There has been an outbreak of furious spluttering in England. We knew it would happen because The Daily Telegraph planned it very carefully. A headline for an article appeared online, announcing that a London theatre was going to be putting on a play at which white people would not be welcome. Because most people do not pay to subscribe to the Telegraph’s online presence, most people could not read the full article, only this headline. Most people did not see that only one performance from a run of around thirty was to be a Blackout Performance. Those who are not Black are requested not to attend this performance, but naturally no ticket holders would actually be prevented from doing so. At least not on the grounds of their skin colour. And so the misleading headline did its work and the fury-prone were duly baited. An everyday love triangle between cynicism, ignorance and prejudice.
The villainous venue in question is Theatre Royal Stratford East. The play is the UK debut of Tambo and Bones by Dave Harris, which won a Brentwood Prize for Playwriting in 2019. The utterly brilliant Matthew Xia will be directing for Actors’ Touring Company and the production is due to run June and July 2023. Theatre, director, company and many besides were all accused of racism, apartheid or both by scores of people who understand neither racism nor apartheid. Any more, I suspect, than they know where Stratford East or any other theatre actually is.
For its part, the noble Telegraph evidently forgot that it had previously reported on another Blackout Performance without feeling the need to poke a nest of fragile hornets. No, the Blackout Performance is hardly a brand new arrival in the UK. In Spring 2022 the Almeida Theatre held such for Jeremy O. Harris’s Daddy – as noted by the same Telegraph at the time.
A Blackout Performance is not racist. It is not an example of, to use a nonsense term, “reverse racism”. If that phrase leaves your lips or your keyboard then you are revealing your true self to the max. A Blackout Performance is not anti-Whiteness. It is a consequence of Whiteness. If you do not understand what is meant by Whiteness, you will gain nothing from reading this so please go read up on the elementary stuff first. Forgive me if I take a while to get to the main point, but there is a lot of background and personal history to fill in here. For context, if you like.
This is a blog about theatre and so I plan only to mention Whiteness in relation to theatre and why Blackout Performances are necessary. To be specific, this is from an audience point of view. Theatre professionals may write with enviable eloquence about what the Blackout Performance means to them and when they do this, I treasure it. I am not a theatre professional. My job since the 1970s has been cleaning train carriages. I could write about Whiteness in that environment and it would probably fill a book but it would be out of place on here.
When I am in a theatre, I am there to see the show. In the audience. That’s it. Very often I write about what I have seen in the form of comment or review but I am not “press”. I see what I can afford to see, and only write about a show whose ticket I have bought and paid for. Sometimes I have seen a show on what turned out to be press night and this is worth mentioning. On press nights I feel as though I am the only person in the audience who has paid for their ticket. Also, the press night audience tends to be even more white than usual.
It makes a difference. It always has. In spite of the tireless efforts from certain individuals and organisations -and the half-hearted performative efforts from countless more- theatres in the UK are still essentially white spaces. There has been some change since I first began going to watch plays for pleasure in 1973. Back then, it was common to be asked what I was doing there by staff and patrons alike. To be glared at and stared at and, yes, moved away from when the auditorium was not sold out. Less common but certainly memorable were those afternoon occasions when I walked into the gilded, empty box offices of West End theatres to buy a ticket and faced the assumption that I was applying for some lowly job there.
“You have come in through the wrong door!”
If we must count then yes, that is fifty years of it. In half a century there has been some change for the better but… not very much. To this day, if I stand too near the doors of an auditorium -inside or out- I run the risk of being taken by white theatregoers for Staff and asked about toilets or ice cream. Or of having tickets wordlessly shoved in my direction in the expectation that I will show these dumbstruck people to their seats. It is nothing personal of course. It is not that I look especially Front Of House in my bearing or my fashion choices, you understand. It is purely that Whiteness cannot see me as Audience, and so infers some reason for my presence in a theatre. A reason which makes sense to Whiteness. Unless we are all here to see A Black Play and then I frequently catch those searching sidelong glances wondering whether I am one of the cast.
Yes I said it. I said A Black Play. As Arinzé Kene expressed (in 2018’s Misty) with an eloquence I can only dream of, no such thing exists. Not in the real world. But here we are coming closer to the point of this ramble, because:
Whiteness decrees that any play made by or starring Black talent is, by necessity, A Black Play.
By necessity, because the fact that all plays are assumed to be white by default goes without saying. Meet my handy stereotypes Simon and Dilys. Simon and Dilys love theatre so much that they do not discriminate. Sometimes they go to see Shakespeare, sometimes to a musical; maybe a romantic comedy one night and an American drama the next. And so sometimes Simon and Dilys will even take in A Black Play. These are educational and exciting, especially when they have racism, knife crime or slavery as their theme.
