Kanye the First: Why playwright Sam Steiner wrote a play about Kanye West

Sam Steiner's plays have great titles - but they are also, by all accounts, great plays. Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons was a critically-acclaimed sell out hit at the 2015 Edinburgh Fringe and had a reading by Sienna Miller and Russell Tovey in New York last year. His follow-up, Kanye the First, explores the second coming of pop icon Kanye West, reborn after his death into the body of a teenage girl called Annie.

Following its premiere at HighTide Festival in Aldeburgh, Kanye the First has a second coming in Walthamstow this week. Running from September 26 to October 8 in a temporary theatre space, it can be seen alongside Nessa Muthy's Heroine, about a young female soldier's experiences of PTSD after medical discharge from the army, and Theresa Ikoko's acclaimed drama Girls.

Ahead of the London opening, we asked Steiner why exactly he decided to write a play about Kanye West.

Why do you think Kanye West is the subject of such wide intrigue?

I think there are a lot of reasons. One is his musical talent and influence - whether or not you’re happy about it he is objectively one of the most influential pop musicians of the 21st century. He’s also defiantly outspoken and I think a lot of the media coverage of him stems from his inherent quotability. He speaks in superlatives and bravado-infused, headline-friendly axioms.

I think too often our information culture is stripped of empathy. We’re so much more interested in what people have said, in catching people out for misspeaking than we are in the meaning behind what they were trying to get across. Kanye West regularly makes himself a perfect target for that. I think one of my main concerns as a writer is that we may be losing out ability to communicate empathetically with each other.

What interested you about him?

I started pitching the play around this time last year. Kanye West was going through a very public breakdown at the time and I found a lot of the media coverage around it very cruel. I’d also been angered by the petition to cancel his Glastonbury headline set in 2015. It felt worryingly and dangerously exclusionary to me.

I wanted to interrogate how the two-dimensional version of his persona that we see in the media had led a supposedly “liberal” audience, a group I’d usually count myself a part of, to try to exclude him from the festival. So the play explores this empathy gap. The plot of the play literalises a process of cultural appropriation - when one culture uses a two-dimensional reading of another culture for their own personal gain.

What issues did you want to explore in Kanye the First?

I think one of the fascinating things about his persona is his perpetual outsider complex. From the start of his career to the present day I think he’s always seen and portrayed himself as an outsider even after marrying one of the most famous insiders in the world.

He was the middle class kid at Jay-Z’s record label; the disgraced, narcissistic pop star after the VMAs; the rapper trying to get into the fashion world. There’s this sense of desperation to prove himself, covered in a kind of braggadocio entitlement to a lot of what he does. I think there’s something very - and I really hate this word - millennial about that. It resounded with how, deep down, I felt about some things, how I think my friends feel some of the time. But Kanye does it on such an epic scale that I think that can sometimes get lost in translation.

Maybe it’s because we don’t like to admit that we feel those things and therefore flinch away from someone doing it so openly and brazenly. I wanted to explore that.

Were you ever concerned that a play named after Kanye West would distract people from what the play is really about?

Not really. I thought it might help bring a new, younger audience into the theatre and that excited me. I also liked the idea of people sitting down to watch a play called Kanye The First and, for the first 10 minutes at least, just seeing a young British woman struggling to connect with the world. I think whenever you subvert peoples’ expectations in the theatre it forces them to be more active as an audience. There was also something satisfyingly Kanye-ish about the Shakespeare-aping title, about setting this weird, silly story against a tradition of English history plays.

Do you think our ability to create personas hinders or helps our ability for self-expression?

I think this is something the play hopefully really digs into. Annie, the main character, uses personas in order to be more honest with people. She puts on masks in order to reveal herself more freely, to connect with others - both the other characters and the public/audience. But the other side of that is we become too focussed on viewing ourselves from an outside perspective - looking at what others think of us, the image that we present to the world, rather than growing our identity more organically.

Something I’ve become obsessed with recently is who we view as capable of changing. I think too often we decide to view people as fixed entities and that can be reductive and even dehumanising. There’s a link between the way we create personas and our ridiculous expectation that our identities remain constant and unchanging.

You have written a play about Kanye West and a play about lemons. What will you write about next?

I’ve decided to take a much-needed break from hip hop superstars and citrus fruit and am writing a play for Paines Plough and Theatre Royal Plymouth about a helpline at the end of the world. It’s hopefully going to be this strange little thing about optimism.

Is Kanye invited to the play?

Of course. Does anyone have his email address?

Kanye the First is at The Mix in Walthamstow from September 26 - October 8; hightide.org.uk/festival-walthamstow-2017