s protests over the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota spread to Britain, Kwame Kwei-Armah, artistic director of the Young Vic, put out a tweet: “Racism is bolstered by the stories we tell.” Kwei-Armah, who spent seven years at Baltimore’s Center Stage before returning to London in 2018, is among the cultural leaders in the UK speaking up about the role and responsibility of the arts in relation to systemic racism in the world at large. “We learn about our community not necessarily through integration alone but through stories,” he says. “It’s why we go to the theatre and it’s why state-of-the-nation plays are so important. We have to be magnificently careful about any stereotypes we create.” Theatre, he thinks, has been complicit in turning the “problematic black male” into an archetype. “I challenge people to look at plays of the last 20 years that deal with black and brown people where the black male is not by default a deficient lover, father or partner.” This stereotype has been used against the black community, he says, citing the recent case of Amy Cooper, the white woman from New York who reported a black man in Central Park for allegedly threatening her, although it was clear from filmed footage that this was not the case. “There was Amy Cooper weaponising whiteness and femininity to take down a black male. I have been ‘Amy-ed’ so many times and it really, really hurts.” Lynette Linton, artistic director of the Bush theatre in London, says structural racism in Britain cannot be ignored, particularly in how this manifests itself in the theatre industry. “We can see it clearly from the coronavirus fatalities here in the UK to the recent events in America. We need to be having open conversations about where the UK sits in this, while making changes across the whole of society and within our own theatre sector. That is why artistic organisations cannot afford to step back in terms of representation. We need to keep creating work that reflects and challenges the world we live in – and when the world is in pain, we need to tell stories that bring us together to work through it.” The playwright Rachel De-lahay has compiled an anthology, My White Best Friend, to this end. It includes contributions from Jasmine Lee-Jones, Nikesh Shukla, Lena Dunham and Inua Ellams. The anthology’s proceeds will be donated to the Minnesota Freedom Fund. De-lahay has long faced bias in the industry, with commissioned work invariably bound to a narrow, race-led remit. “Work by black and brown writers is more likely to be put on stage when they are writing about race,” she says. “Beyond this are the spaces in which only white people are allowed to exist. When there are a lack of [rounded] stories about black and brown people, they become ‘other’.” Indhu Rubasingham, the artistic director of the Kiln, says it is essential that British theatre address inequality and injustice, not just in what it puts on the stage but also in personnel, programming and sustaining diversity in leadership. “What is happening in America is about structural racism and continual oppression. One rule for one, another for another. Structural racism exists in this country too.” She mentions Pass Over, about white-on-black police violence, staged at the Kiln earlier this year. “We only have to look to Stephen Lawrence and Grenfell to recognise these structural injustices and inequalities exist in Britain. Theatre can play an important role for change.” Both lockdown and the Black Lives Matter protests have made her even more committed to bring unheard voices to the fore. In recent years, theatre has made significant gains in reflecting diversity on stage but lockdown arguably threatens to undo these hard-won measures. Last month an open letter was sent to the culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, signed by 60 leading figures in British theatre. It spoke of the strides that the performing arts had made and the wealth of black, Asian and ethnically diverse artists in the industry’s ecology. But it made its greater point emphatically: in the current climate, when the industry faces financial turmoil and knife-edge uncertainty, diversity cannot be forgotten and needs to be “protected” in policy decisions, post-lockdown. The letter included the backing of directors from across the nation. Instigated by Kwei-Armah, it read like a hard nudge to remind government that diversity existed in theatre – and that it counted. Eight days earlier, the culture secretary had announced the names of those chosen to sit on a cultural renewal task force that will help the arts, culture and sporting sectors get back on their feet. Among the eight-strong team (which is supported by eight working groups) is one person of colour, the footballer and broadcaster Alex Scott. “There is a lack of clarity around how people get selected and who makes these choices,” says Kwei-Armah. The letter was to make sure that “when the sector began to have formal conversations about re-grouping, diversity would not fall by the wayside”. Linton says: “The fact that the task force is overwhelmingly white shows you the fragility of this moment. How can we still be in a time where black, Asian and ethnically diverse arts leaders are not consulted? We should not be reminding the government or anybody that our voices should be in that conversation. We are the British theatre industry, and it is infuriating that we even had to write this letter.” Rubasingham agrees that the task force “does not feel representative at all” but says her discomfort began well before it was formed. “I’ve felt a growing unease since lockdown started, watching who has access to government and where the power structures lie.” While theatres have been uniformly dark since March, there has been an explosion of online content offered to the public, often for free. Some of this has been quick response plays made with tight budgets, but there are also the splashy productions, recorded before lockdown with far bigger budgets and high production values. These offerings have been celebrated by theatre-lovers and cited as an example of the industry’s resourcefulness but some, including Rubasingham and Linton, have noticed the marked lack of diversity in the big, “predominantly white” productions. The National Theatre has been prominent in streaming free shows every week since April, many of which were sell-out performances and aired on NT Live. Since its digital NT at Home scheme was launched with Richard Bean’s One Man, Two Guvnors, the theatre has aired one drama by a writer of colour. Even then, Ellams’ Barber Shop Chronicles, streamed in May, was an archival recording rather than an NT Live broadcast. It is expected that the NT’s roster of future shows will include greater diversity, but the current track record is still woeful for some, including De-lahay. “At the start of lockdown, I thought, ‘Oh good, I’ve never seen One Man, Two Guvnors.’ It was a nice piece of art and it was lovely I got to watch it for free. I thought, ‘Let’s see what else is coming out’ and I found that all the stuff was by another white person.” Rubasingham says she had tried hard, pre-lockdown, to get venues interested in filming dramas at the Kiln for the kind of archive material that is proving invaluable now, but she had no takers. “When I offered plays like White Teeth and Red Velvet, I was told there was no room on their schedule. This has made me more determined to find funding or put pressure on venues to make sure they have good-quality films that represent the broad range of work produced live.” One of the biggest fears around diversity, post-lockdown, is that theatres may become risk-averse to new work and retreat into what is seen as commercially “safe” content – traditionally staged classics such as Chekhov and Shakespeare, to put bums on seats. Without government intervention, it is likely that many venues will simply not survive, says Rubasingham. “And if we continue, we may be risk-averse to new talent. There may not be that pipeline for new voices. We have to ask ourselves which kind of people will then have access into the industry and which won’t?” Even before lockdown, the industry had a way to go, adds Linton, but she had noticed some change, so any retreat from that improvement in diversity would be an “absolute tragedy”. “What we know for a fact,” adds Kwei-Armah, “is that recessions and depressions make us smaller, not larger. We become our smaller selves and I fear that the lockdown may contract us, not expand us.”