Collected Essays

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This collection begins in the early 1980s, and as far as I can recall, ‘The Rainbow Sign’ was the first essay I ever wrote. My then editor at Faber, Robert McCrum, had approached me about publishing the screenplay of My Beautiful Laundrette and suggested I write an introduction to it, since it might seem thin on its own.

I’m not keen on reading screenplays myself; I can’t recall wanting to read one purely for pleasure, except for The Third Man. Certainly, when I write a screenplay, how it reads is not primary. A screenplay is more of a map than a work of art, and should show the director how he might get from here to there, while telling the actors what they should say.

In the 1980s Faber began to sell a lot of screenplays, especially Tarantino’s. ‘The Rainbow Sign’ was an opportunity for me to think more about some of the issues raised in My Beautiful Laundrette and in the plays I’d written before that, which were concerned with race, class, sexuality and so on, questions provoked by my childhood and family situation, and which I couldn’t help continuing to try to formulate and think around. These were questions — particularly the ones around race — which, it seemed to me, contemporary artists were reluctant to engage with, as if they didn’t know where to begin.

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