Latest news with #Talawa
Telegraph
22-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The UK's oldest black British theatre: ‘We're regressing – West End shows are back to one black actor'
When the UK's leading black British theatre company, Talawa, was founded in 1986, it was to fix a glaring problem: black actors were not being given lead roles. 'Especially in the classics – Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde… Jacobean tragedies – [black actors] didn't get a look in,' says Michael Buffong, who joined Talawa as artistic director in May 2012. 'So Talawa was formed as a way to say to the wider public that a black actor can do Shakespeare as well as anybody.' Talawa – which turns 40 nest year – has become admired in the industry as a hothouse for producing the brilliant black British stars of tomorrow, from Michaela Coel and Alfred Enoch to Don Warrington and Norman Beaton. Its contribution to promoting diversity in theatre is such that Arts Council England (ACE) awarded Talawa an 18 per cent uplift in funding for 2018-2022. It is perhaps thanks to Talawa, says Buffong, that 'these days you probably wouldn't even consider that an actor couldn't do Shakespeare because of their ethnicity – it just wouldn't be a thought.' Talawa – inspired by her mother, who used to say to her 'yuh lickkle yuh know but yuh tallawah', Jamaican patois for small but strong – was founded by Yvonne Brewster, Mona Hammond, Carmen Munroe and Inigo Espejel after Brewster became frustrated with the 'drivel' being given to black actors and creatives. 'There was a lack of attention to the fact that [black theatre-makers] had a classical tradition that could hold its own anywhere,' she told the Guardian. Born in Jamaica to an upper-middle-class family, Brewster was educated by her grandfather, Ba. During her studies, Ba introduced her to Shakespeare, which he said didn't 'belong to Europeans only; it belongs to the world.' Brewster was inspired to consider a career in theatre after her father took her to see a production of Sartre's Huis Clos aged 16. 'And in it was Mona Chin, who I thought looked just like me. She was fantastic. I looked at this woman and I said, 'Hey, Daddy, I want to be like her.' Brewster was the first black female drama student to attend London's Rose Bruford College. 'In those days there were a lot of black theatre companies but nobody [was] getting any money. The work was very experimental and very good in many cases, but it was really, really, really fringe.' When Brewster graduated in 1959, she found it hard to land acting roles and so turned to directing. In 1972, she directed the Jamaican play Smile Orange – a satire about the tourism business. Unfortunately, during its run, the venue or the production burned down, destroying all of the props. 'The Jamaican government were funding this grand production that picked up terrific steam with audiences across London,' she told The Guardian. 'After a few weeks, there were queues of people around the block in Cricklewood. The next night, the venue was mysteriously set on fire.' (Arson was officially ruled out, despite concerns of racial tension in a majority white area. According to Brewster, the influx of the black community in the area 'annoyed' members of the local population.) After returning to the Caribbean in the mid-1970s, Brewster joined Bill Bryden's company at the National Theatre, and became the Arts Council's first black Drama Officer in 1982. Eventually, in 1985, a 'happy accident' occurred. Brewster received a call from Lord Birkett encouraging her to apply for a Race Equality Unit's arts programme, which was funding projects celebrating Trinidadian historian and writer CLR James. 'So it was us three black women, roughly the same age,' Brewster has said of co-founding Talawa. 'Adding it up, we realised we had 120 years' experience in theatre between us, so why couldn't we have a theatre company?' A year later, Talawa was registered as an official company and Brewster was granted £80,000 to direct Talawa's first production, The Black Jacobins by CLR James — a play that hadn't been performed in Britain in 50 years and never before by an all-black cast. The play was staged in Riverside Studios, Hammersmith, and featured co-founder and actress Mona Hammond and Desmond's Norman Beaton. Michael Coveney reviewed the show for the Financial Times, writing: 'How marvellous to see a large-scale project – presented by the newly formed Talawa ... that lends dignity and credibility to the Black theatre movement.' One of the company's first Shakespeare productions, Anthony and Cleopatra, followed a few years later. It premiered at Everyman Theatre, Liverpool, in April 1991 before transferring to London's Bloomsbury Theatre. Jamaican-born EastEnders star Doña Croll was the British