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 

RIPPED JEANS AND SNAKES AROUND THE NECK

Ripped jeans - £45 from Top Shop
(Three times the cost of whole ones at M&S) 

My partner fell over and ripped her jeans the other day.  Very fashionable, I consoled her.  We both come from a generation that wears jeans for practical purposes – decorating, gardening and other jobs around the house in my case, looking after her horses in her case – and we tend to buy them cheaply (£15 for my latest ones from Marks and Spencer).  For us a rip in the jeans is a sign that they should be replaced, for more fashion conscious wearers a sign that they should be purchased. 

I first became aware of the trend when the footballer Christiano Ronaldo was pictured wearing jeans with holes while his then teammate at Manchester United, Wayne Rooney, was wearing a suit at an event held to honour the former player at their club Bobby Charlton, who would never be seen in public wearing jeans of any type, ripped or whole.  The savvy young continental player did not need to bother with things like suits and ties when honouring an older one, while the more conventional and conservative British one did.

Nowadays it is almost impossible to take a journey on the London Underground without sitting opposite someone – usually a woman around half my age – exposing flesh through jeans.  Sometimes it is a few square inches, at other times quite a considerable acreage.  How is it that a feature which not so long ago would have made a garment unsellable has now become virtually a prerequisite of purchase?  We buy and wear clothes to demonstrate who we are – or maybe who we want to be.  As we get farther away from manual labour, we want to look more and more like workers.  Occasionally you see an actual labourer in the tube and they will usually be wearing unripped trousers, tears being potentially dangerous.  They will probably also have a tool bag strapped to or sitting next to them, a sure sign that they are on their to or from actual physical work.

Maybe it is to do with sex, partially exposed flesh being an indication that this body might be available to the right person, a promise of barely hidden treasures.  Although the fashion seems to be on the way out now, it was recently quite common for young and - let's admit it - black men to expose their boxer shorts above the line of jeans which drooped down their legs.  What did this show?  That they could afford to buy a fashionable brand of underwear, the name of which was conveniently; that it was a short step to what lay barely hidden below; or – and this was the ‘official’ explanation given – that they identified with the black prisoners in American jails who were not allowed to wear belts so found that their trousers dropping down involuntarily? 

The issue is fraught with racial dynamics and dangers.  In my fiction writing days, I once wrote a story in which a female character compared the modesty of young Moslem women, who would not expose even their hair let alone their undergarments to anyone but their husbands, and young men who exposed their underwear to all and sundry as though they were ready for sex with anyone at any time.  I was ticked off for this by a writing judge who said I ought to be more careful about racial sensitivities.   It seemed to me that it was just the sort of thing a young woman in tune with clothing and fashion might say but it appears you cannot even imagine a fictional character making this kind of comment these days.

At the same time as we are trying to look like the workmen we are not, we are refusing to dress like the office workers we are – or used to be.  I have a weakness for a neck tie but usually only wear one when I am going to work as it seems like a mark of respect to those you are working for to dress properly for them and, as a man, you simply have not finished dressing until you have put that tie around your neck and done it up.  On one level this is, I know, ridiculous as most workplaces do not demand a tie these days and it serves no practical purpose to wear one.  They are even banned in hospitals now as they are considered germ-carriers. So why half strangle yourself with a snake around your neck, as one tie-hater put it?  Because leaving that top button undone and uncovered shows that you cannot be bothered to complete the process you started when you began covering your flesh.  I would feel faintly ridiculous wearing one to anything other than the most formal social occasion but I have a decent collection of ties and, rather than let them rot, I wear them as a sign that I am operating in a professional capacity.  So, tie on means money being earned while tie off means money being spent.

Ties used to be tribal, adorned with the symbols that indicated which school or regiment you had been a member of.  Now they are individual, patterned in a way that gives you the opportunity to be dandyish.  I have a weakness for Liberty patterns, which can be almost witty in their detail without descending into irritating whimsy or gimmickry, ties with pictures on them which you wear once but never again.  (It is hard to be taken seriously wearing a tie with Homer Simpson or the Beatles over you belly.)  As I work less the opportunity to wear a tie is diminishing, which Is in itself a shame.  I could put one on to write this piece but would frankly feel like a prat wearing one unnecessarily.  We are more subject ot the pressures of fashion than we often realise or acknowledge.

I have not yet bought a pair of ripped jeans.  There would be little to see through the rips except hairy legs and varicose veins, nothing to persuade a passer-by that were great treasures beneath the denim.  If there is one thing more embarrassing than dressing too formally it is dressing too fashionably.  Maybe this is why I am baffled by ripped jeans.  I am just too old to look cool in them.  I will stick to that snake around my neck. 

