Black Day for Rugby
I had a strong premonition that it would all go pear-shaped for England in the World Cup rugby final on Saturday night, so I took a deep breath and went down to Stratford East instead to see Genet’s The Blacks.
Was this a good idea? The underground system was in chaos (cheers, Ken). Severe delays on the Central, no trains on the Circle, Saturday night fever on the Northern and Piccadilly lines.
By the time I got to Stratford I felt as though I’d played in a scrum against South Africa myself, as well as France and Australia, with my head stuck up the backsides of various large bruisers trying to pull each others’ limbs off. Public transport can be a dangerous game.
It was a relief to rediscover Gerry Raffles Square which is very pleasant and buzzy indeed these days. The Theatre Royal is as cheerfully welcoming and atmospheric as it’s always been. Even the inanity of having built another theatre — Stratford Circus — right next door doesn’t seem quite as stupid because of the contrast in programming.
And a sort of oblong piazza effect is nicely finished with the sleek deco lines of the new cinema and the abutting, ever popular Pizza Express. In the Theatre Royal bar, whole parties were eating and drinking, listening to jazz. A school reunion was in full swing. The staff, mostly black, all dressed in red shirts, could not have been sweeter.
The auditorium was packed, again mostly black, for a play that sets out to give a white audience a hard time. Whoops, slight error there, but it was good to see the play, however traduced it was by all the rap and hip hop.
Then the journey home. Luckily I hooked up with a colleague, Maxie Szalwinska, and we plunged back to the underground. More severe delays. Overground to Liverpool Street. Still no Circle. Back on the Central. Change to the Northern.
Still, I was indoors in time for Match of the Day and the post-World Cup final misery. Going out is all part of the masochistic fun of the theatre, and Stratford East holds a special place in my heart, anyway, as it’s my first theatre in the area — now unrecognisable — where I grew up.
Artistic director Kerry Michael is obviously doing a fairly good job. One just wishes, as one does so often here, that the production standards were higher and the black ghetto policy not so aggressively defensive all the time.
It is true, as Kerry says in a programme note, that most of our arts elite are well-intentioned liberals, but surely no longer true that they think “the problem” of including ethnic minorities as equals in the arts lies with others, not with themselves.
You can’t go on plying this old saw for ever, Kerry old chum, when it’s clear to everyone that funding and executive bodies are falling over backwards to widen the operative and participatory constituencies in the arts, and have been for years, even to the disadvantage of the white “ruling” majority.
But then The Blacks is partly about that very topic so, although the polemic gets muddled by the circumstances of the performance, the show should keep the debate on the road for a while longer.