THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
Ivanno, thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule to talk to The American. Why don’t we start with you talking us through your background and what drew you to Retrograde as a story?
I am a Ugandan British South London proud actor who attended the BRIT School, with loads of great contemporaries, your Amy Winehouses, the Kooks, Adele... Having come from quite a working class South London background, and then going on to the Royal Academy where I trained for three years, I spent my first few years touring with the Royal Shakespeare Company, cutting my cloth. I then went off into film and television, and I'm very grateful to have had quite a thorough innings in all of the departments. I’ve done loads of voiceovers, and just did a documentary on the Arab Israeli situation for the BBC that should be released soon.
I’ve had quite a varied entrance to this thing. I’m in my 15th year, and way back in 2018 there was a great play that was put on my desk as part of the ‘Adopt A Playwright’ scheme, in which a writer enters a competition and as a reward, they get a stipend for the next year, and they get a couple of professional actors to tear up the script on a stage with a live audience. Fortunately, that year’s playwright was Ryan Calais Cameron with an early version of Retrograde. I took the script home and I loved it – I've always loved Sidney Poitier. I just kind of kept it under my bed. And then all of a sudden, as the universe sometimes catches you off guard, three years on, Ryan got in contact with me and Amit Sharma, creative director of The Kiln Theatre, to offer to be a part of the version of Retrograde which we put on at The Kiln about a year and a half ago.
The Kiln is a fantastic community theater. It covers a big catchment area, there aren't many theaters in this area of West London, Kilburn, and they do so much. They’ve got cinemas, great organizations and schemes for the local people to be a part of and kind of own. It was really something to be sold out by the second weekend of our run, which kind of meant the community has kind of adopted it as well. We wanted Patricia Routledge or Lulu, from To Sir With Love [Poitier’s 1967 British film set in the East End of London] to come down, but alas, there were no seats. I'm very excited that after that big initial response we're now expanding to a bigger audience, and hopefully we can share the play with a larger crowd.
What is it about Sidney Poitier’s character and his work that you love?
He fascinated me. I first came across him when I was about age 15, at the BRIT School with a friend of mine, Miles Mitchell, an actor [from British soap Holby City]. We were getting into early Chekhovs and those workshop plays where everyone wears black and plays a bit of Massive Attack – all very moody. But we were, I guess, feeling out for idols, role models, you know, where do we place ourselves? We came across Aram Goudsouzian's autobiography of Sidney and started watching some of his films. From then on, we were in awe of him. The dignity and uniqueness, the way he carried himself, the artistic exuberance and the freedom of him, the way he articulated himself. Even as young actors, Miles and I thought these have got to be the pillars we use as we're starting off on our journey.
Along the way, he's stayed as a North Star for me, someone who created a blueprint that didn't really exist before him, and in doing so, opened up the floor for so many people. He played his hand in some of the progress and development in the America we know today. He's a fascinating man, he spanned from Hoover right up until Biden, and just missed the second Trump, and he spent 50 years on our screens. His first film was in 1947, I think 1997 was his last: incredible! [plus further TV roles until 2001 – ed] There's so many versions of this icon, hopefully our play goes a way to humanize him.
You see him as ‘a North Star’, that’s a really poetic way of putting it. As well as an actor, he has been like a mirror of several different eras in American history?
Most definitely. The way this kind of play gets you to do a forensic on a life, you can step back and see their impact. They never had the luxury of seeing their impact on future work, but there is definitely a baton there, coming from Hattie McDaniel, moving into an era of more realism and less caricatured characters which Sidney really fought for. Later we heard Denzel Washington say ‘I'm still chasing Sid’, then he hands the baton on to the next generation, like Viola Davies, and maybe even to ourselves. There is a responsibility to ask questions, expand what this medium is and what diverse presence is like in that camera obscura. Where do we belong, and how are we portrayed? I think the FBI understood the power of this medium at the time. There's a sort of advocacy that can happen, and an education and expansion of people, in being able to relate to fully rounded characters in films, and therein, hopefully in society.
