British Black and Asian Shakespeareans

Integrating Shakespeare, 1966–2018

Jami Rogers

• Verlag: The Arden Shakespeare
• Jahr: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350112933
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Media & Performing Arts
• Thema: Theatre History & Criticism

Shakespeare is at the heart of the British theatrical tradition, but the contribution of Ira Aldridge and the Shakespearean performers of African, African-Caribbean, south Asian and east Asian heritage who came after him is not widely known. Telling the story for the first time of how Shakespearean theatre in Britain was integrated from the 1960s to the 21st century, this is a timely and important account of that contribution. Drawing extensively on empirical evidence from the British Black and Asian Shakespeare Performance Database and featuring interviews with nearly forty performers and directors, the book chronicles important productions that led to ground-breaking castings of Black and Asian actors in substantial Shakespearean roles including:
· Zakes Mokae ( Cry Freedom ) as one of three black witches in William Gaskill's 1966 production of Macbeth at the Royal Court Theatre. · Norman Beaton as Angelo in Michael Rudman's 1981 production of Measure for Measure at the National Theatre – the first majority Black Shakespearean cast at the theatre. · Josette Simon as Isabella in Measure for Measure at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1987. · Adrian Lester in the title role of Nicholas Hytner's 2003 production of Henry V. · Iqbal Khan on his 2012 production of Much Ado About Nothing – the first production with an all south Asian cast at the Royal Shakespeare Company. · Alfred Enoch and Rakie Ayola as Edgar and Goneril in Talawa Theatre Company's 2016 production of King Lear · Paapa Essiedu as Hamlet in Simon Godwin's 2016 production for the Royal Shakespeare Company. With first-hand accounts from key performers including Joseph Marcell, Adrian Lester, Josette Simon, Lolita Chakrabarti, Noma Dumezweni, Rakie Ayola, David Yip, Ray Fearon, Paterson Joseph, Alfred Enoch, Rudolph Walker and many more, this book is an invaluable history of Black and Asian Shakespeareans that highlights the gains these actors have made and the challenges still faced in pursuing a career in classical theatre.

1

‘Difficult to justify this casting without sounding racist’: breakthroughs and stereotypes, 1966–1972

When the British Parliament passed the Race Relations Act of 1965, it was the first piece of legislation to directly address racial discrimination in Britain. While it was relatively toothless – civil, rather than criminal law – and excluded employment and housing, it was an acknowledgement that postwar immigration was changing Britain. While there is no direct correlation between this legislation and classical theatre, notable castings followed in the wake of that ground-breaking legislation. In 1966, four performers of colour were cast in British professional Shakespeare productions: one in Othello (Rudolph Walker as Othello) at the Malvern Festival Theatre and three in Macbeth (Zakes Mokae, Femi Euba and Jumoke Debayo as the Weird Sisters, more commonly known as the Witches) at the Royal Court in London. All four were immigrants: from Trinidad (Walker), South Africa (Mokae) and Nigeria (Euba and Debayo); all but one (Debayo) were male. Four performers of colour appearing in Shakespeare in the course of a single year was also a British theatrical record.

The role of Othello serves as a benchmark to which we will return throughout these pages, an illustration of the slow integration of classical theatre in Britain. As we saw in the opening chapter, despite a handful of exceptions after 1930, the norm in 1966 remained a white actor blacking up to play Othello. Perhaps no performance of the role was more culturally significant in Britain than Laurence Olivier’s in 1964. Its reach remains extensive, as the production was filmed and released as a commercial venture in 1966 and is still available for purchase.

Olivier spent two and a half hours each night on his make-up, shifting his skin tone from ‘Brighton white’ to ‘Caribbean black’ (Holden 1988: 378), covering himself from top to toe in various hues of brown and black, donning a black curly wig and lowering his voice by an octave. As biographer Anthony Holden notes, Olivier’s ‘lifelong obsession with make-up reached its apogee’ with Othello (1988: 378). Holden links Olivier’s ‘Black man’ directly to recent Caribbean immigration into Britain, noting the actor ‘would look and talk and walk like a negro – yes, a contemporary negro, of the kind now commonplace (if only recently) on the streets of London’, who were living and working on the South Bank ‘on the edge of the black ghettoes developing in the south of the capital’ (378). Olivier justified going to these extraordinary lengths to change his physical appearance by stating, ‘I had to be black. I had to feel black down to my soul. I had to look out from a black man’s world’ (Olivier 1986: 106). Of course, a white man covered in thick, ebony make-up (which prevented him from kissing his Desdemona, lest it rub off on her) had no way to ‘be black’. Instead, Olivier presented his audience with, as Ayanna Thompson says, ‘a full-on racial impersonation’ (2016: 82).

