A local production of The Blacks leaves questions unaswered.
French writer Jean Genet’s play The Blacks is a tricky customer at the best of times – and its author intended it to be so. Of the genesis of his anarchic piece of theatre, he wrote: “One evening an
actor asked me to write a play for an all-black cast. But what exactly is a black?” he goes on to ask himself, and the world at large: “First of all, what is his colour?”
These were dynamite questions when the play was first performed in Paris in 1959, and then in London in the early 1960s. They remain dynamite questions in 2001, as an English translation of the play (a Swedish-South African coproduction) unfolds at the Market Theatre in the run-up to the World Conference on Racism (is this a coincidence or was it planned that way?)
The play deliberately raises more questions than it tries to answer. What is black? Who has the right to define it? Who’s fooling whom?
Let’s start with the author. Can a homosexual white Frenchman, a convicted thief and murderer, a dropout from his own society, really write a play about black people? Well, why not? After all, Genet was not creating a play to solve the racial issue once and for all. He was not even attempting to get to the core of “the black experience”. Nor was he writing a coon show. He was holding up the mirror of his warped imagination for his own tribe to stare into, and decide for themselves whether the image that stared back at them was a distortion, or a true reflection of the world they had created.
“This play,” he noted, “written, I repeat, by a white man, is intended for a white audience, but if – which is unlikely – it is ever performed before a black audience, then a white person, male or female, should be invited every evening. The organiser of the show should welcome them formally, dress them in ceremonial costume, and lead them to their seat, preferably in the front row of the stalls. The actors will play for them. A spotlight should be focused upon this symbolic white person throughout the performance.
“But what if no white person should accept? Then let white masks be distributed to the black spectators as they enter the theatre. And if the blacks refuse, then let a dummy be used.”
The play is supposed to work on several subversive levels. Subtitled “a clown show”, it mixes vaudeville conventions with deadly serious reflections on the historical relationship between Europe and Africa, and then sends up all this seriousness all over again. It is a clown show without many belly laughs – a parody of its own parody.
It is also a play about post-war France, the French and their colonies. Can it be translated into English, then?
To start with, what about that title? Genet’s original title is Les Nègres – which could be translated as “The Negroes”, “The Niggers”, “The Darkies”, “The Blacks” or even just “Blacks”.
French is more subtly treacherous than English. How you want a word to be received by the listener depends on the inflections of your voice, and the secret signals hidden in your eyes.
In French, you can deliver a phrase full of curses with courtly and elegant formality. English – modern English, anyway – tends to be more prosaic, and finds it hard to avoid calling a spade a spade.
In English, the words you utter leave you exposed, like that dummy in the spotlight. In French you can pretty much get away with murder – which is the main theme of Genet’s play.
The white court (all played by black actors) have been getting away with murder for centuries, and now look down from their royal balcony, making alternately rude and frightened comments among themselves as a group of black actors performs a parody of the white world’s greatest nightmare – the ritual murder of a white woman by an eloquent and attractive black man, aided and abetted by his own people.
But in the end, although all agree that a murder has been committed, it turns out that there is no corpse. The nightmare has been nothing more than that, both true and false, and the actors are condemned to replay it to each other night after night, “till doomsday”, as one of the “white” characters points out.
The “white” world and the “black” world call back and forth to each other, united by the careful use of the same treacherously formal language, yet divided by history and unable to come to a conclusion about each other. And yet, at the same time, everyone on stage is black, which deepens the conundrum.
The Blacks is a sophisticated and deliberately puzzling play. At the Market Theatre, the tiny audience just seemed puzzled.
This was partly a function of the cumbersome process of translating the elusive spirit of the play from French into English.
It was also partly a function of a directorial failure to orchestrate the multinational company of black actors into one vaguely menacing voice, while also representing a parody of vastly contradicting worlds.
In fact some of the “white” court played their parts so well, and the actors were so well masked, that you often forgot that they were black – which is a problem, and contradicts Genet’s specific intentions.
The Blacks is a rare opportunity for a company of black actors. But then again, what is a black actor? First of all, what is his or her colour?
In this production, these questions still beg to be asked.
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