It was an offer she almost refused. But when Josette Bushell-Mingo — actor, director and zealous promoter of black British theatre — finally overcame her reservations about taking on a United States production and brought Langston Hughes’s 1950s musical Simply heavenly to London’s Young Vic Theatre in April, it was a resounding success.
London’s Evening Standard newspaper declared itself seduced ‘almost at first sight and soundâ€.
‘The cast was like a pantheon of black British history,” says Bushell-Mingo. ‘I’ve never seen such acting or heard such singing.”
There are more plays being written, produced or directed by black and Asian women than ever before in the history of British theatre.
Under Karena Johnson, Britain’s only black female theatrical programmer, London’s Oval House has enjoyed a succession of inspired productions, including Dipo Agboluaje’s Early morning, a satire about Nigerian cleaners mounting a coup; and Troy Andrew Fairclough’s You Don’t Kiss, exploring black male gay relationships.
Johnson’s vision to programme a broad spectrum of black British productions stems from her frust-ration at plays that are ”either total escapism, where we sing, dance and be funny; or the other extreme, dramas about police brutality. Somewhere in between is the place where most of us live, and that’s what I want to see reflected.”
Tanika Gupta’s adaptation of Harold Brighthouse’s classic, Hobson’s Choice, transposed to Manchester’s Asian community, opened to great reviews at the Young Vic this month. In April, it was her Fragile Land at Hampstead Theatre that caught the zeitgeist. It portrayed British-Asian teenagers talking in appropriated black verna-cular about disaffection, radical Islam, Islamaphobia and mixed relationships.
Bollywood has made a big impact, too. Bombay Dreams, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s £4,5-million extravaganza, co-scripted by Meera Syal, opened to mixed reviews last year, but it is still showing to packed houses at the London Apollo and is set to transfer to Broadway. And Leicester Haymarket had a hit in May with Kully Thiarai’s production of Bollywood Jane, which staged Bollywood-style musical sequences in what journalist Lyn Gardner described as ‘the most successful integration I have ever seen”.
Such triumphs are all the more remarkable in an industry that was last year deemed institutionally racist by the British Arts Council, and is dominated by a male, Oxbridge (British universities Oxford and Cambridge) coterie.
To date Britain’s only Asian woman artistic director is Thiarai, who says: ”There’s still a real sense that theatre is for the Oxbridge crowd. Sometimes I think, ‘I’m a working-class girl — what am I doing here?’ Those barriers remain real issues.”
This is a long-standing struggle. ‘I have to pay homage to the pioneers who stood there and took the bullets,” says Yvonne Brewster, grande dame of black British theatre and co-founder (in 1985) of Talawa Theatre Company. ‘Without them, what you see now would not be happening.”
Winsome Pinnock — who, thanks to work such as Leave Taking, is thought of as the godmother of black British playwrights — offers this analysis: ”Theatre is a sort of moral conscience of a society, an arena where a society can examine itself. If some voices are missing, I don’t think that it’s honestly fulfilling that role and is, in fact, practising a subtle form of censorship.”
Jamaican-born playwright Pat Cumper came to Britain in the mid-1990s armed with four Caribbean awards, and struggled to find anyone who would stage her work.
British theatre’s agenda for black plays, she says, is ‘a vaguely heroic white figure who forgives you, and you forgive them, and then it’s all good. It’s society forgiving itself, and that wasn’t what I was interested in writing about. I wanted to write about black female characters, and that’s an automatic no-no. Most theatres think you can’t get an audience for plays with black women in the lead. The response to most of my scripts was, ‘It’s really well written, but we can’t put it on.’â€
Asian director Kristine Landon-Smith’s Tamasha Theatre Company, formed with writer/actor Sudha Bhuchar in 1989, has brought to a mainstream audience previously marginalised Asian work. Along with the commercial success of Fourteen Songs, Two Weddings And A Funeral in 2001, Tamasha’s production of East Is East was nominated for an Olivier Award and went on to win the London Critics’ Circle Award for best screenplay for its subsequent film adaptation.
Black and Asian theatre was born of exclusion — now other doors are opening, and newcomers increasingly head straight for the mainstream. Director Indu Rubasingham — whose credits include the Indian classic The Ramayana and Molière’s 17th-century drama The Misanthrope — is a case in point: she decided against establishing an Asian company, although she was advised to do so ‘by practically everyoneâ€.
For director Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa, her colour means that assumptions are made about her capabilities. ‘No one has ever rung me up about Chekhov — 99% of the calls are about black plays. No one ever asks, say, Adrian Noble, before he does Chekhov, if he has any experience of Russia. That’s infuriating because I can do other work.”
Some theatre directors are catching up, however. Philip Hedley, of east London’s Theatre Royal, has a record of productions others would consider ‘too black” — Da Boyz, for instance, a hip-hop version of the Rodgers and Hart musical The Boys From Syracuse.
Jeanie O’Hare, literary manager at Hampstead Theatre, says: ‘There’s a hunger for a really big black show that’s going to break into the West End.†While progress has been made, says director Paulette Randall, ‘it’s still a political act to put a black person on stageâ€.
To transform British theatre means a shaking-up of power structures. Only then can it function as Pinnock’s ‘moral conscience of a society”. —