Introduction
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Notes Introduction 1. Current feminist theatre scholarship tends to use the term ‘heteronormative’. The predominant use of the term ‘heterosexist’ in this study draws directly from black lesbian feminist Audre Lorde’s notion of ‘Heterosexism [as] the belief in the inherent superiority of one pattern of loving and thereby its right to dominance’ (Lorde, 1984, p. 45). 2. See Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (London: Routledge, 1989) for summaries and discussions of the essen- tialism/constructionism debates. 3. See, for example, Elaine Aston, An Introduction to Feminism and Theatre (London: Routledge, 1995); Elaine Aston, Feminist Views on the English Stage: Women Playwrights, 1990–2000 (Cambridge: CUP, 2003); Mary F. Brewer, Race, Sex and Gender in Contemporary Women’s Theatre: The Construction of ‘Woman’ (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 1999); Lizbeth Goodman, Contemporary Feminist Theatres: To Each Her Own (London: Routledge, 1993); and Gabriele Griffin Contemporary Black and Asian Women Playwrights in Britain (Cambridge: CUP, 2003). 4. See, for example, Susan Croft, ‘Black Women Playwrights in Britain’ in Trevor R. Griffiths and Margaret Llewellyn Jones, eds, British and Irish Women Dram- atists Since 1968 (Buckingham: OUP, 1993); Mary Karen Dahl, ‘Postcolonial British Theatre: Black Voices at the Center’ in J. Ellen Gainor, ed., Imperi- alism and Theatre: Essays on World Theatre, Drama and Performance (London: Routledge, 1995); Sandra Freeman, Putting Your Daughters on the Stage: Lesbian Theatre from the 1970s to the 1990s (London: Cassell, 1997); Dimple Godiwala, ed., Alternatives Within the Mainstream: British Black and Asian Theatres (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006); Lizbeth Goodman, Feminist Stages: Interviews with Women in Contemporary British Theatre (The Netherlands: Harwood Academic Press, 1996); Lizbeth Goodman and Jane Due Gay, eds, Languages of Theatre Made by Women (Bristol: Intellect, 2002); May Joseph, ‘Bodies Outside the State: Black British Women Playwrights and the Limits of Citizenship’ in Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane, eds, The Ends of Performance (New York: New York University Press, 1998); and Meenakshi Ponnuswami, ‘Small Island People: Black British Women Playwrights’ in Elaine Aston and Janelle Reinelt, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights (Cambridge: CUP, 2000). 5. See Patricia Hill Collins’ Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (London: Routledge, 1991) and bell hooks’ Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (London: Pluto Press, 1982) for explor- ations of the ways that seemingly divergent representational discourses meet to substantiate certain ideas about black womanhood. 6. White feminists have shown how these mythical presuppositions were used as much to control ideas of white female sexuality as virtuous. See, for example, 198 Notes 199 Diane Roberts The Myth of Aunt Jemima: Representations of Race and Region (London: Routledge, 1994), for a detailed analysis of the impact of these constructs on beliefs about black and white femininity. 7. See Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Freedom: The Crossing Press, 1984) and Barbara Smith ‘Toward a Black Feminist Criticism’ in Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott and Barbara Smith, eds, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies (New York: The Feminist Press, 1982). 8. For example, Basic Instinct (1992) has been discussed significantly in film studies as making a connection between sexuality and criminal deviancy, where ‘deviant’ (bi)sexuality is positioned as a ‘mark of aggression’ (Hart, 1994, p. 1) for the central character Catherine Trammell. See, for example, Lynda Hart Fatal Women: Lesbian Sexuality and the Mark of Aggression (London: Routledge, 1994); Kate Stables ‘The Postmodern Always Rings Twice: Constructing the Femme Fatale in 90s Cinema’ in E. Ann Kaplan, ed., Women in Film Noir (London: BFI Publishing, 1998); and Linda Ruth Williams ‘Sisters under the Skin: Video and Blockbuster Erotic Thrillers’ in Pam Cooke and Phillip Dodd, ed., Women and Film: A Sight and Sound Reader (London: Scarlet Press, 1993). 9. See Barbara Christian Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers (New York: Pergamom, 1985). 1 Black British women and theatre: An overview 1. See, for example, D. Keith Peacock, Thatcher’s Theatre (New York: Greenwood Press, 1999); Meenakshi Ponnuswami, ‘Small Island People: Black British Women Playwrights’ (2000); and Jatinder Verma ‘Cultural Transformations’ in Theodore Shank, ed., Contemporary British Theatre (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996b). 2. Errol John’s Observer award-winning play Moon on a Rainbow Shawl and Barry Reckord’s Flesh to a Tiger received main house productions in 1958, and during the 1960s and 1970s The Royal Court housed Sunday night, lunch time and theatre upstairs presentations of black plays and performance. 