Everyone seems to have been talking
about race during these two weeks. A remarkably batty article on
the
Guardian’s blog site
manages to suggest that Roy Williams, of all people, is an Uncle Tom,
“simply part of a trend picked up by the white men in power, in which
non-white men are ‘in’ for the time being”… conveniently ignoring that
the “white man in power” who commissioned Williams’
Joe Guy is, er, Femi Elufowoju Jr
of Tiata Fahodzi. Quentin Letts treats the black-on-black
prejudice so acutely indicted in
Joe
Guy with equanimity but recoils at what he mistakenly considers
to be black-on-white racism in not just some characters’ attitudes but
the play’s own; then, in the following day’s review, he thinks nothing
of describing a black character in
Hairspray
as “a hot-pumping Mama”. It’s the capital letter, I think,
that does it, taking the word within a hair’s-breadth of “Mammy”.
I can’t help remembering a moment during this year’s Edinburgh Fringe
when former MP Neil Hamilton, during his and his wife Christine’s daily
chat show, remarked to African-American performer Jonelle Allen that he
believed in plain speech and calling a spade a spade. She, with
admirable presence of mind, quickly went into a parody of outrage and
so turned the matter into a joke, perhaps showing rather more tact than
was deserved, and certainly more diplomacy than the erstwhile
government minister himself.
Tripe
Another interesting Lettsism is his presumption that “the point of [
Kebab at the Royal Court] is to
tell us that illegal immigrants, wherever they are, have a jolly hard
time of things”.
Kebab is
about some Romanians in Ireland. Both countries are members of
the European Union. Therefore, freedom of movement exists without
visa, and the characters by definition cannot be illegal
migrants. But there’s a strain of political discourse in Britain
that can’t help prefixing “immigrants” with “illegal”, or “asylum
seekers” with “bogus”, as if they were part of the same compound
noun. Such people may even in the same breath praise our
enlightened values.
Myself, I watched
Kebab with
a deep ambivalence. Only days earlier I had, in one of my night
raids on a theatrical blog, commented: “Shouldn’t ‘cultural diversity’
now also take into account the eastern-European communities [in
Britain]? How many arts venues are doing so? I genuinely
don’t know.” To which blogger Andrew Haydon replied, “By
‘reflecting cultural diversity’, do you mean theatres that are getting
young Eastern Europeans and making them write kitchen-sink dramas about
what it’s like being Eastern European in London? I’m kidding, of
course, but only slightly.” And there I was, sitting with Andrew
in the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs, watching precisely that kind of
work (all right, with the substitution of Dublin for London).
It’s almost a self-parody of “the Royal Court play”; I don’t know
whether to praise Aleks Sierz for bucking the trend and finding
substance and excitement in it, or to hoot that of course he would
because his compulsive championing of “in-yer-face theatre” (© A
Sierz) probably in large part drew the template for it. Still,
writer Gianina Carbunariu unintentionally supplied a perfect emblem for
her play: when the characters begin to wax nostalgic about home
cooking, the first dish they sigh about is ciorba de burta, which my
phrasebook describes sardonically as a soup made with “a small amount
of vegetables and a large amount of beef tripe”. Tripe soup:
that, I’m afraid, is
Kebab.
(That sentence looks like a mixed metaphor, but I’m pretty sure it
isn’t one.)
Perverseness
Sometimes, of course, we can be over-eager in our desire to be on the
right side of the race issue. Sam Marlowe, in her review of
You Can’t Take It With You, finds
something suspect in a description of a black maid as “awfully cute,
like Porgy and Bess”. No doubt Hart & Kaufman were being a
little blithe by today’s standards, but primarily they were being
topical: their play premièred barely a year after Gershwin’s
opera.
And then there’s the perverseness of yours truly. Given the
choice between Race and Fat in my review of
Hairspray, I went for Fat.
It’s not that I insist that the subject of obesity be treated with
gravity (and I use the term advisedly), or think that the musical is
anything but a piece of fun… and an excellent one. I was just
noting that when you have two aspects, and portray them equally in one
respect, then it puts you in an awkward position when the merest shift
of angle reveals that, in another way, you’re treating the same two
topics in almost diametrically opposite ways. It’s a testimony to
the show’s strengths that it sails past such a contradiction, not just
with no-one minding, but with scarcely anyone even noticing.
(Caroline McGinn also mentions it in passing. But did nobody
think to spell out that the very fact that the black kids are in
Special Ed. is itself a manifestation of racism? Anyway…)
And it’s certainly a good thing that my
FT editors excised several (though
not all) references in my review to my own physical status, as the
Jabba the Hutt of British theatre criticism.
Gaze
I wish I had had the chance to write at some length about
Small Metal Objects, which –
although dramatically it’s no big deal – strikes me as full of
resonance in the relationship between audience, company and
presentation. Tamara Gausi refers to Back To Back as an
“integrated theatre company”, in the sense of working with people with
learning disabilities. But with this show, what they have
produced is a piece of theatre integrated with a busy everyday
environment – in the case of its London outing, Stratford rail and
underground station in east London just after evening rush hour.
In putting the audience on display for the hundreds of travellers
passing through during the performance, it reverses the usual
theatrical gaze, and does so far more intensely than conventional
devices such as traverse staging, when the only people watching us are
ourselves. Here, the actors are among the crowd; it is we who are
on display. And, whatever the eccentricities of characters Gary
and Steve, it is we, sitting in our ranks with our headphones on in the
middle of a transport hub, who are the oddities.