A race for change

Some time ago, Kwame Kwei-Armah saw a car crash on Lower Clapton Road. Inside were two young black men, both dead from gunshot wounds. The scene appalled him. 'Something is happening on the streets of our nation that's reaching epidemic proportions,' he says. 'I was outraged. I thought: I need to challenge the apathy that allows this to exist.'

Most people know Kwei-Armah as that actor from Casualty or, more recently, the one with the great voice who should have won Celebrity Fame Academy. Since 1998, he has also been a playwright, and it was the crash that inspired his most recent play, Elmina's Kitchen.

It's set in a West Indian takeaway; it's about fathers, sons and guns; and it's pessimistic, confrontational and angry. It also raises many questions about representation and race, which Kwei-Armah is keen to talk about - but more of that later.

Apart from his fabulous singing, the most striking thing about Kwei-Armah on TV was his huge smile. In person, he retains that larger-than-life quality, not least because he talks constantly. 'You want to know about me?' he asks, beaming. 'Where to start? So much has happened.'

He talks effusively about growing up in Southall during the rise of Britain's extreme Right movement and the Brixton riots, and about going to stage school and realising his dream of singing in musicals.

It was a terrible and an exciting time to be an adolescent: he and his mates were getting stabbed on the streets at the same time as America's new black consciousness was starting to make an impact. The turning point was the TV adaptation of Alex Haley's seminal novel, Roots, which changed his life. 'It reversed the popular image of the black African as a sambo with a bone through his nose to a Kunta Kinte - a proud African male fighting to overcome adversity.

I told my mum I no longer wanted to be known by my real name, Ian Roberts, and called myself Kwame Kwei-Armah.'

Since then, he says he's been a political man, but only recently has he been able to think of himself as a black British man with pride. 'My son asked who we should support during the 1998 World Cup. I said we should support the African nations, but also England because it was our home. He said "OK, cool". I realised then that I was cool with that, too.'

Yet he is adamant there is still an enormous way to go. 'Two-thirds of black children leave school with fewer than five GCSEs and one in four black men under 24 is unemployed,' he reels off. 'It's vital we confront these things if we are to progress.' He admires August Wilson and James Baldwin for putting the black experience on stage so accurately, while keeping the core of their work universal.

As for his own work, isn't there a problem defining that experience artistically in 21stcentury-Britain through ghetto clichès such as gun culture and fraught family relations? 'At the National Theatre, you've got Adrian Lester playing Henry V in the Olivier and you've my play in the small room, and both reflect what it means to be black and British,' he replies. 'I wrote Elmina from the heart, not to play the race card.'