Theatre Royal Stratford East in the News

 

THE ONES TO WATCH
by Aleks Sierz

 

Kerry Michael, 33, artistic director, Theatre Royal Stratford East

 

Michael is a torchbearer. Equally at home directing hip-hop musicals or pantomime, he has just completed three months as head of this renowned theatre, run by Joan Littlewood in the 1960s and Philip Hedley for the past 25 years. Michael, a former actor, has worked here for almost a decade. The first play he directed as supremo, The Battle of Green Lanes, inspired controversy, with its account of tensions between Greek and Turkish Cypriots and its portrayal of Muslim militants. “It did exactly what I wanted,” Michael says. “It got a new audience – 75% of whom came here for the first time. It got covered on Al-Jazeera and CNN. We even had half an hour on Sky News”.

While Littlewood introduced working-class stories, and Hedley brought in black and Asian voices, Michael’s aims to put on London’s new communities on stage. “The East End is really multicultural, and our work is jumping with energy and topicality. By 2007, half of the under-thirties here will be mixed-race – today’s theatre has to reflect this changing society”. In February, he’s reviving The Big Life, a feelgood ska musical with the plot of Love’s Labour’s Lost. Look out also for High Heel Parrotfish!, a play about West Indian drag artists: “We plan to turn the theatre into a Trinidadian nightclub”.

Courtesy of The Sunday Times, Culture, January 9, 2005