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

Apologies for the late posting of this essay.

Edwin Lerner

WOMEN DRIVERS - IN SPACE

First female Doctor Who and Tardis - but can she drive it?

I only watched two television programmes on Christmas day and both in different ways brought into focus the role of women: Doctor Who and The Queen’s Christmas Message.  I had also been intermittently following The Crown series and I almost wondered if the real queen would live up to the performance of Claire Foy who portrayed her as a young wife gradually approaching middle age while holding down an uniquely demanding career.

In fact, the Queen’s annual broadcast to the nation and (importantly for her) the Commonwealth is usually a tepid affair with very little that is original or challenging in it.  That is probably no bad thing: you do not want to divide your people, especially at Christmas and, for everyone who praised her boldness for speaking out on some issue, there would be at least as many who criticised her.  Her Maj has perfected the art of seeming to care about her people without worrying overmuch about the issues which affect them.  The danger for monarchy is not that they do not get involved, but that they forget the importance of neutrality for a head of state, something that the Queen’s uncle Edward VIII (later Duke of Windsor) did when he hobnobbed with the Nazis and which Prince Charles occasionally show signs of doing, albeit on a far smaller and safer scale.

After the Queen and Christmas dinner we watched that other Christmas insitution Doctor Who.  I loved it as a kid and was genuinely frightened by what now seem laughably crude special effects. Later I grew bored with it before coming back when the series was regenerated by Steven Moffat and actors such as David Tennant and Matt Smith (who has done excellent service as Prince Philip in The Crown).  I was starting to get bored with it again but knew that the new programme would end with the first female Doctor being introduced and thought I would like to be present as history was being made – along with several million others.  The first thing Jody Whittaker did as she appeared was to press the wrong buttons in the Tardis and get thrown out of the door into space, instantly fatal for any human but not for a Time Lord, who presumably will survive and reappear when the next series starts, just as Carrie Fisher playing Princess Leia did in the latest Star Wars film.  Cue lots of jokes about women drivers.  In fact, government statistics invariably show that women are much safer drivers than men.  Lewis Hamilton need not worry, however.  I wrote 'safer' - not more skilful.  You are far less likely to have an accident with a woman at the wheel, also less likely to arrive before a car driven by a male driver.

The Last Jedi has the same concern with diversity as Doctor Who with a largely female crew and a diverse cast including a couple of rogue heroes portrayed by a black male and a Chinese female while the ‘bad guys’ are all white and male.  The reassuringly presence of Harrison Ford, who portrayed Han Solo an unreconstructed chauvinist, albeit one who sides with the ‘good guys’.  (They actually use those terrible phrases in the movie.)

Action films, in which ‘good’ characters can waste as many ‘bad’ ones as it takes to get the job done, have until recently been the last preserve of aging male movie stars like Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger who still kill lorry loads of their enemies, conveniently lining up to be offed and unable to shoot straight or move fast enough even when confronted by action heroes who are now lumbering into their eighth decades.  Recently, however, there has been an increase in films in which the killing is done by women.  

I do not care for ultra-violent films like these and have little desire to see Angela Jolie or Charlize Theron join this line of licensed psychopaths who emerge with barely a scratch after killing off multiple anonymous villains who, whatever their motivations, are human beings with a living to earn and a family to support.  Curiously enough it was in an Austin Powers spoof film that this issue was confronted.  In one scene family members of victims mourn the loss pf a loved one as Powers makes increasingly desperate puns about the methods used to bring about their demise.

Is it a victory for female emancipation to see women taking charge of spaceships and sending shedloads of fellow human beings to their doom?  Or is it just females trying to act more masculine?  Shouldn’t women try to change the agenda rather than just adopt the worst habits of men?  As James Bond has shown there is a lot of money to be made from characters who can drive fast and kill without remorse. Unsurprisingly women and minorities want to get into this act, once the preserve of urbane white heterosexual men.  

Good luck to them.  The latest Star Wars has done well enough at the box office to survive any churlish objections that it was too anxious to appeal to the politically sensitive in its audience.  There are still plenty of shoot outs and explosions in it, although the female characters might have done more good if they had managed to use their non-macho skills to effect some sort of compromise between the forces of dark and light, just as the Queen does.  She is good at bringing people from different backgrounds together to enjoy what they have in common rather than what divides them. Female power might even produce a shades of grey solution – even if that suggests a semi-pornographic novel in which the man in the story is triumphant thanks to the power of his penis.  Sometimes women cannot win.

