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The debates surrounding ethnicity and theatre are alive and kicking, as shown by a range of current London plays.
It's an interesting time for black theatre in London at the moment. Stop. Rewind. Is that actually a useful thing to say? This is the question posed by the playwright Bola Agbaje on the Facebook group for her Olivier Award-winning play Gone Too Far!, which returns to the Royal Court in July as part of its Upstairs Downstairs season. The discussion topic "If a black person produces something such as a play, a film or music should it be associated with the word black?" has received almost 4,000 words in reply, passionately arguing both for and against, while examining the wider issues that surround the question.
Across town at the Arcola, Femi Oguns's play Torn has just opened. Like Gone Too Far!, Torn also deals with the split in the black community between African and West Indian cultures. The blurb for the show reads: "'You got the Whites - they're a collective. Then there's the Asians - they're unified. And then there's us. Divided. It's deep.' Two London lovers. One African. One West-Indian. What's the problem?" Leaving aside the questionable suggestions that whites are a collective (unless you count, uh, class, nationalism, Protestantism/Catholicism and even sexuality) and that the Asian community is unified (sure, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs all get on like a house on fire - not), it is significant that here again is a play by a (black) playwright dealing with issues that directly affect the black community. And one which presents the situation as unique to black communities. Rather than using the situation to explore wider questions of segregation common to all human societies, Torn's publicity presents the divisions as specific and unique.
Perhaps even more interestingly, this week Look Back in Anger opens at Jermyn Street theatre starring Jimmy Akingbola. It remains to be seen whether this is "colour-blind casting" in a traditional, literalist, 1950s setting, or whether any adaptation or modernisation has taken place. Writing on the discussion of Gone Too Far!, one actor writes "...I don't want to be DE-ETHNITISED in my work. Meaning that I am colourblind cast all the time. In this sense I want my background/skin colour/ heritage to be part and parcel of what I bring to acting/writing because that is the frame of reference in which I am working. I would NEVER want to be asked to 'imagine to be white'. Which incidentally I HAVE been asked to do... BUT I don't want to be known as a 'BLACK ACTOR' rather than just an actor NOR do I want to be asked to deny my life's experiences when it comes to creating my art."
Meanwhile, over the river, the second leg of the LIFT festival's two-part season, which started in Stratford, continues on the South Bank. Here again, questions of identity are raised, both explicitly - with discussions like "The Responsibilities of Representation" chaired by Ruth Holdsworth with Paolo Favero - and implicitly: looking down the list of events you see label after label: "Deaf artist and Graeae Artistic Director Jenny Sealey"; "a staged meeting between the audience and leading Maori activist, Tame Iti"; "inspirational music from Australia's black protest movement"; "renowned English actor Pete Postlethwaite... Patrick Dodson and Bill Johnson, an old English school friend whose indigenous son Louis died tragically" ... The list goes on.
The question of identity concerns us all. Writing on the Gone Too Far! discussion, the playwright Duncan MacMillan notes: "It disturbed me greatly that many critics of my last play couldn't get over the fact my central character was black, as if our default starting position for characters is white ... I wonder whether it surprised so many people because I wasn't black, as if I couldn't possibly relate to or have empathy for someone who was ... There will be many people who will feel that, as a white man, I have no right to write a black character. You could also say I shouldn't be able to write women, old people, firemen, people who have different names, ages, opinions or experiences etc to my own. This particular line of argument ends up at a dead end where we are only able to write one-person shows about ourselves, performed by ourselves ... but then why even bother, if our capacity for empathy doesn't stretch to engaging with and being moved by the experiences of others."
It is a beautifully eloquent point. While identity and taxonomy can be important, it is our reaction to the labels that causes the problems. There should be no problem identifying a writer as black, but identifying a play as "black" (as in "black theatre company" and the like) seems to suggest exclusion, in the same way as "disabled theatre company" almost appears to start with special pleading, each modification seeming to enforce the idea that theatre companies are, unless otherwise stated, white and able-bodied. In seeking to fight against dismissive attitudes, is there a danger that the labels actually enact a far more definite sense of segregation? How do we retain identity without implying separatism?
Photo : Zawe Ashton (Armani) and Marcus Onilude (Blazer) in Gone Too Far!, 2007. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
Courtesy : The Guardian Daily, London
