Ahead of his performance at Windrush Secret in Jacksons Lane this week, Rodreguez King-Dorset is in a reflective mood. “I have come to terms with memories from everyday life – some of which still haunt me today,” says the playwright and actor.
We meet in London, where he has just landed after a successful three-week run off-Broadway. The production was praised by the NY stage review, which said: “There is perhaps no better performance on a New York stage at the moment than his.”
Windrush Secret, the drama about the scandal that first emerged in 2017 and the tense race relations that persist in modern Britain, first premiered in London in 2020 and returns Thursday for Windrush Day on June 22 for just one evening back to the city.
The timing couldn’t have been better: the piece seems to have eerily predicted the world of 2024, with the far right sweeping through Europe. One of the play’s central characters is a far-right party leader who King-Dorset admits is a ‘smoothie’ of Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson, and whose normalization of divisive and inflammatory language is akin to Farage’s current tactics as leader of Reform UK. .
The playwright expresses deep concern about the nationalist party’s skyrocketing popularity, as well as the far-right gains in the EU elections, adding a new urgency to his message. “Nothing has changed,” he says of the racism rampant among certain communities, explaining the “disgusting” and “disturbing” context behind his play.
Windrush Secret was originally intended as an educational piece for children and was performed at the National Maritime Museum during the Windrush Day event. During the second national lockdown that year, King-Dorset returned to and revamped Windrush Secret following the murder of George Floyd and media attention to race relations in the US and abroad.
This time he developed the piece to explore politics, trauma and morality, with his “own firsthand experiences as a black boy growing up in a racist country” becoming the fuel for the fully fleshed-out solo work.
King-Dorset was born in Britain to Caribbean parents who came over on the HMT Empire Windrush. He talks about memories of his early years growing up around the first generation of Windrush Brits, and hearing the stories from his parents, family friends and community, which were later brought to public attention during the 2018 Windrush scandal .
Theresa May created a system in which Home Office officials deliberately made it difficult for Caribbean Britons to prove their citizenship.
Rodreguez King – Dorset
In Windrush Secret, a one-man show, King-Dorset plays three characters: the far-right party leader, a Black Caribbean diplomat and a white Home Office staffer, addressing their respective crowds in 2018.
By then, the Windrush scandal had erupted into a full-blown political crisis, after it emerged that Commonwealth citizens, many of the Windrush generation, had been wrongfully detained and deported as a result of the government’s ‘hostile environment’ policies, which was first announced in 2012.
Six years after the play’s setting, King-Dorset points out that headlines about the scandal still make headlines, such as when Theresa May recently admitted to making mistakes regarding the policy in question. “Look at the red tape the Windrush generation had to go through to prove their validity,” he says.
May “created a system in which Home Office officials deliberately made it difficult for Caribbean Britons to prove their citizenship,” he adds, highlighting cases this year where children of Windrush parents were asked to provide DNA tests in an attempt to claim damages for the scandal.
There is something cathartic, he says, about banishing his experiences, but also exploring the psychology of his dark, villainous characters. “On the theater stage, I understand the dramatic themes of the play from three different perspectives, both as an actor and as an individual,” he says. “I hope I offer my audience the same opportunity.”
Although the piece is a means of self-healing, its audacity has shocked some audience members. “The biggest problem I have was the use of explicit language throughout the play by one of the characters – especially the N-word. When I was in America it was much more charged because of their history with the word,” he says.
Thanks to its far-right nature, the N-word is said more than 30 times over the course of the play. “It’s not an insult, it’s your history,” he says of his decision to use the term for an often white audience; he says he was called the slur countless times as a child.
Despite drawing on his own and more global history, King-Dorset makes it clear that Windrush Secret is not based on the past. He is convinced that the Windrush scandal is not over yet and that the overriding message of his piece can also be applied to countless global political issues.
“My piece looks at the moral compasses of three individuals… and how a misleading and distorted set of beliefs about immigration and what is right and wrong about immigrants can be used to justify immoral actions with impunity,” he says.
“The story is about Windrush, but the feeling is bigger than Windrush. The feeling is about humanity… Look at Rwanda in the 1990s, look at Taiwan and China, look at Palestine today. We don’t learn from history.” He later adds that “people generally distort the truth of the past to fulfill their own political and social agendas.”
His comments feel prescient at a time when the Reform Party, campaigning on a nationalist and anti-immigration ticket, has risen in the polls and challenged the Conservatives in some constituencies.
“Nigel Farage is a manipulator and a master magician,” says King-Dorset, referring to the party leader’s rhetoric on immigration to disrupt politics since UKIP. “The same man is using the same strategy in the same conservative party. But in that sense he is a one-trick pony.”
“Distorted words are sewn into a political narrative that becomes a tool for national identification and legislation,” King-Dorset continues. “The end result is a belief in one’s superiority and the distorted right to take a moral high ground before committing immoral acts and crimes against humanity. All nations are guilty of this to some extent. Why? Because we are humans, and humans are fallible.”
Reflecting on the ongoing trials faced by the victims of the Windrush scandal, and the ongoing human rights crises around the world today, he concludes: “You don’t just get rid of the Prime Minister and the problems will be solved. It’s the system. Until you change that broken, twisted system, it will always rear its ugly head.”
Windrush Secret is at Jacksons Lane on June 20 and will tour in October and November