_________________

Edwin Lerner - my other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com 

THE RELUCTANT PROTESTANT

Martin Luther, the troublesome monk

There is a certain irony in the fact that it was in a Roman Catholic church where I first learned the full facts about Martin Luther. He did not, apparently, nail those ninety five theses onto the church door at Wittenburg 500 years ago (there would not have been room) but sent them to the local bishop. Within weeks they had spread through Germany, within months through Europe and reached as far as little old England. Although Henry the Eighth – like Luther – considered himself a good Catholic until the end of his days, his break with Rome would not have been possible without the writings of the German monk and the fuss which followed. In another of those ironies it was Henry (and his successors) who proudly carried the title of Defender of the Faith given him by the Pope for persecuting heretics.

I was in the church to hear the writer Peter Stanford talking about his book Martin Luther: Catholic Dissenter.  The talk was scheduled to start at 7:30 and I had endured a long day and was not best pleased that it was delayed by the evening service running late. I convinced myself that the priest was taking his sweet time to put these godless Protestants in their place.  In fact, there were just a lot of people there for the service and he was not going to rush them. Saving souls was more important than stimulating intellects.  Fair enough – it was a house of God after all.

We learned that Luther hated the term ‘Protestant’ and thought he was actually doing the Pope a favour by highlighting the abuses which came from the selling of indulgences to finance the building of ever grander churches.  People were promised a quicker route to Heaven if they dropped a decent donation into the box and helped the church pay its bills.  The net result of this German monk speaking his mind and saying that salvation came from God’s grace not from good works was, in the short term, tens of thousands of people dying in the wars which followed and, in the long term, the division of Christianity into those who stick with the original Catholic creed and those who look for something different from the Protestant reformation.  Once you allow freedom into an institution it does not stop operating and the Protestants themselves have divided into an almost comical number of sub-sects. 

Stanford was brought up and remains a Catholic, I was brought up in a sceptical house and embraced atheism in my teens but later found it wanting and began to wander back into the church. (My work as a tourist guide has taken me into a lot of churches and some of it obviously rubbed off on me.)  If anyone asks, I describe myself as having the piety gene: looking for the solace of religion but unable to take the leap of faith into full scale belief. 

It would always be a Protestant church to which I would go in this search for God, even if I disagree with Luther’s idea that Heaven is attainable through faith not works.  If such a place exists – and I have great difficulty in believing it does – surely He will not exclude our souls from it without giving us a chance to prove our worth in this life.  Should a bad believer jump the queue in front of a good sceptic?  Can someone born in the wrong hemisphere or century be excluded from salvation because he or she did not have the opportunity to be or become a Christian?

Maybe Luther’s most famous action actually contradicts his philosophy.  If faith alone is enough to get you to Heaven, why bother to undermine those who tell you to do ‘good’ things to reach there – even if such actions are merely lining the pockets of those who run the show on earth?  Of course, Luther could not lead a life of quiet obedience, letting God alone decide who was to be saved.  He was a born upsetter of applecarts – “Here I stand, I can do no other,” he proclaimed even though he knew that doing so might condemn him to the flames in this world, if not the next.

One who did suffer the flames was William Tyndale who, like Luther, translated the Bible into his own language.  Tyndale was betrayed and executed by the Catholic hierarchy for the terrible crime of enabling the ploughboy to know the Bible as well as the pope. At the time the church was determined to keep its hold on the words of the Bible and would not tolerate translations which allowed people to think for themselves.  He was not actually the first English translator of the Bible.  That was John Wycliff who, unlike Luther and Tyndale, managed to keep his head down and survive. His body was later dug up and destroyed in an act of petty posthumous spite by the church authorities.  Luther would have suffered Tyndale’s fate if it was not for his powerful friends.

Tyndale’s is the translation we know and love in England with its great ringing phrases like ‘the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak’ and ‘the salt of the earth’.  It is phrases such as these which are heard today in the Catholic churches which often boast a larger congregation than their Protestant rivals.  The Latin mass has long been sidelined by all but a few stubborn traditionalists who defy a church no longer allowed to burn them at the stake.  So, in a sense Luther got his way with people of all faiths encouraged to know and read the Bible and not merely to rely on the man (Catholic) or person (Protestant) in the pulpit wearing the robes and leading the service.

I doubt I will ever square the circle and reconcile my scepticism with my need for belief.  I do know that atheism is not the answer and, to all those wo say that religion causes wars and bloodshed, I would reply that the great mass killers of the twentieth century were all atheists – Hitler, Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot.  At least with religion you are expected to behave better.

Edwin Lerner. (My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com)

For more on Peter Stanford and to order the book go to: peterstanford.co.uk