Theatre

A couple of months ago, I was sitting in the packed Cottesloe studio watching Enda Walsh’s flamboyantly deranged family drama ‘The Walworth Farce’. It’s set in a London council flat, and it concerns a father and his two adult sons, who, each day, compulsively perform a play they’ve invented to turn their tragic family history into a farce. It’s a fantastic piece of theatre, which orbits kitchen-sink reality at a great height, and I praised it fulsomely. But, oddly enough, the part which has stayed with me most is something I felt I couldn’t mention in my review: the moment when the black girl who stumbles in on the boys’ mad routine has her face daubed with white cream by the father, so she can play the part of his wife. Feature continues

Really, this is just one piece of naive cruelty in a play which contains many more squirmingly  painful examples (stabbings, betrayals, rectally impaled family pets). It’s not even a pivotal moment – Walsh’s quintessentially Irish text is all about family, not racism. But the audience’s reaction was extreme. As soon as we perceived the white man whiting up the black girl, it was as if somebody had turned the house lights up. A gasp of almost salacious shock rippled around the auditorium. Disbelief was un-suspended. The characters receded. And, for a long moment, the (white) audience was conscious of itself: shocked; disapproving; but also, I think, titillated.

That racially charged moment in ‘The Walworth Farce’ is not the first time that I, a middle-class, white theatre critic sitting in a predominantly middle-class, white audience, have felt deeply uncomfortable and complicit. Usually it’s not blacking up (or whiting up) which prompts that reaction. Theatre bears a guilty responsibility for minstrelsy. So blacking up is  usually radically reversed, or used with heavy irony to update the racial politics of an old text (in Theatre Royal Stratford East’s production of Jean Genet’s 1958 play ‘The Blacks’, Tameka Empson was whited up to resemble the Queen beneath a sign reading ‘APOLOGISE’). The N-word, though, is often heard on stage, frequently prompting the same sort of mass gasp. During the 200-year anniversary of the abolition of slavery in 2007, a theatre-goer could walk into several white-dominated, state-subsidised cultural institutions and pay to see a play in which black actors were called ‘nigger’.

Of course, the theatrical establishment and its average audience is massively well-intentioned. Some of the plays in question deal with or date from a time before the N-word became a lexical outlaw. And you can make a strong argument (as does Thea Sharrock, who directed ‘The Emperor Jones’ at the Gate and the National) that good old plays shouldn’t be chucked simply because they reflect the ideology of less racially conscious times. One of the unique things about theatres is that they’re museums for the curation of old – as well as factories for the creation of new – culture. So the big posterity test for scripts like O’Neill’s ‘The Emperor Jones’ or Genet’s ‘The Blacks’ (both peppered with the N-word and both by white writers with progressive intentions in less progressive times) is whether they are flexible enough to be reinterpreted. And they’re only going to get that posterity test in performance. Re-working the old is a part of cultural evolution almost as much as finding the new, through initiatives like the Royal Court Young Writers Programme, which discovers strong new talent from every social background. But Bola Agbaje’s council-estate-set drama ‘Gone Too Far’, which comes from that stable, reveals what a wide gap there is between new and old scripts and new and old audiences. Her play tackles second-generational identity within mixed-race teens without once using the N-word – Agbaje says that it simply didn’t occur to her, and that many young black Britons, unlike some American counterparts, have no wish to reclaim it.

Dawn Walton, the new artistic director of Eclipse Theatre, goes further, arguing that theatre needs to move from a white to a black positivist approach, where black artists, who necessarily develop both black and a white perspectives, give an accurate firsthand view. That’s a fair point too. But I feel that the view from the stalls is too often the poorer for being monochrome. Not only because I am a part of a very white critical establishment (two out of Time Out’s three staff theatre-writers are white, as are all the broadsheet critics). But also because the collective reactions of a racially homogenous audience, whatever its colour, don’t take me out of myself.

With the decline of religion, the increasing virtualisation of cultural experience and the youthfulness of the gig and club scenes, theatres are one of the few places where diverse people can congregate and have a powerful collective experience, live. So, at a time when ethnic separation is an economic as much as an ideological condition – and may worsen as we go into recession – we ignore economic elitism at our peril. Theatres like the Royal Court and the Young Vic have made massive strides towards accessibility in the last few years: not only by programming great plays by non-white writers (Tarell Alvin McCraney; Debbie Tucker Green) with broad appeal, but also by connecting with younger, blacker local audiences. Under the Young Vic’s free-tickets scheme,  ten per cent of tickets are given away to locals, 55 per cent of which are taken up by those with black or ethnic minority backgrounds.

These stats point towards a massive opportunity when the Government’s new free theatre tickets scheme for 18 to 26 year olds starts next year. It’s vital for the ongoing health of theatre and for social inclusion that these don’t just go to clued-up middle-class kids. Change the audience and you change the cultural product. Change the cultural product, and you might just get fewer people like me writing their way gingerly around the  ‘race issue’, or being inhibited about commenting on it because of their ethnicity and background. That shocked gasp shows there’s an elephant in the room. It shouldn’t be purely a white one.

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