BLACK AND WHITE

I remember the first time I saw a black actor portraying a white character on stage.  It was in Stratford-upon-Avon, the play was Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth and the lead role was taken by Adrian Lester who had won his spurs playing the likeable conman Mickey in Hustle.  It was a modern dress production with tanks and machine guns and the largely white audience was far too polite to wonder how a medieval king of England ago could be black.

More recently I went to see The Convert at the Gate Theatre in London.  A young African woman becomes a Christian to escape a forced marriage to an older man and adopts the name of Esther.  She embraces the faith but finds that it does not live up to its promises and is unable to overcome the unchristian racism of the people who introduced it.  There were no white characters on stage and the cast of seven were all portrayed by black actors. 

This somehow seemed right.  It was a small theatre where you could almost touch the actors and the presence of a white performer representing a black person would have seemed incongruous.  Not that it was likely to happen.  On the way to the theatre I had read about a demonstration organised to protest about the use of white actors to represent Chinese characters on stage.  Then the daughter of Michael Jackson caused a jokey satire about her father and Elizabeth Taylor taking a road trip together to be pulled by Sky Arts because he was portrayed by the white actor Joseph Fiennes.  Jackson himself seemed to got hrough life becoming progressively whiter and the casting of a swarthy looking white like Fiennes may have been an ironic comment on this process, but we will let that pass. 

So we are now in the ludicrous position where black actors can portray white characters while white actors cannot take on non-white parts.  With oscarssowhite so fresh in the memory you need not weep too much for those poor privileged white thespians unable to show their versatility by portraying people of colour.  My concern is more that we are in danger of ghettoising non-white actors in a way that might in fact inhibit them from moving into mainstream parts.  As Lester showed, there is no reason why black actors cannot play parts once reserved for whites, so why prohibit white actors from portraying black people?

Coleridge invented the term ‘suspension of disbelief’ to represent the imaginative leap we make when watching a play.  Our conscious minds know perfectly well that the person on stage is not actually the King of England, Prince of Denmark or Empress of Egypt but, if the actor representing that character does so convincingly, we put that knowledge aside and enjoy the play. This works in the theatre but not on film.  If Lester rather than Kenneth Branagh had portrayed King Henry in Branagh’s film version of the play it would not have worked as we would been unable to accept the discrepancy in a medium which demands a higher level of realism.  This is why I tend to avoid films which use intrusive CGI effects.  As soon as I see the join and realise that the exploding spaceship or collapsing building has been created by a technician on a laptop I lose interest in the whole process. 

Why would I find it difficult to watch a play about black Aficans in which one of the characters is portrayed by a white actor?    The answer must be that there is still an element of racism in the way we look at actors on the stage and that I am not immune from this.  I can suspend my disbelief enough to accept a black man portraying a white man – or a woman portraying a man, as Fiona Shaw did when she played Rchard the Second, another historical impossibility that worked on stage.  Yet I might not sit comfortably in a theatre in which a white person is portraying a black one. 

We all know that this happened frequently in the days before black actors decided that they were not going to take it anymore and brought to an end the days of blacking up in the late and unlamented Black and white Minstrels Show or, to go back to Shakespeare, the time when great thespians applied dark make-up to portray the moor who kills his wife.

Ah yes, Othello, the elephant in the room of transracial casting.  It is inconceivable that a non-white actor could portray him these days, yet it seems a shame that a fine white actor like Christopher Ecclestone would not be allowed to step into this role without causing such an uproar that a staging of the play would be effectively impossible. 

Now I know that black actors, still finding it hard to gain a foothold in the acting profession are not going to be particularly sympathetic to some white bloke who says that they cannot have exclusive access to Othello.  This is the one serious role that is ours, they say, and you are trying to take it away from us for the skae of a theoretical racial equality which does not exist in the real world.  Forgetaboutit.

Yet we do not insist that Shylock is portrayed by a Jewish actor any more than we insist that Macbeth is portrayed by a Scotsman even though anti-semitism still exists.  Jewish actors are supposed to be able to overcome prejudice while black actors are not expected to overcome racism.  Isn’t this ultimately a bit patronising, our thinking that if you are black you cannot be expected to compete on equal terms with white actors?  My late mother was a great supporter of the Fair Trade movement but it always left me a bit uncomfortable, the idea that businesses based in the third world would always need some extra help from us because they could not be expected to compete on equal terms.  There is a fine line between giving someone a helping hand and thinking them incapable of helping themselves.

This is why I think that racism will not be truly dead until it is considered utterly unremarkable for a white actor to play Othello – just as a black actor portrays King Henry.