a copy back to NZ to show it to a group of young actors in her company. These actors had grown up in youth theatre and were about to grow out of it. Two of them, Max Palamo and Joe Folau, wanted to work on a project that came from their lives in Auckland. They saw Storm Damage - the story of the fight for a young man's soul, partly based on my own experiences growing up in south London - and it seemed to be a good example of what they were looking for. Eighteen months later I was making the 27-hour journey to New Zealand.

It was the impossibility of the project that attracted me. Knowing that I was interested in the idea of men and ritual as a starting point, Sam put together a group of 12 young actors, 11 of them male. Over the next three weeks I spent a whole day with each of the actors individually. On that day I would go where they wanted to take me. Meet the people they wanted me to meet. Listen to whatever story they had to tell. Over that time, in different ways, the company of actors introduced me to the country, their city, their neighbourhood, their families and their lives. We shared stories. We ate together, drank together, got drunk, got sober. At the time a documentary team was following the process. The working title for the film was Common Ground. And that just about says where the play took us. It lives among the things we had in common, not our differences. As one of the guys said, "We got this play from somewhere between south London and south Auckland."

A strange thing happened to me when I got off the plane in New Zealand. My mum has a favourite saying: that she never was a black woman until she got off the boat in England. In New Zealand I became an Englishman. I am a black man from south London of Trinidadian parentage. I am included in the history of my own country from roughly the 1950s onwards. But in New Zealand, all the history of England was my history. When people interviewing me spoke of the long history of British theatre, it was all mine. I was allowed to own it, all the way back to Shakespeare and further. I can't tell you how strange that sensation was. That, I think, was what Wiri rebelled against. He was so angry at my Englishness he almost made me white.

And there is the contradiction. The context within which I do what I do was so much broader over there than it sometimes is over here. Over here I am a black writer and a black actor. And that can be restrictive, stifling and limiting. In NZ I was allowed to be everyman. I was an actor and a writer; my work spoke for me in a way that was incredibly liberating and more than a little uncomfortable. The swing Wiri had taken at me I had taken, or wanted to take, at white writers tackling the"issues" of my culture in Britain.

My only salvation was that I knew where they had gone wrong and I knew that I wasn't making those mistakes. I wasn't interested in the issues. I never really have been. All the characters I play as an actor are going to be black, but I want to go beyond that.

I came up with the idea of the play the day before I left NZ. I wanted to find a structure that would hold some of the stories the company had given me, and give me room to write whatever it was I had to say. I was looking for the common ground. The garage came from a trip to Mangere with Max, Charlie Paora from our mutual enjoyment of rugby. And the theme - the giant step between being a boy and being a man - came from the actors' lives, and my own strong memories of when I took that step.

I wrote the first draft in just over a week, flat out. The cast recorded themselves reading it and sent suggestions. Over the next year that was the process. I would email drafts and questions. Sam and the company would send back recordings and answers. Together we wrote The Sons of Charlie Paora. It is as much mine as it is theirs. It is as much about me as it is them. And it is as much about south London as it is south Auckland.

So when I told Wiri that I didn't appropriate anyone's culture, it was true. I didn't write the brown into this story - or the white. If it's there, the cast put it there. I don't even appropriate my own culture. I can't afford to. I tell stories. Those stories come from the people I know, have met or have heard about. And they are always about the people. Not their race or culture. However much I celebrate it, that is not what it is about. Don't come to The Sons for the culture. Come for the story and you will be better fed.