“There’s a sidestep that Europe does where it takes itself out of the triangle … I’m never quite sure how that sleight of hand is
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Last modified on Wed 5 May 2021 04.18 EDT
Alfred Fagon was many things before becoming a playwright at the vanguard of the black British theatre movement of the 1970s and 80s: welder, champion boxer, railway worker, army man, poet and actor, with a colourful circle of friends including the model Christine Keeler. “He put no limits on himself and he didn’t want to follow any pattern,” says his friend Yvonne Brewster, the actor and director who, after his death, co-founded the Alfred Fagon awards to recognise black British writing talent.
Born in Jamaica into a sprawling household of 10 siblings, he left school to work with his father on the family’s orange plantation at 13 and emigrated to Britain in 1955, at the age of 18.