Michael McMillan


Michael McMillan is a British playwright, artist, curator and educator, born in England to parents who were migrants from St Vincent and the Grenadines. As an academic, he focuses his research on "the creative process, ethnography, oral histories, material culture and performativity". He is the author of several plays, and as an artist his first installation, The West Indian Front Room, was exhibited at the Geffrye Museum in 2005, going on to inspire a 2007 BBC Four documentary Tales from the Front Room, a website, a 2009 book, The Front Room: Migrant Aesthetics in the Home, and various international commissions, such as Van Huis Uit: The Living Room of Migrants in the Netherlands and A Living Room Surrounded by Salt. A more recent installation of the Walter Rodney Bookshop featured as part of the 2015 exhibition No Colour Bar at the Guildhall Art Gallery.
McMillan has said of the range of his work: "I was a painter before I was a playwright/dramatist and through making live art pieces and writing critically about performance, photography, visual arts culture, I have come home in a sense to fine arts, through making mixed-media installations, which given my interest in performativity background can be seen also as theatre sets. My work and practice is often interdisciplinary using mixed media, installations and performance."

Life and career

Michael McMillan was born in 1962 in High Wycombe, UK, of Caribbean migrant heritage; as he has said, "Both my parents came from St Vincent & the Grenadines and... were 'arrivants', to use Edward Kamau Brathwaite's term, from colonies where they were imbued with English culture." Given this background, he has noted: "I grew up with learning three languages: the creole spoken by my parents as a fusion of an English lexicon and an African grammar; the Jamaican English spoken on the streets of Hackney and around London and the London English spoken at school."
As a youth McMillan attended the Keskidee Centre, a Black-led theatre and arts community space in London. The Keskidee was the first of its kind in England and had a great influence on McMillan:
"Keskidee Arts Centre was the first Black community arts centre in the UK, off Caledonian Road in Islington. It was run by the Guyanese-born Oscar Abrams, with the African-American Rufus Collin as Artistic Director. It was where Linton Kwesi Johnson developed dub poetry while running the library, Angela Davis spoke, and Bob Marley filmed the video for 'Is This Love?'. I went there often as a teenager, seeing Black theatre productions like Edgar White's 'Lament for Rastafari', Derek Walcott's 'Pantomine' and Lennox Brown's 'Throne in an Autumn Room'. I would eventually become part of this world as a playwright.

McMillan won an essay competition, run by Len Garrison's ACER, which led to him being chosen, aged 15, as one of the "Black Britain" delegates to attend FESTAC '77. He subsequently wrote his play The School Leaver, which was produced at the Royal Court Theatre's Young Writers' Festival.
McMillan read sociology and African and Asian studies at Sussex University, graduating in 1984, and then earned an MA degree in Independent Film & Video from Central Saint Martins, London, in 1991. From 2000, he was a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at the London College of Communication and went on to become, since 2003, a Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the University of the Arts London, and a researcher and Associate Lecturer at the London College of Fashion, teaching predominantly Cultural & Historical Studies. He was awarded a practice-based Arts Doctorate from Middlesex University in 2010. In 2010–11, he was Arts in Health & Well Being artist-in-residence in North Wales.

Writing

McMillan's interest in oral history and the stories of first-generation Caribbean migrants is reflected in early writings such as Brother to Brother and The Black Boy Pub & Other Stories, which used recordings of interviews done during a year's residence in High Wycombe, where many of those arriving in particular from SVG had settled. As a dramatist, he has had work performed and produced by the Royal Court Theatre, Channel 4, BBC Radio 4, and in venues across the UK. His play The School Leaver was published by the Black Ink Collective in 1978, when McMillan was 16 years old, and was reprinted several times. His other plays include Master Juba, Babel Junction, and a new translation of Bertholt Brecht's The Good Person of Sezuan, set in Jamaica in the 1980s.
McMillan has written a number of essays and articles in national and international publications, and has presented papers at conferences and symposiums in the UK, Europe, Canada, USA, Caribbean and Brazil, including as keynote speaker at the 2006 "Islands in Between" Conference on Language, Literature & History of the Eastern Caribbean. McMillan contributed towards the 2024 book

