“I ain’t British though / Yes you are. You’re as English as I am”1 Staging Belonging and Unbelonging in Black British Drama Today

DEIRDRE OSBORNE

OR BLACK ARTISTS IN BRITAIN, the divisions engendered by racial politics have produced long-standing contortions of positive F status and identity, and a legacy of disenfranchisement, which is hardly favourable to either creativity or progress. Until the late-twentieth century, black people in Britain served as a representational presence rather than experiencing opportunities for authentic creative agency in white-domi- nated cultural arenas. Even now, black people’s contributions to contempo- rary Britain’s multicultures still chafe against monocultural experiential expectations and the filtering of work through the white–male hegemony of Britain’s creative institutions.2 Drama in particular literally brings to life, and theatricalizes, debates about black people’s social, cultural, and national senses of belonging in a white- majority context. Its live dimension directly confronts ideologically en- trenched antipathies and socially enacted xenographies, producing a per-

1 Kofi Agyemang & Patricia Elcock, “Urban Afro-Saxons” (MS, 2003, courtesy of Talawa Theatre Company. 2 This was not uncontested. Naseem Khan’s The Arts Britain Ignores (London: Commis- sion for Racial Equality, 1976) marks a watershed in articulating the institutional racism that operated in every aspect of British theatre – from actor training to employment opportunities, to programming and board membership – in excluding British black and Asian practitioners. 204 DEIRDRE OSBORNE  formativity of black cultural identities. Michael Eldridge has referred to Frantz Fanon’s claim that nations have “a fundamentally recitative or per- formative quality to them” and applied this to cultural conceptions of black- ness in Britain. Eldridge concludes that “black Britain was performed into being, deliberately conjured by artists and intellectuals” to imply that a con- scious aesthetic process has been crucial in rendering this distinctive British manifestation of African diasporic inheritance.3 Most obviously, the performativity of the socially inscribed body and the body in performance is also a visual experience creating simultaneity of re- ceptive possibilities, where “the physical is very present but the historical, social and political may also be articulated.”4 This can be registered explicitly through themes and content of the production, the semiotics of its perform- ance systems, or implicitly, in challenging or reinforcing anticipated audience expectations. The historical marginalization or omission of black-centred dramatizations renders the British theatrescape an incomplete and flawed enterprise. A swathe of neo-millennial playwrights have set out to redress this with work that challenges the canonicity established by the white-domi- nated critical apparatus, such as the constituency of Aleks Sierz’s “In-Yer- Face” theatre. What could be more visible and indeed ‘in-yer-face’ for British theatre history than staging black British people’s experiences, with black British actors?5

3 Michael Eldridge, “The Rise and Fall of Black Britain,” Transition 74 (1997): 34. 4 Anita Naoko–Pilgrim, in Acts of Passion: Sexuality, Gender and Performance, ed. Maya Chowdhry & Nina Rapi (New York & London: Harrington Park, 1998): 71. 5 By coining the concept of ‘In-Yer-Face theatre’, Aleks Sierz attempted to account for the often sensational, taboo-staging plays in London in the 1990s written by Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill, Jez Butterworth, and Martin Crimp, among others. Although he went on to publish a book of the same title, In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (London: Faber & Faber, 2000), it is devoid of any British black or Asian playwrights. He is not alone in his omissions. Changing Stages: A View of British Theatre in the Twentieth Century, by the former Royal National Theatre director Richard Eyre and his co-author Nicholas Wright (Lon- don: Bloomsbury, 2000), similarly excludes any notion of British black and Asian theatre, drama or performance. Duncan Wu’s Making Plays: Interviews with Contemporary British Dramatists and their Directors (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000) and Mireia Aragay, Hildegard Klein, Enric Monforte & Pilar Zozaya’s British Theatre of the 1990s: Interviews with Directors, Playwrights, Critics and Academics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) go even further and do not feature a single woman, either. The distortions enacted by these studies per- petuate a status quo that privileges white males without indicating or interrogating key shifts in late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century British theatre. As Alan Sinfield