As Colin Chambers shows, blackface minstrelsy ‘became central to the performance of Otherness in Britain, rising with the abolition of slavery’ (2011: 52) and it continued well into the twentieth century. The Black and White Minstrel Show debuted on the BBC in 1958 and ran for twenty years, its final episode broadcast in 1978, well over a decade after Olivier’s Othello. An episode of ITV’s popular 1990s series Jeeves and Wooster, with Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, featured characters – including Laurie’s Bertie Wooster – made up as blackface minstrels. The programme’s US co-producers could not air the episode, as American audiences were arguably more attuned to the blatant racism.

The practice of blacking up was so ingrained in British culture that even Olivier’s wife, Joan Plowright, considered it when playing Portia in Jonathan Miller’s 1970 production of The Merchant of Venice (Guardian 7 October 1974):

At one stage, we had the idea she might black up when she goes to Venice: it would at least have made plausible the fact that her husband never recognises her and it would have given a certain point to the Duke’s ‘Came you from old Bellario.’ I could also have imitated Larry as Othello. But in the end, perhaps wisely, we dropped the idea.

Black men in Britain who aspired to be professional actors in the 1960s faced a very different reality from that of the white men who casually blacked up to play Othello. As Rudolph Walker recalls, ‘What I faced as a young actor in this country is that Shakespeare – and especially the leading role in Shakespeare – wasn’t meant for us, as Black actors’. The data in the British Black and Asian Shakespeare Performance Database corroborate Walker’s statement. Performers of colour filled few roles, leading or otherwise, in Shakespeare productions before the early 1980s, even after the influx of immigrant talent after the Second World War.

The exclusion of actors of colour from Shakespeare was symptomatic of an attitude within the wider British entertainment industry. A 1950s-era BBC internal audit claimed that people of colour were represented in television drama, but only when a programme contained what decision makers called ‘suitable roles’ (Newton 2011: 106–7). The term is itself opaque, but what was most often meant were parts specifying a character’s ethnicity, as with The Boy in Shelagh Delaney’s 1958 play A Taste of Honey. The almost complete exclusion of performers of colour, driven by a perceived lack of ‘suitable roles’, marked the period when this story starts.

Like many of his contemporaries, Wyllie Longmore emigrated to Britain from Jamaica in the early 1960s. Having come across a prospectus for what was then the Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama and aware of the precedent of previous students, such as fellow Jamaicans Yvonne Brewster and Trevor Rhone, Longmore arrived in London in 1961 intending to train as an actor. He eventually obtained a grant from Ealing council and enrolled in Rose Bruford’s dual teacher–actor training course in 1965. Longmore’s experiences at drama school help to paint a picture of an industry struggling with inclusion. ‘It shocked me greatly when I discovered there were so few Black people at the college. In fact, one in every year practically’, Longmore recalls of his time there.

Two key points from Longmore’s years at Rose Bruford are indicative of prevalent industry practice: the expectation around accent and the ways in which Longmore himself was cast. Although a plethora of regional and international accents is now heard on contemporary British stages, as late as the 1980s actors had to suppress their natural accents in favour of Received Pronunciation (RP), the standard British dialect. Longmore found practical as well as professional reasons to succeed at the elocution lessons Bruford offered: ‘If you didn’t get rid of your accent and you came from overseas, your diploma said “overseas student”, which meant that you probably couldn’t teach here, couldn’t work here.’ In other words, students were expected to assimilate, to sound British by changing their way of speaking. This was particularly important in the acting profession, where any difference was carefully neutralized. As Lucy Sheen explains, in the 1980s drama schools were still ‘pounding’ regional dialects ‘out of you’ because:

you had to speak in a particular way. The only way – especially for classical theatre – you could do that was to sound like a bad imitation of John Gielgud or Ralph Richardson or Laurence Olivier. RP was the language of the classics, particularly Shakespeare. So any kind of regional differences, any regional colour, was smacked out of you.