I know Sidney believed that. Within the time of civil rights, he's hanging out with Josephine Baker, Marlon Brandon, Charlton Heston, Joe Mankiewicz, Paul Robeson. I think he believed his contribution to that whole movement was through his medium, like In the Heat of the Night. You know, ‘I'm not an activist, but I'm an actor. What can I do and how can I fashion this?’.
Cinema beautifully nestles images in our skulls that can form our present day selves. It's a subtle way of introducing new ideas without preaching to people, like To Sir With Love. I remember growing up in South London, very multicultural. House to house it was Russian, Polish, African, Jamaican, and varying classes, but the sentiment was the same across these different backgrounds, they all thought that this man had such dignity.
I heard one of my friend’s grandparents had taught their parents based on watching Sidney’s films. It was like, ‘Look, it's how you’ve got to dress yourself. Look at how he's taking his time.’ He was one of those torch bearers that can cut through a lot of these geopolitical problems.
I think in Ryan's play, there are two things for me: my love for Sidney, but also Ryan’s excellent writing.
I'm interested in this conflation of global Black identity, Black American identity and Black British identity. You've mentioned a few icons of American culture. Is there a Black British equivalent of Sidney Poitier? Are actors and artists here setting a trend or branching off in a different direction?
Sidney was in the army for a few months during World War Two, under Truman. It was a time when America became a global superpower. This was a country that was saving the West from the threat of the East, politically and financially, and therefore became a bit of a paternal state or a torch bearer, a country that a lot of countries in Europe look to. I think that’s true, not only in geopolitical terms but in terms of the black experiences. They are very separate experiences, but in the same way that hip hop and Biggie and Tupac is what we came up on in South London, quite often, America leads and the rest of the world follows and adapts. I hate to say it, but there wouldn't be an Idris [Elba] without Sidney. We have to see something done before it becomes commonplace. Before Sidney there weren't any respectable values-led, good looking, erudite black people on screen.
The soft power of America, having given us some of the best cinema, music and culture, spans out to the rest of the world and inspires different movements and versions. The experience is different, but there are a lot of things that are shared collectively within that. Here’s one example: Earl Cameron, one of the first black stars in the British film industry, was mixed race, and he was the first to break the color line of an interracial black/white kiss on screen. It was controversial in the UK, but had that not happened in America there'd have been nothing to sort of justify it. I think I'd be lying if I didn't concede that American work has always been the bravest and most interesting.
Let's talk about Retrograde. What drew you to Ryan Calais Cameron’s script?
Ryan's pen is electric and his ear is his superpower. The play is set in 1955, a hot corner office in NBC, height of the summer and of McCarthyism. Robert Allen Arthur is the writer of Edge of the City, the film that John Cassevetes made eventually with Sidney Pottier and the film we are going into a lawyer's office to sign off for starting shooting on Monday. It turns out that this contract is asking much more than either of them could have imagined.
It's a play that deals with choices and morality at a time when work and the world is asking more and more. I hope the discussion that comes up as a result is, what are our individual stopping points that we negotiate away? He's asked to betray friends. He's asked to betray morals. There's an argument to say, in this modern world, who's to blame? It's fascinating to see that, in 1955, an actor who doesn’t have much power, exercised all of it. In doing so… well, I don't give the game away about what he may or may not sign.
The parallels with 2025 feel very poignant.
Yeah, a time of cancellation, where heads are rolling.
I don't know how much you've explored this, but there must be a sense, when an individual is confronted with a choice like that, of ‘why is this my responsibility’?
It's a beautiful question, and I guess that is really where we may get the measure of the man. Because, yeah, there isn't any reason why you should not defend yourself and your family, especially as an immigrant coming from nothing, But then who would you be thereafter? Like, what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Is that Matthew 16?
So Poitier must have had an incredible sense of personal integrity.
It's an elemental kind of stuff. He grew up in a place where he didn't have a mirror until he first went to Nassau about age 12 or 13, so I guess he didn't really know what he looked like. Poverty. They were on a tomato farm in the Bahamas during the Great Depression. He learned so many hard lessons as a result, as we all do, the kind of people coming from that kind of background… I'm from a very small village in the north of Uganda, and who would have thought that I ever could have gotten to where I'm going and where I'll go in this lifetime? His mum was shy and almost illiterate, she didn't have much education, but she instilled lessons in her son that transcended financial stability. He admitted that when he stepped into America, he didn't subscribe to a lot of these preconceptions about being black, because back home in the Bahamas, everyone was black. He said, ‘I didn't see myself as a black man. I saw myself as a man’.
