“Hmm, I hadn’t really thought about it like that,” Mos Def says, rather dreamily, because he only got in from America this afternoon and has just spent three hours in rehearsals. “I just do what I can. All I knew was I wanted to do Topdog in London, because it’s a town I have a lot of affection for. So I just said, right, let’s go, let’s do it.”
From a British theatregoer’s perspective, he has almost certainly made the right choice. The production, which opens this week, has the same director, George C Wolfe, and the same two-man cast — Mos Def and Jeffrey Wright (who starred in the film Basquiat) — as the one that swept all before it when it transferred to Broadway in 2001, earning its writer a Pulitzer prize in the process.
It is a tautly scripted, alternately harrowing and hilarious portrayal of two brothers’ struggle with their shared past and with their uneasy love for each other. Fatally wounded by parental neglect, haunted by fantasy girlfriends, marooned together in a single room, Lincoln and Booth spend much of the play bickering away their helpless inter- dependence like a black American equivalent of Vladimir and Estragon in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Until the terrible finale, that is. “We’ve had nights when, at the end, there’s just dead silence,” Mos says, recalling his own stunned reaction when he first saw the play off-Broadway at New York’s Public Theater. “Man, I was deeply moved. I thought, ‘Wow, the guy who wrote this is awesome.’ I had no idea it was a woman. Just the way she writes about how men behave with each other when women aren’t around. It’s spot-on. And I was like, how does she know that? It is amazing.”
Astute readers should have correctly deduced by now that Mos Def is not your average gold-crusted, foul-mouthed, ghetto-fabulous homeboy. So much for the simplistic logic of what it means to be from “the street”. Born Dante Smith in 1973, he grew up in Brooklyn’s version of Harlem, the black neighbourhood called Bed-Stuy (for Bedford-Stuyvesant). His father played the piano and sang a bit. All around him in the early 1980s, the youth were inventing hip-hop, which they played for each other at block parties and on local one-hour radio shows like Mr Magic and Red Alert.
“It was just neighbourhood music that we liked. We had no idea anybody outside was listening. In hindsight, the world was more aware of us than we knew.” Feeling himself, at the age of nine, a little young to be manipulating the wheels of steel (“Turntables were for older dudes”), Mos turned his hand to writing stories and rhymes: “I wanted to try the Mc thing. I was good at sports, but they didn’t really interest me. Music was a good way to be mental and physical at the same time.”
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Acting had a similar appeal, he found, and, after making a strong impression in various school productions at Richmond Junior High, he was encouraged to try out for some readings organised by talent-spotters from the ABC television network.
“I had no designs on a career as an actor,” Mos cheerfully admits, “But it offered an alternative to doing nothing.” While he was still at high school, he was offered his first movie role. The film, God Bless the Child, about a struggling single mother, took him to Montreal for several weeks one Christmas term. “It was a heavy piece,” Mos recalls, “And that’s how my career got started.”
Social realism and moral seriousness, rather than cheap thrills and quick bucks, have been his watchwords ever since, he insists. A practising Muslim, he does not swear throughout this interview, at one point advocating, albeit mumblingly, “stronger expressions than lust or craving for wealth or the desire to dance”. “All human beings are about more than that,” he says. “Even if they don’t wanna talk about it.” He prefers not to talk about the lightweight filmic entertainments (Brown Sugar and The Italian Job) he has appeared in recently. He is more comfortable discussing his other stage roles, particularly in Suzan-Lori Parks’s latest drama, F***ing A. “I always had my eyes on doing plays, I didn’t have my eyes on Hollywood. And the music career was the same way.”
It took him a bit longer to achieve liftoff with his rapping than it did with the acting. At the grand old age of 18, he — and his younger brother — finally got themselves signed to the Payday label, recorded an album as Urban Thermo Dynamics, then sat and waited. Eventually, the label went bust. “That was like my college,” says Mos, “I learnt a lot from that.” The main lesson he learnt was not to sign any more contracts until he had achieved sufficient recognition to dictate his own terms to the record company. To that end, he began guesting on cultish tracks by De La Soul and Bush Babees, and has since fetched up on dozens of albums by artists as diverse as Macy Gray and Scritti Politti.
He doesn’t know quite why he has taken so many calls from people he’s never met, but he surmises that they must like “a clear voice that is accessible and new, and a style that is more literary. You can read what I rhyme without the beat”. He also compares himself to a jobbing, improvising jazz musician, “because I play where I can play and I’m just listening to the music to tell me what to do”.
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Whether it was his verbal fluency, his refreshingly highbrow approach or the simple fact that he can recognise a good head-nodding tune when he hears one, Mos Def’s first solo album, Black on Both Sides, sold 500,000 copies in America in 1999. His next, which he describes as “more adventurous” stylistically — and whose subject matter is “the fragile nature of the human experience”, no less — is due out on the Rawkus label in 2004, after a compilation he has prepared for this autumn.
Meanwhile, from this Wednesday until the end of August, the busy Mos Def will have his first encounter with a British theatre audience — more reserved, probably, than the ones he’s used to back home, and less familiar with the play’s context, too. How does he feel about that? “Oh, ask me on August 7,” he replies phlegmatically. “It’s like Suzan-Lori says: what do people do in any given situation? They do the best they can.”
Topdog/Underdog opens at the Royal Court, SW1, on Wednesday