What was true when Sheen was entering the profession was exponentially more so in the 1960s when Longmore attended Rose Bruford. White actors, from both Longmore’s generation and those acting in the early twentieth century, provide countless anecdotes about having to adapt their natural speaking voices. Performers such as Laurence Olivier and Alec Guinness did not, however, have to contend with the prejudice meted out to Wyllie Longmore and Rudolph Walker because of the colour of their skin.

While training at Rose Bruford, Longmore quickly discovered the struggles he would face in the profession in terms of how he was cast. He recalls, ‘I was playing Colonel Fitzwilliam in Pride and Prejudice and I was the only Black boy in my year and so of course I had to play whatever the syllabus was.’ Just as Ira Aldridge played roles like King Lear in whiteface, Longmore was required to white up to play Colonel Fitzwilliam. There were also few roles for him in Shakespeare during his training and never full productions, only Prospero in the opening scene of The Tempest and one scene as Bardolph in Shakespeare’s history plays: ‘I was never given any work in Othello and so I left college after three years with only that smattering of Shakespeare.’

For all its faults, Rose Bruford was more enlightened in casting Longmore than the wider profession at the time. He remembers, ‘When I left, there was hardly any work for Black people. I graduated in 1968 and I came up here [Manchester] to audition at the Library Theatre for A Taste of Honey. That’s where I was heading, really, that’s the sort of role.’ Longmore was not interested in playing servants and the other marginalized roles given to Black performers. Lacking acting opportunities and having a family to support, Longmore used his educational training at Rose Bruford to begin teaching at drama schools, first at Rose Bruford and then LAMDA, East 15 and Webber Douglas, before eventually joining the drama department at the University of Manchester. Longmore nevertheless returned to acting in the early 1980s and made history by being the first performer of colour to play a succession of Shakespearean roles in both Manchester and London, including Mark Antony in Antony and Cleopatra.

The prevailing atmosphere in the late 1960s meant that actors of colour had limited opportunities to develop careers in mainstream theatre, film and television. This makes Rudolph Walker’s early and largely unknown success in Shakespeare more remarkable, especially as he recounts that Shakespeare had been ‘alien to me as a youngster growing up in Trinidad’. Walker arrived in England in 1960, the year before Longmore, having been encouraged to emigrate by his fellow Trinidadian pioneer, Errol John. Walker had planned to go to America, but John convinced him that the training was better in England (Guardian 22 October 2001). Walker spent his first few years in England working with amateur dramatic groups such as the Mountview Theatre Club and attending evening classes. Walker had his first experience acting Shakespeare in 1963, when an amateur company decided to stage Othello and asked him to play the lead. This fortuitously provided Walker with what he calls a ‘working knowledge’ of the play, which allowed him ‘that little extra luxury to do a little exploration’ when he first came to play the part professionally.

In 1965, Walker found himself in a recurring role in a BBC television drama about a fictional Second Division football club, United! Immigration was gradually changing all aspects of British life, a trend that was reflected, on rare occasions, on television. First Division football clubs had engaged Black footballers as early as 1909, when Tottenham Hotspur fielded Walter Tull. By the end of the 1960s, a number of other clubs had hired their first Black footballers, including Portsmouth and Everton. The BBC’s United! had incorporated this growing trend into its scripts, which meant that there was a ‘suitable role’ for an actor of African-Caribbean heritage. As Walker recalls, after he had filmed several episodes of United!:

this offer came through to go to Malvern Festival Theatre to play Othello. I had a choice then of continuing in the television series because there was a short gap [in filming United!] and they were thinking of making my character a running character. I remember the executive producer saying ‘If you take that job, the chances are that you might not get back into the series.’ I thought: You know what? The opportunity to play Othello professionally, I have more to gain by doing that. I never got back into the series, but that was neither here nor there.

Rudolph Walker’s casting as Othello in 1966 at the Malvern Festival Theatre went against the prevailing climate. The director, John Ridley, had contacted Walker directly about the opportunity, leaving his agent out of the loop. When Walker told her that he was going to be in Othello, she asked him, ‘Which part are you going to play?’ His agent’s response shows how ingrained the idea was that African-Caribbean men were not considered for the lead in Shakespeare’s tragedy. The reaction of the local paper – which announced Walker’s presence in the three-week run with a front-page headline, ‘Coloured actor as Othello’ (Malvern Gazette 10 February 1966) – also reflected the rarity of his casting.