In playing this role are you acting as a model, an example of what can be done? Do your think about how young people from black and brown communities, will see you? Do you think you need to find ways to stay true to yourself?
Massively, massively. This might be a bit of an overshare, but at the same time this play first went on, I'd lost someone very close to me. I was faced with a bit of a moral question about whether to do the role. I got myself to a place where if I was going to continue doing this, all of it now needs to mean that much more. My circumstances are very different to Sid’s, but one of the things I've never compromised on was variation of the black identity. I made it my mission in anything I do to be starkly different, and to not just say, oh, South London, black male dah duh duh dah dah. I've been space villains and all sorts, and I just hope people see me in variation.
Are there stories you wouldn't want to take part in?
I've got five pillars that I don't really negotiate on in terms of the work. I guess that’s similar to Sidney, but not as regimented. Its popularly said that he didn't do janitors, that he didn't do drug dealers. But I think those weren't conscious decisions, they were filtered out based on the fact that he wouldn't want to play a part that dishonored his family or misrepresented his people. He was famously offered The Phoenix Project, which was a great part that would have changed his life, but he said no, because the character's daughter is gratuitously killed by the mob and during the course of the show, the character doesn't do anything looking towards his father. Sid couldn't imagine a world where his dad could watch that and see his son play a character that doesn't advocate for themselves and leaves it for other people to fight for themselves. How that pertains to me is to try not do anything regressive or anything too easy or predictable, just to try and push the mark, via the creativity in myself. It's sometimes better to not be a part of it. There are compromises, one fantastic example is American Fiction – Jeffrey Wright is one of our best actors, but he's not in the limelight like some people may expect, and I guess that's a compromise about this type of work he does. There's a trade off.
What is the trade off?
I haven't seen Jeffrey Wright win any sort of silverware or be a kind of a poster boy. Maybe some younger – or, hate to say it, not so experienced – actors are going right past him and all that sort of stuff. But, you know, I believe he's very happy and still feels challenged by his work, and may sleep very well at night.
So the trade off is, you've got the glitz and the glamour and the recognition versus the satisfaction of constantly challenging yourself?
Sometimes, yeah
What do you think is the difference between the way a story is told on stage compared to the way it's told on screen?
One of my pillars is the importance of storytelling. Without it, we are pretty machine minded, and don't really document our progress. For me, storytelling is the thing so the medium doesn't matter. It could be poetry, it could be music, and that there's a thin line of an important lifeline that we have with storytelling. There’s a timelessness to cinema, I must concede, that is captured and documented, and I've had the luxury of going through this body of work which can rain or shine, and hopefully some sort of alien civilization down the line are going to know this. But unfortunately, there's a quality to that if you weren't there that night, like in theater, the run is done, which is beautiful. But come on, I'd love generations to be able to see it.
That’s storytelling – what are the other four values you hold as an actor?
Storytelling. Authenticity. Community and artistic advocacy. Mental health and self care. And legacy – what's come before, what are we doing now, and what would we like to leave after we go? That's a very brief version.
This last question is one we ask all our interviewees – what the best thing is about being Ivanno Jeremiah right now?
I guess having been a little patient, and having experienced the good and bad, the ups and downs of this industry, and having had to make some big choices of my own to be going to the West End – arguably the best theater in the world. Taking up some space on that street and performing as one of my favorite artists, and sharing that with the generation that may or may not even know his name due to the algorithm – trying to make our human efforts transcend algorithms. It feels timely, topical, but also for me, sharing a little bit for the generation who came before us, and hopefully highlighting the space for the next generation to contribute what they want to contribute to their legacy.
That’s a fantastically philosophical way to end. Thank you so much, and I really can't wait to see the play.
Retrograde is at the Apollo Theatre, London, from March 8 until June 14, 2025
www.kilntheatre.com/whats-on/retrograde-in-the-west-end
