Romeo revels in racial tensions

After every performance of Blue/Orange, the play by Joe Penhall which ended its run last month, the cast would do what casts often do when they have performed a particularly sombre piece. They would file back onto the Cottesloe stage to take their bow, and they would look absolutely knackered. There would be nothing as frivolous as smiles, or arms casually slung over shoulders, not after the two hours' traffic of a play about diagnosing mental illness. You knew the actors had worked themselves to the bone and you did not begrudge them their long, serious, this-is-a-gruelling-job faces.

Of the three, Bill Nighy was a big name in theatre and Andrew Lincoln was a big name in television. Chiwetel Ejiofor wasn't a big name at all. You can't see that lasting for much longer. This autumn he takes a couple of giant strides towards the limelight. From the Cottesloe he moves to the Olivier, into the heart of the classical canon, to play Romeo and Peer Gynt.

Blue/Orange will transfer to the Duchess next year. The only thing stopping it going sooner is that it couldn't possibly be done without Ejiofor.

If Romeo is the one classical role which several young non-white actors have played in recent years, Blue/ Orange was something altogether different. It provided an extraordinary new role for a black actor not long out of drama school - a rarity at the National Theatre. When we meet him, Christopher, a young man from a White City estate who has been sectioned under the Mental Health Act, is about to be discharged, but he has to wait for two clinical psychiatrists to agree about the wisdom of releasing him into the community. Though he bounces off the walls, filling the auditorium with a voice that doesn't seem to have a volume control, for most of his time on stage he is in his seat: in the moral and intellectual tennis rally that formed the argument of the play, he was both ball and spectator.

Ejiofor comes from a firmly middle-class background. His Nigerian parents came to Britain 30 years ago. They sent him to Dulwich College. But, he says: "People from any cultural background who are part of ethnic minorities in this country will always identify with characters like Christopher. Coming from public school, yes you do see racism in a slightly different way. You don't feel immediately attacked by it but you are aware of the insidiousness of its nature."

Roger Michell, who directed Ejiofor in Blue/Orange, says: "He is very skilled but he also has an extraordinary grace and poise and taste which is rare in an actor of his age. It is a gift. He came in to the audition and read and halfway down the first page I looked at the writer and he looked at me and we said, 'We'd like you to do this part'. It was instantly recognisable." Though actors do not yet work in a colour-blind world, the National's new ensemble of which Ejiofor is a part is moving in that direction. The Montagues in Romeo and Juliet are played by black actors, while as for the trio cast to play Peer Gynt, they sound like three actors in search of a punch line: did you hear the one about the Nigerian, the St Lucian and the Irishman?

At 23, Ejiofor is too young to know whether the situation is improving. "It's impossible for me to say. I have nothing to compare it to. Ask me in 25 years. On the one hand, there are vast opportunities within theatre and television, but on the other hand, if the majority of your audience is white and they want to see plays written by white people about white people then I suppose that's what is going to happen."

Ejiofor has already played the big one - Othello - two years running in the National Youth Theatre. "I didn't get anywhere near it, but it was a valiant attempt." He then hummed and hawed about going to university, but the offer of a scholarship to Lamda swung it. He had already made a film by then. In Deadly Voyage he played one of seven Ghanaian stowaways on a Russian vessel who were killed off in the first reel. "You always die on your first job," he muses.

His first job out of drama college was as a young West African interpreter in Steven Spielberg's Amistad. "I thought that that was what directing was. It wasn't a two-way endeavour as I consider directing to be now. Spielberg does what he does and you do what you do and if he doesn't like what you're doing, he'll tell you to do something different and you'll do it." "Although he's a clever guy," says Michell, "he works from his instincts, which are very finely tuned. Some actors like talking about it a lot and some actors like just doing it, and he's certainly one of the latter."

In other words, there's no way of telling what his Romeo will be like from what he says about it. Although he knows the Zeffirelli and Lurhmann films, he has never seen the play on stage. "You relate to moments where you've been in love with someone. I've been close to being in love with people in the way that he's in love with Juliet."