The Malvern Festival Theatre Othello with Rudolph Walker received little attention from the national press, making barely a ripple in theatrical history. The Malvern Gazette praised Walker’s Othello as ‘a striking figure, with a fine voice’. There were hints of prejudice in the review as well, as the author felt it necessary to point out that Walker had ‘obviously analysed most carefully this character’, a comment that contains centuries of stereotypes of African-Caribbeans having inferior intelligence and lacking in work ethic (Malvern Gazette 17 February 1966). This comment was mild, however, in comparison to what the national press would write in the 1980s as performers of colour attained leads with larger repertory theatres and the two subsidized national companies.

Director John Ridley was clearly more enlightened than his contemporaries. Walker himself notes:

It was quite something for Malvern to do it. Certainly that a man of that era invited me to play Othello. It’s not to say that I was a name or anything like that. I was just a young actor, sort of struggling, and he located me and said, ‘You know, look, I want you to do that’.

Between 1966 and 1972, three other white directors played significant parts in the history of integrating British Shakespeare: William Gaskill, Jonathan Miller and Peter Coe. In Macbeth (Royal Court, 1966), The Tempest (Mermaid Theatre, London, 1970) and The Black Macbeth (Roundhouse Theatre, London, 1972), respectively, these directors cast actors from African-Caribbean heritage in significant roles in the canon.

These three landmark productions begin in earnest our history of a more inclusive Shakespearean landscape in Britain. Collectively all three were innovative while also conforming, consciously or unconsciously, to dominant perceptions of African-Caribbeans in British society. These early examples of integrated Shakespeare set precedents, in both the casting of ethnic-minority performers in Shakespeare roles and the framing of the actors’ work. These productions also mark the beginning of a glass ceiling that has been a feature of Shakespearan production for the past fifty years. They demonstrate the ways in which the concept of ‘suitable roles’ was adapted to the Shakespearean medium.

Macbeth, Royal Court, 1966

On the surface, London’s Royal Court Theatre is an unlikely venue to provide a seminal moment in the history of integrating Shakespeare. The Court’s policy, according to former Literary Manager Graham Whybrow, was to ‘conscientiously search for new voices, new playwrights, and new social worlds that hitherto hadn’t been seen on the stage’ (qtd in Little and MacLaughlin 2007: 20). The importance of this policy cannot be underestimated for Black British theatre history, as some of those new voices were writers of African-Caribbean heritage. In 1958 the company staged Lloyd Reckord’s Flesh to a Tiger, swiftly followed by the premiere of Errol John’s Moon on a Rainbow Shawl, which were ‘the first in a long line’ of work by ‘African and West Indian authors and actors’ that was ‘unequalled by any other British theatre’ (Findlater 1981: 46). Along with Lloyd Reckord and Errol John, the Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka was active with the Royal Court Writers’ Group, helmed in the 1950s by William Gaskill.

Wole Soyinka’s success as a playwright in the mid-1960s led directly to the first known casting of performers of colour as the Witches in William Gaskill’s Macbeth, starring Alec Guinness. Soyinka had joined the Royal Court Writer’s Group in 1957 on the strength of a play he had written while a student at the University of Leeds, The Lion and the Jewel (Little and MacLaughlin 2007: 59). Gaskill’s involvement in nurturing the Writer’s Group and his championing of Soyinka’s work likely drew him to the Hampstead Theatre in June 1966. At that time, the Ijinle Theatre Company was producing what its publicity called ‘a series of African plays’ with Soyinka’s The Trials of Brother Jero staged in a double bill with Athol Fugard’s two-hander, The Blood Knot.

The casts of both one-act plays at the Hampstead included Fugard’s frequent collaborator, Zakes Mokae, playing opposite the actor–writer in Blood Knot and the eponymous hero in Soyinka’s Jero, along with two Nigerians of Yoruba heri...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Forgotten Shakespeareans
• 1 ‘Difficult to justify this casting without sounding racist’: breakthroughs and stereotypes, 1966–1972
• 2 ‘Why weren’t we auditioned?’: the ‘Black canon’ and the battle for Othello
• 3 From ‘suitable roles’ to leads, 1980–1987
• 4 Owning Shakespeare – Temba, Talawa and Tara Arts, 1988–1994
• 5 Cracking the glass ceiling, 1988–1996
• 6 ‘Monarchs to Behold’: 1997–2003
• 7 Progress postponed, 2004–2011
• 8 Shakespeare from multiculturalism to Brexit, 2012–2018
• References
• Index
• Imprint