DJ and musician Goldie is to make his stage debut playing a feared Jamaican gang leader.
He said he would take inspiration for his role in Kingston 14, by Roy Williams, from a cast of gun-toting characters he met while young and selling gold teeth in Miami.
Goldie, 48, said he was thrilled to get the chance to add the theatre
to a CV that already boasts art, conducting in TV’s Maestro, and appearing in the James Bond film The World Is Not Enough. “I’m over the moon. I’m grabbing the bull by the horns. I love Pete Tong to death but I don’t want to be a desk DJ when I’m 50,” he said.
Kingston 14 is the story of a black British police officer sent to Jamaica to investigate the murder of an English tourist, and struggling to lead a proper inquiry when gang leader Joker — Goldie — is brought into custody.
He hopes the play will open more opportunities, including taking on classic roles, as Lenny Henry has done with Othello: “I’m just learning my way here with this. But I would love to do Shakespeare. I would love to think that something like that could happen.
Goldie, who is of Jamaican and Scottish heritage, spent time in care as a child, and contrasted opportunities in the UK with the inspirational approach of the El Sistema music project in Venezuela, which gives the nation’s poorest and most vulnerable children the chance to learn and play classical music.
He said: “I was a kid out of control. Do you have to wait for society to completely fall apart before you put a violin in their hands? But I never made a record until I was 28. This is theatre at 48. It’s not bad.” He denied any parallels with the experience of his son Jamie Price, who is serving a life sentence for gang-related murder. He said it was a “bitter pill” that his son ignored family advice and went off the rails, adding: “When he comes out of prison, I’ll be 65.”
Roy Williams, 45, a Londoner with Jamaican roots, has already had hits at the Royal Court and the National Theatre but said he was thrilled to return to Theatre Royal Stratford East for Kingston 14. It runs from March 28 to April 26.
