Reading educational books is great, and necessary (buy them from black-owned bookshops!!) - but they are always read in a fraction of the time it took to write them. It is the least amount of labour involved. At some point, we must also be the ones labouring to write to educate and inform others like us. Our friends and colleagues cannot do this alone, and they shouldn't have to try to. We must be amongst the first to challenge our own institutions for their lapses.
With that in mind, questions must be asked of the culture of my own mainstay theatre:
Why are we packed with white talent, yet I can count the prominent black talent on maybe one hand?
Why is this talent pool so small that some are even related, either to one-another, or to white performers?
Why are these few actors only brought out for "black" roles exclusively focused on little more than black experience?
Why are their audiences often packed with white people? Black audiences must be able to see black actors, or it defeats the point.
As a white, male-bodied disabled actor, I have been fortunate to receive many non-disabled roles that have allowed me to perform, and to be, more than just my disabilities (although the dearth of disabled roles is another conversation for another time), and this must not remain a white male actor’s privilege. A greater variety of roles for under-utilised talent is essential for the future.
We know – or ought to know – that black people have higher rates of disability than whites. It is impossible that none of them want to be successful actors, and yet, in nearly 7 years of fringe acting in London, I met the only disabled black woman in theatre I have ever met on my first ever production, in which she was AD, not a performer.
Disabled black performers are not non-existent. They need only be made comfortable enough to show up, and when they do show up, to be cast instead of overlooked – and allowed to be cast as more than just disabled characters, just as I am (although they should, and must, be the ones playing disabled roles, just as I should be).
As thrilling as it was to once see the foyer packed with happy black faces from the audience of a hugely successful production, it is wrong that I have since seen so few of any of those faces again, if any at all. We must ask why they have not chosen to come back, and why subsequent audiences for later black-centred productions were (at least in my experience) so overwhelmingly white. I include myself in this, particularly as an in-house theatre critic. Theatre criticism itself is dominated by white, male perspective like mine. We must ask why black voices are not more readily on-hand to critique black productions, either in-house, or more broadly, on the staff of our go-to review services.
Whilst a point has been made to highlight broader black experiences with a subsequent production, it was in my experience the one with a majority white audience, versus the majority-black audience turning out for a play which especially risks suggesting racism is an exclusively American issue. We must beware of the unintended consequences of this, and appeal more broadly with a wider range of material which represents the full diversity of international black experience, including ordinary, everyday experience beyond paradigms of race – it bears repeating that black actors must also be given more opportunities than strictly black characters, particularly if material stresses black suffering – whether historical or current – in its text. We must avoid that sort of typecasting situation as much as possible. Particularly when coupled with majority-white audiences, the result can be an unsettling sort of voyeurism we must avoid.
I also note with much concern that there is a broader trend across theatre culture when discussing uniquely black-centred productions to stress that the work is “not about blackness, but about all humanity”, or some variation thereupon. This is something I noted even our own black talent has felt compelled to state when summating their work to our overwhelmingly white audiences. This, quite simply, is an ugly sort of respectability politics which suggests blackness and humanity are somehow separate categories. It reads, and is heard, certainly to me, as a compelled apology for being black, addressed to white audiences. This must not continue, either amongst ourselves, or in London theatre more broadly. We must recognise, and stress, that a work’s blackness is in and of itself a work’s humanity.
Good work has been done, particularly with stressing the broader inclusion of women as of late, but more can always be done. Fighting one form of oppression in the arts whilst ignoring or overlooking others undermines our own noble cause. We cannot merely cut at the branches. The tree itself must be felled. It is not enough to focus on disability when ableism is derived from a form of sexism, and it is not enough to uplift white women when much paternalistic sexism has to do with the racism of pernicious anti-black myths in our history.
We must commit to shared unity in the struggle against our mutual dehumanisation and institutionalised mistreatment by those which prize an able (male) body and typical mind in their construct of whiteness. A renewed commitment to active anti-racism must be at the root of all this action in our theatre, and in theatres throughout London – and it is not, nor should it be, the sole responsibility of black actors to make the case for this. We must actively make it ourselves.
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