Installations

Alongside teaching, McMillan has also worked on mixed-media exhibitions and publications. His first installation, The West Indian Front Room, drew on memories of the domestic setting created by his parents and their like after they migrated to Britain, featuring a recreation of a typical front room of the 1970s to raise "questions about the constructions of diaspora, identity, race, class and gender in the domestic interior". According to cultural theorist Stuart Hall, "The front room is a conservative element of black domestic life, which is more complex and rich than the generality of the society ever realises"; nevertheless, McMillan recalled in an article in The Guardian:
"Growing up in our front room caused me much aesthetic distress. The wallpaper and carpet never seemed to match, and Jim Reeves would be crooning from the Blue Spot radiogram on a Sunday. This room was based on the Victorian parlour and was inscribed with a formal code of behaviour because it was reserved for receiving guests. It was packed with furniture, ornaments and soft furnishings surrounded by a gallery of pictures and photographs."
Mounted at London's Geffrye Museum in October 2005, the critically acclaimed exhibition resonated with more than 35,000 visitors who represented a variety of ages, genders and social, cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Different versions have since been remade in other countries and cultural settings, including in the Netherlands and in Curaçao, and the associated BBC4 television documentary Tales from the Front Room was broadcast in 2007. He has also made presentations on The Front Room at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Clark University, Worcester and Northwestern University, Chicago,. A book entitled The Front Room: Migrant Aesthetics in the Home followed in 2009.
Another installation-based exhibition was The Beauty Shop at the 198 Gallery in south London, where, as with The Front Room, McMillan "tried to create a tangible sense of performance. Visitors were encouraged to respond to them as theatre as much as art."
In 2015, he recreated the Walter Rodney Bookshop as an installation within the exhibition No Colour Bar: Black British Art in Action 1960–1990 at the Guildhall Art Gallery, and participated in related events.
Another recent work is Doing Nothing Is Not An Option, a site-responsive mixed-media installation to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the death of Ken Saro-Wiwa by exploring the relationship between local people in Peckham and the memory of the Nigerian writer and activist.

Selected curatorial work

Van Huis Uit: The Living Room of Migrants in the Netherlands A Living Room Surrounded by Salt The Beauty Shop The West Indian Front Room The Southall Story
  • "I Miss My Mum’s Cooking"
  • "The Waiting Room"
  • "My Hair: Black Hair Culture, Style and Politics"
  • "The Walter Rodney Bookshop"

Selected publications

The School Leaver On Duty
  • Editor, Words, Sounds & Power Anthology Living Proof: Views of a World Living with HIV/AIDS.The Black Boy Pub & Other Stories: The black experience in High Wycombe.If I Could Fly: An anthology of writings from young men at Orchard Lodge Resource Centre.Growing Up Is Hard To Do: A Book For Young People & Adults About Sexual Health.Same Difference: 25 Years of International Youth Volunteering with the Daneford Trust.The Waiting Room: An audio-visual tale of an artist in residence at the Alaw Ward in Ysbyty Gwynedd & Rheumatology Clinics in Ysbyty Gwynedd and Ysbyty Llandudno The Front Room: Migrant Aesthetics in the Home. Revised edition, The Front Room: Diaspora Migrant Aesthetics in the Home, Lund Humphries, 2023,.

Plays and performance pieces

The School Leaver Hard Time Pressure Carve Your Name Day of Action On Duty First Impressions Portrait of a Shopping Centre as a Cathedral The Last Blind Date Invisible Brother to Brother ; in Cheryl Robson, Black and Asian Plays Anthology, Aurora Metro, 2000I Hope It's Not a Black Man After Windrush Blood for Britain Can you Play Football? Babel Junction Master Juba