theatre's first black Cleopatra, described by critics as 'groundbreaking' and among the very best Cleopatras. In an interview with the Guardian, Croll said: 'White actresses play her as a sexy queen. I play the politics and power…She is somewhere between Maya Angelou and Tina Turner ... the fable of the white Cleopatra is just another way of bleaching out history, cutting the nose of the Sphinx.' Other notable Shakespeare productions have included 2016's King Lear starring Harry Potter's Alfred Enoch as Edgar and Rising Damp's Don Warrington in the titular role. The Telegraph's Claire Allfree commended Enoch's 'excellent Edgar, who eloquently embodies the play's wild, ungovernable forces', while Warrington 'ascends the cliff face with magnificent authority'. Over the years, Talawa has been nominated for a number of awards, including Performance Ensemble for A Place for We (2022) at The Offies. The play's writer, Archie Maddocks also picked up a nomination at the same ceremony for New Play. Talawa's Recognition (2023) won the 2024 Offies award for Musical Director (Rio Kai) while this year Talawa's Wil Johnson has been nominated for BBC Radio 4's BBC Audio Drama Awards in the Best Actor category for Talawa Stories: Babydyke. The ceremony will take place March 30 2025. Despite how much Talawa has helped radically change the British theatre landscape over the last 40 years, Buffong has noticed a regression of sorts. Last year, a production of Romeo and Juliet starring Tom Holland as Romeo gained attention for casting black actress Francesca Amewudah-Rivers as Juliet. The 26-year-old was barraged with online hate and hate mail and admitted to feeling unsafe while working on the play. The overwhelming critique appeared to conclude that Amewudah-Rivers could not play Juliet as it was a character of Italian descent and, therefore, a white role. The abuse became so bad that many fellow actors, including Snow White's Rachel Zegler and EGOT award-winning actress Viola Davis, called for action. Then, last summer, Cynthia Erivo was trolled as a 'woke hire' for playing Elphaba in movie-musical Wicked, originally played by Margaret Hamilton in 1939. 'An actress is vilified for playing someone with a green face. When you think about the logic of it, it's ludicrous,' says Buffong. 'Somehow, this gate – this portal – has been opened where it's free game to have these views,' continues Buffong, pointing to the trickle-down effect of world leaders such as Donald Trump ordering to shut down all federal diversity equity and inclusion offices. 'It's such a societal thing,' adds Buffong, 'and we unfortunately in the arts, kind of reflect that.' To progress further, says Buffong, the UK creative industries must become less 'timid.' He continues: 'Opportunities for performers can often come from new, original material by upcoming playwrights. Usually, these originals have a risk factor– a subject that hasn't been touched upon, a style of story-telling that might be taboo.' Shows that challenge this mindset and highlight the richness of diversity around Britain are important to Talawa. The company's most recent production Play On, a modern retelling of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, has been one of Buffong's proudest achievements during his time as artistic director. 'Play On is an incredible show,' says Buffong. 'I really wanted to produce something that would nourish the souls of the people that were watching – give them a high almost from the experience of the show.' Following the pandemic, however, theatre has become 'really risk-averse… which makes the work we do even more important,' he says. 'West End shows, and you have one black actor in it again. [The current West End Mamma Mia! cast features one black actor across the main cast and ensemble. The Phantom of the Opera has two black cast members, and Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap has no black actor.] What's happening? Are we going back to the 80s? What's going on here? To be quite honest, I think it's regressing. I feel like it's going backwards.' Last year, the West End production of Jeremy O' Harris's Slave Play attracted controversy for its designated 'black-out' nights, which specifically targeted an 'all-black-identifying audience' for two days of the show's 12-week run so that they could be 'free from the white gaze'. Former prime minister Rishi Sunak called the strategy 'wrong and divisive', but Buffong thinks the public misinterpreted the intention. 'I feel like they were misunderstood. The idea has been hijacked, the same way the 'woke' has been hijacked,' he says. Diversity, Buffong concludes, is not only 'an absolute must' but essential to 'the richness of British culture. We are doing what we do at Talawa because that's what enriches theatre.'
