'Creative activism' inspired by George Floyd at forefront of London arts festival

Artists need to engage in “creative activism” to help combat racism, according to the creators of a piece of theatre inspired by the police killing of George Floyd, which will take centre stage at the first major live arts festival since the Covid-19 lockdown began.

Roy Williams’ 846, which will be performed live on the final day of the Greenwich+Docklands international festival in September, is a collection of more than a dozen short audio plays by British playwrights of colour, who were asked to write something in response to Floyd’s death.

“I think there’s a part of me that could have easily just sat back and said ‘I’ve heard it all before’, but there was just something about it this time, and the wave of protests, and I just felt: I want to be part of this,” Williams said.

The title refers to the length of time – eight minutes and 46 seconds – that the police officer Derek Chauvin had his knee on Floyd’s neck.

Clint Dyer, the playwright who co-wrote The Death of England with Williams, is contributing to the series, which will be released initially as a podcast on Monday before a live version is put on during the postponed festival, which will now take place between 28 August and 12 September.

Nadia Fall, the artistic director of Theatre Royal Stratford East which is hosting the podcast on its website, said the piece was “creative activism” inspired by Floyd’s death, the Windrush scandal and the Black Lives Matter movement.

She said: “We want to make work that energises for change and the possibility of change. I’m not interested in making work that is ‘pain porn’ or makes people of colour feel like it’s all insurmountable.”

Williams initially asked playwrights in a Facebook group for black and minority ethnic writers to take part in the work, which will be performed at the festival on a basketball court and will be billed as 846 Live.

The 14 plays are each only a few minutes long. Williams and other playwrights have drawn on their own personal experiences of racism to create work that Fall said “holds a mirror up to society”. Actors who will perform the audio work include Paapa Essiedu, of I May Destroy You fame, Kobna Holdbrook-Smith and Jade Anouka.

Other pieces that will feature at the festival include a new poem by Bernardine Evaristo, which is billed as “a people’s history of the diverse communities who have made Woolwich their home”. The poem will be inscribed into the paving of General Gordon Square.

The artistic director of the festival, Bradley Hemming, said it had had to be completely reimagined because of the Covid-19 crisis, and some of the work had become “hyper-localised” in order to engage with local communities.D