COLOUR BLIND CASTING

Ade Hastrup, black actor

I have written before on the issue of colour blind casting, arguing that racism will never be properly finished in this country until we have a white man playing Othello without anyone batting an eyelid (http://menfriday.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/black-and-white.html).  Recently I have been thinking about the issue again. largely as a result of seeing two plays and a film.

The first play was The Winslow Boy, a thoroughly old-fashioned conventional story about a family's fight for justice for their son, who is accused of stealing a postal order.  The play was fine, well-acted and involving even if the set, costumes and staging were unadventurous.  The only slight frisson was when the family solicitor Desmond appears on stage played by a black actor.  The character is a stuffy cricket-playing solicitor and the name is common enough amongst black men in Britain - as is playing cricket - so the casting would not have excited comment except that the play was set a hundred years ago in the build-up to the First World War.  (The actual character on whom the play was based died at the age of nineteen in the trenches.)  Fair enough, however, we seemed to think in the audience.  It is an well-known play by Terence Rattigan who is coming back into fashion, black actors need opportunities and you can suspend your disbelief enough to accept this piece of casting, even if in practice a black man would not have become a family solicitor a hundred years ago.

Second up was Queen Anne, set three hundred years ago about the relationship of Anne and Sarah Churchill, which had been central to the power balance in Britain but then went sour.  In this play, Sarah's husband the Duke of Marlborough was played by a black actor.  While it was just about possible Desmond could have been black, history tells us that John Churchill was definitely white, wealthy and privileged.  Again, you put this fact out of your mind in watching the play.  Something about a show on the stage means you stop being pedantic about skin colour and get on with enjoying the story.

That does not work so well on film, however, where a higher standard of realism is expected.  Film-makers spend millions on computer generated special effects (CGI) which are often unconvincing and distancing.  I start to switch off when I imagine a nerd sitting at a keyboard expecting me to believe that a skyscraper is collapsing or a spaceship exploding.  Sadly this means that opportunities for black actors have to be restricted to roles they might be expected to fill in real life - or in the alternative superhero universe of Black Panther.  

The film was about the Duke's descendant Winston Churchill.  I have been a bit Churchilled out recently and was going to skip it but we went for date night and it was actually a reasonable representation of an important time.  Even the make-up which, like the CGI, is so often unconvincing worked well enough.  What did not work was the part in which 'Winnie takes the tube'.  It sounds like a Pooh story and is about as realistic.  This absurd scene ends with some lines from the historian Macauley begun by Churchill and completed by an unknown black character, who gets a pat on the back from Winnie.  Çhurchill then goes off to rouse the House of Commons and stride off in triumph as the credits start to roll.

Everything about this is wrong.  Churchill was a leader not a follower and he would not have been seen dead on the tube. He did not need the support of the common people he supposedly met there to be convinced that he was right.  Moreover, Britain simply was not a multicultural country at the time and a man of colour would not have been in the position to offer his opinions to the Prime Minister of the day. Let us give Churchill the benefit of the doubt and say that he was not an out and out racist, but he was definitely an imperialist who had no time for Indian independence, for example, and despised Gandhi.  Shoehorning a black character into an already unrealistic scene simply made it impossible to believe in.

The actor who played the unnamed black man on the tube is called Ade Hastrup and I wish him well in his career.  He faces plenty of obstacles, not least the fact that it is not easy to rewrite history.  On the stage, maybe.  On the screen, no.

This essay was written just before the Oscars ceremony - in which Oldman won for Best Actor - and so it did not cover the concept of the 'inclusion rider' which Best Actress winner Trances McDormand referenced.  This is something I will deal with in a future post.

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com