The Guardian
26-01-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The week in theatre: Play On!; A Good House; Moby Dick
Mood indigo. Moments of blue. Hot spots of red. Play On!, a jazz musical conceived by Sheldon Epps with a book by Cheryl L West, is a blend of tributes. To Twelfth Night, whose opening line, 'If music be the food of love, play on', supplies the title. To Duke Ellington, whose numbers run through the evening as plot and permeate it as atmosphere. Also to Ellington's reported synaesthesia – his seeing notes as colours. Ultz's strong evocation of the Cotton Club, where black artists performed to a white audience in 1940s Harlem, is not painted in predictable monochrome: beats of violet and azure are framed by a scarlet proscenium arch. This is not the first time that Shakespeare's comedy has lent itself to musical reinvention. Kwame Kwei-Armah's opening show at the Young Vic in 2018 set the drama to R&B, Motown and music hall. Still, this Talawa production, directed by Michael Buffong, is not so much a version of Twelfth Night as a response to it. A nice bit of name-play is at the centre: the melomane, brooding presence is not Duke Orsino – a titled, entitled nonworker – but the Duke: Ellington, who earned his soubriquet through his gifts. Several characters have vanished, though no one is likely to sob at the absence of Sebastian. What most of us would think of as the nub of Shakespeare – the speeches! – are obliterated. You have to listen hard to catch the few direct quotes: 'Some are born great' gets a look-in, as does the playing around with witty fools and foolish wits, delivered by Llewellyn Jamal's Jester, whose limbs are as elastic as his loyalty. Yet the play's moods of rapture, longing, discontent and sudden surges of energy are gorgeously present, woven through the evening by an onstage band who deliver wonders by Ellington, from Take the 'A' Train to It Don't Mean a Thing. Koko Alexandra sultries compellingly as Lady Liv – dressed with shimmering irony in a butterfly costume with glitter thorax and gauzy shawl wings. Earl Gregory's Duke and Tsemaye Bob-Egbe's Vyman/Viola take off beautifully from each other, the latter's character reimagined as an aspiring songwriter who would not get taken seriously dressed as a woman. Waves of frustration and exhilaration sweep across the stage in shrug-shoulder dance routines choreographed by Kenrick 'H20' Sandy. Shakespearean disguise – a vital route to self-discovery – is central, and cast off more literally than usual when Viola reveals herself to her lover not by suddenly appearing in women's garb but by stripping off. There is good news for those who feel Malvolio (here 'Rev') has more to offer than scapegoatery. Cameron Bernard Jones – slick, uptight and appealing – is also well served by his costume: no cross-gartering but all-over bright yellow, like an animated dollop of custard. Bright and emphatic, Amy Jephta's new play punches home its awkward arguments with a leery grin. A Good House, produced in collaboration with the Market Theatre in Johannesburg and Bristol Old Vic, expands the geographical boundaries of David Byrne's Royal Court – one of the characters is a Zulu speaker – though without greatly enlarging its social and psychological targets. In the tradition of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959) and Bruce Norris's Clybourne Park (2010), the play looks at racism and class through the prism of property. In a South African gated community (Ultz's design is convincingly declamatorily bourgeois, with plush pouffe and decorative basketware), three couples – one black and two white – discuss a price-lowering shack that has suddenly appeared on an adjacent lot. Rough-edged prejudice quickly emerges over the cheese board: one man assumes that when his black neighbour explains he works in 'securities', he must mean he is employed by a security company; another that he must come from the shack. The neat and nasty points land, but with insufficient shock. The hearty bonhomie of the white householders is too evident a cover: one man wags his finger at a black resident when he talks about the sedate neighbourhood's aversion to loud music. The shack itself is given a subtle aura of unreality – glimpsed from time to time in arbitrarily altered form, while the owners remain invisible – but characterisation is dogged. Jephta's intriguing play would be more fulfilling with a subtler undercurrent and less underlining. As improbable as the idea of Herman Melville swallowing the unconscious in his prose is the notion of putting his novel on stage. With puppets. Yet Yngvild Aspeli's 85-minute production of Moby Dick for Plexus Polaire – part of this year's MimeLondon – magnificently summons reality and its shadow, waves and depths in a mixture of puppets and fleshy actors. The swoops of the novel – its metaphors and its adventures – are given eye-enlarging expression as the scale contracts and expands. The massive Barbican stage is covered in black-and-white video of the sea. The crew of harpooners and cabin boy and mates are lit individually, as they swing below deck in their hammocks. Tiny boats with matchstick oars are sent out on the billowing waves. A skull-faced chorus moves across the stage, where a tremendous onstage trio – double bass, percussion and guitar – conjure up the noise of a shoal of small fish moving through the ocean. Finally, the mighty whale glides past like a giant duvet, one tiny knowing eye embedded in its folds like a jewel. Star ratings (out of five) Play On! ★★★★A Good House ★★★Moby Dick ★★★★ Play On! is at the Lyric Hammersmith, London, until 22 February A Good House is at the Jerwood Theatre Downstairs, Royal Court, London, until 8 February