How the Simons and Dilyses of this earth choose to spend their time and money is up to them of course but their experience of watching plays is very different from mine because they are white. Which means it never crosses their minds to wonder whether or not this play at that venue is for them. Of course it is. Going to the theatre is what they enjoy more than anything, and so all of theatre is naturally for them if they choose to see it. Theatre is for everybody, right? It is inclusive nowadays. And having a Blackout Performance is really not inclusive is it? I have been hearing and reading a lot of this from white people who are Definitely Not Racist because they have Black friends and babysitters, loved A Raisin In The Sun and were so very sad when Tina Turner died. “Fair’s fair,” they point out, “Imagine how you’d feel if things were the other way round!” and this is the precise point at which I want to scream.
Imagining how they would feel if things were the other way round is exactly what those who object to a Blackout Performance are not doing. Maybe because life has not equipped them to do so. My life has, and I certainly do not have to imagine how it feels to be the only Black person in a theatre audience. Made to feel I am unwelcome at worst, intruding as standard, a curiosity at best. I have felt this at everything from Macbeth and My Fair Lady to Home, I’m Darling and The Mikvah Project and for much of my life it has gone with the territory. Depending on where I am and what I am seeing, it is less common now for me to be the lone representative in an audience. It is still very rare for me to blend in with the majority of an audience.
“But what does it matter, Kim? Surely you don’t buy a theatre ticket just so you can look at your fellow audience members?”
Of course not. But being part of an audience is important to the experience of live performance. Mostly it is a blessing, sometimes it is a curse. Sometimes I have to get close to reviewing an audience when I write about a show. The most-read entry on this blog is my review from 2019 of The Secret River at National Theatre. It is one of several reviews of mine which mention the blight of Inappropriate White Laughter. Take a look. This phenomenon is the easiest problem of theatre’s white gaze to spot because it is loud. So loud that even other white people sometimes notice it. When a character on the stage experiences anti-Blackness in the form of prejudice, micro-aggression, race based name-calling etc. white people in the audience will laugh out loud. When the same theatre staged an already troubling adaptation of Andrea Levy’s Small Island earlier in 2019, the laughter came hard and loud during one scene, in which a Black character was set upon and beaten by a group of white cinema-goers. It was something many in the audience found funny. Either you can imagine how that felt to a Black member of that National Theatre audience or you cannot, which is a large part of the problem.
There are more insidious troubles and responses to navigate though, and these are usually silent. Plays holding Blackout Performances concern themselves with themes, lives, history and experiences specific to Black people. When these experiences are negative this is often referred to as Black Trauma. Well I guess we got to call it something and I cannot pretend to like the term but it seems here to stay. Where these plays run, white audiences come to see them and white audiences who enjoy theatre are, by 2023, quite familiar with the themes of Black Trauma. These are not necessarily the same people who laugh aloud at abuse and violence. I am talking about decent human beings, people who are not anti-Black and who come to see these plays in good faith. Maybe they are learning as they watch. However deeply they feel about what they are seeing and hearing, whatever effect it has upon them, their experience will not be comparable with my own.
The blunt and honest truth is that it can be very hard for Black people to watch, absorb and react to seeing some emotions and experiences presented on a theatre stage when surrounded by people who, to phrase things carefully, represent Whiteness. It adds layers of discomfort to what is often a raw enough experience already. It can stunt the experience by forcing us to self-censor, forcing us to consider the people around us when we ought to be concentrating on the show. If this has never occurred to you, have a think about it now. Try to imagine it, or to empathise.
I have not yet been to a Blackout Performance. I am keen to do this but they are still rare in the UK and my opportunities to see any theatre at all are a lot more limited now than they were before Covid-19 changed everything. The closest I have come was, again, at the National Theatre back in 2018. Watching Natasha Gordon’s magnificent Nine Night in the Dorfman space where the audience was overwhelmingly Black was a remarkable experience. This was not a play which concerned itself with ‘Black Trauma’ but even so it was playing out the lives of Black Londoners to an auditorium full of Black Londoners. Later in the year I went to see it again, over the river at the Trafalgar. The audience was very different, more than fifty percent non-Black and although I still loved the play, the feeling of being in the audience had changed. This is not exact science and nor should it be, but that contrast between the two experiences proved to me that the idea of Blackout Performances is valid and that the need for them is real. Nobody protests at the notion of Relaxed Performances which are now common, and signed or captioned performances are standard. Because audiences need them!
Theatre Va-va-voom! 