When he was still in his 20s and studying for a master’s degree in acting, James Ijames was advised to take a swerve away from all things Shakespearean. His tutors thought his southern accent, the product of an upbringing in North Carolina, was not conducive to declaiming Elizabethan verse. Believing them, he did just one professional Shakespeare production in 10 full years of treading the boards.
Now Ijames is righting that old wrong, although he does not see it quite that way. Fat Ham, his latest drama, is based on Hamlet and features a queer protagonist called Juicy, who is commanded by the ghost of his murdered father to avenge his death. Significantly, Juicy hails from a Black American family in North Carolina. “The thing I kept hearing over and over,” he says, “was that my regionalism – the slowness of my southern accent – would make it difficult for me to do Shakespeare. I did avoid it for those reasons. That’s a little bit of what’s in this. I wanted to take this thing I was told I couldn’t access and see if I could make it work for me.”
It worked all right. Fat Ham was feted on Broadway, winning a Pulitzer prize and amassing five Tony award nominations. Next month, the play is coming to the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-Upon-Avon for its European premiere. Ijames, a playwright with more than 15 dramas under his belt, conceived the idea eight years ago, as he gravitated back to Shakespeare.
An easy-going presence with a calm, donnish air, Ijames now makes a robust case for his right to Shakespeare. “I was raised in a Black Southern Baptist church that reads the St James Bible every Sunday,” he says, speaking via Zoom. “So I grew up reading Elizabethan English. Yet I was told the way I spoke would prevent me from being able to do that, when I had seen people speak this language with ease and eloquence my whole life. It just rocked my world, at a later age, to realise it belonged to me. So it was a real revelation working on this play.”
Ijames has not only embraced Shakespeare but played fast and loose with this most definitive of his tragedies. There are new names, rearranged storylines, with most of the big soliloquies written out. “I can’t compete with those,” he explains. “I can’t be in the room with ‘To be or not to be’. That existential crisis won’t look that way in my characters.”
It’s a bold move, not least because of an unconventional programme in the Oregon Shakespeare festival not so long ago, with plays including references to slavery and non-binary actors cast in various roles. Nataki Garrett, the festival’s artistic director, received death threats. “I remember that happening,” says Ijames, “and thinking, ‘This is insane.’” Yet, he points out, Shakespeare hardly wrote from scratch: he took huge liberties with his source material, recycling older stories, borrowing from history. The “almost scriptural quality” some attach to his texts is not something Shakespeare would have endorsed, Ijames believes. “He was trying to evoke the audience’s imagination because he knew that’s where the play actually exists.”
Acting, for Ijames, was a circuitous way into writing. In 2001, he says, “they weren’t really taking young people into playwriting programmes. So I went to grad school for acting. But I wrote the entirety of my career, in dressing rooms, wherever, until I’d built up enough work.”
Learning about writing through acting sounds rather Shakespearean, I suggest. “Yes,” says Ijames. “I don’t pretend to be as earth-shattering a writer as he was, but his curiosities are very similar to mine.” Evidently so: Fat Ham is warmer and more comic than Hamlet – but at its core, it is a story about fathers, sons and the cycle of violence triggered by the drive for vengeance. Except that Fat Ham’s antihero struggles against the violent masculinity his father represents. “It’s perennial for me as a writer to ask, ‘What does masculinity mean?’ ‘What does the performance of masculinity do?’”
One reason he is so defined by this theme, he explains, is because he shares a name with his father. “I’m a ‘junior’ – so there’s a kind of ownership, an expectation of legacy, that I’ve lived with my whole life. As an artist, I’m preoccupied with disrupting: this notion of how a man is supposed to act at any given moment.” He wants to explore what lies beneath the ideal of masculinity that young people are fed – an ideal that requires them to stifle many components of their emotional being. “It takes time,” says Ijames, “to bring that stuff back to life.”
Alongside Juicy in Fat Ham, there is Larry (based on Laertes) who feels a closeted queer passion for Juicy. Shame and homophobia shape their trajectories. “Many times,” says Ijames, “homophobia is about not wanting to face parts of yourself. I’m not one of those folks who say you’re homophobic because you’re actually gay – but I do think you are homophobic because you think that if you get too close to a man’s body, then your body might betray you.”
Ijames grew up in a large family, in the small town of Bessemer City. His father worked in truck manufacturing (“He’s retired military – that type”) while his mother taught elementary school (“She wanted us to be surrounded by art”). What was it like growing up queer in this household, in this corner of the south? “I wasn’t in a family that was like, ‘Oh, you’re gay, get out of here, you’re the worst.’ They said, ‘Just don’t get in trouble.’” And the masculinity in his family contained a “softness”, something he puts down to it being mostly comprised of women. “They were such engines of the family that it changed us. I remember thinking I should be elegant because one of my uncles was very elegant.”
What about the greater forces around him, such as the Baptist church? He tells an instructive story about a late family member called Thomas Calvin, who was a theologian. As Ijames’s uncle, he believed a Christian had a simple duty: to make the world a better place. “And that is my framework for Christianity.” Although Ijames has witnessed – and experienced – intense homophobia in churches, he still takes moral direction from the “social justice aspect of the teachings of Jesus”.
Given the changes that have swept America under Donald Trump, it is hard to escape “strongman” notions of masculinity. Has it ever felt more toxic, more in crisis? “Well,” says Ijames, “that’s a thing a play can’t fix.” He adds, in his even way, that masculinity is hardly one single thing. “It’s a constellation of stuff. I don’t feel safer with these strongmen, so what is the strength we’re talking about? I don’t feel more protected. I don’t feel like we’re somehow more powerful. I just feel like anxious people – and I’m an anxious person – are being anxious with each other.”All those alternative versions of manhood are there in Fat Ham, rubbing alongside darker elements. But there is playfulness and exuberance, too. Its characters do not seem as villainous as Shakespeare’s and the ending might even be described as happy. Is Ijames deliberately creating a state that is good out of Shakespeare’s rotten one? “I was very much doing that. I was curious about what happens if we spend time figuring out what paradise looks like. What if everyone didn’t die at the end? What if everyone had a place to live, enough to eat. These are questions about civilisation.”
There is violence in Fat Ham and it seems implicitly bound to race and US history, but Ijames does not get into cycles of inherited violence within some Black communities. Instead, he goes down another route. “I don’t write that because I don’t know how to be inside that. Joy is a thing I know in excess. It’s one of the tricks of being an actor: you understand what offers pleasure to the audience because you have to do it with your whole body. I think marginalised people in general, and Black Americans in particular, are miraculous. I think we should party once in a while.”