3. The list of Royal Court playwrights included John Osborne, Samuel Beckett, John Arden, Arnold Wesker, Ann Jellicoe, David Hare, Howard Brenton, Henrik Ibsen, Harold Pinter, Bertolt Brecht, Arthur Miller and Joe Orton. Michelene Wandor’s Look Back in Gender: Sexuality and the Family in Post-War British Drama (London: Methuen, 1987) looks at the representation of gender in plays by several of these playwrights. 4. Adrienne Kennedy wrote only three of the twenty or so black plays seen at The Royal Court between 1956 and 1980. Despite these disheartening figures, the significance of The Royal Court, The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) and The Arts Theatre as champions of black theatre should not be underestimated. Since the 1980s The Royal Court, Theatre Royal Stratford East and the Tricycle have been particularly instrumental in accommodating professional black performance work. 5. The spread of interviews in Richard Findlater’s celebration of the first 25 years of the Royal Court makes this quite apparent as interviewees constantly refer to the camaraderie within a group of people who knew each other well both privately 200 Notes and professionally. Mustapha Matura broke into the British theatre scene because he shared a friend with director Roland Rees, who used his contacts with Ed Berman of the Ambiance Theatre (based at the ICA) to ensure a production of short plays by Matura. It was the success of this production that led to Matura’s play As Time Goes By (1972) being produced at the Royal Court in 1971. See Richard Findlater (ed.) At The Royal Court: 25 Years of the English Stage Company (Ambergate: Amber Lane Press, 1981). 6. Pauline Henriques was an understudy for Georgia Burke in the American Negro Theatre’s touring production of Anna Lucasta (1944) at His Majesty’s Theatre (1947). 7. The Almeida Theatre’s 1988 production of Moon on a Rainbow Shawl imported poet and novelist Maya Angelou to play the lead female role. 8. The Dark and Light Theatre Company was founded in 1970 by Frank Cousins and folded in 1977. Temba, founded by Oscar James and Alton Kumalo in 1972, mounted plays throughout the 1970s and 1980s before disbanding in 1991 after huge cuts in their Arts Council subsidy. 9. Connor estimates that ‘ninety-percent of the black or Afro-Asian and Oriental people who wanted to join the acting profession found their way to us’ (cited in Pines, 1992, p. 36). 10. Connor notes the struggle to get the actor’s union Equity to relax the 40-week rule for black actors. At the time Equity membership demanded actors to prove 40 weeks of work in the West End theatre, a virtual impossib- ility for black actors when there were already so few roles to be shared amongst them. Following activism by black theatre practitioners such as Connor integrated casting initiatives began to become more commonplace, which was followed by the formation of a separate Afro-Asian artists register in Equity in the 1980s. 11. Carmen Munroe and Horace James produced Ibsen plays for the Negro Theatre Workshop at St Pancras Town Hall and toured Ibsen and Chekhov plays to black community venues. 12. One recommendation, still an issue today, was that funding panels making decisions about black work should include black members if the work was to receive the recognition and aesthetic understanding it deserved. The insinu- ation here is that black theatre has inherently different aesthetic stand- ards from white theatre and therefore should not be judged by the same criteria. Yvonne Brewster was the first black woman drama officer for the Arts Council of Great Britain from 1982 to 1984. 13. Regional theatre venues receiving black theatre tend to be in cities where there is a mixed racial demographic, thus a concentration of potential black audience members. See Lynette Goddard, ‘Black Theatre Venues’ in Alison Donnell, ed., Companion to Contemporary Black British Culture (London: Routledge, 2002) for a summary of key venues. 14. Until quite recently the Tricycle had not produced a play by a British black woman. Most of their black productions are by African-American men, particularly James Baldwin and August Wilson, and they also produced Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind (1955) in 1992 and housed BTC’s touring produc- tion of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959) in 1985. Winsome Pinnock’s Water (2000) was the Tricycle’s first play by a black British woman, and was specially commissioned to accompany Childress’s Wine in the Notes 201 Wilderness (1969) for a Black History Month double-bill in October 2000. Pinnock’s One Under (2005) was produced at the Tricycle in 2005. 15. The Royal Court was a launch pad for the careers of other significant black women theatre practitioners such as Paulette Randall who won an Arts Council bursary to train for a year as an assistant director with the English Stage Company in the late 1980s, which led to her developing a successful freelance directing career. 16. Interviews with black theatre practitioners in Jim Pines Black and White in Colour: Black People in British Television Since 1936 (London: BFI Publishing, 1992) and Roland Rees Fringe First: Pioneers of Fringe Theatre on Record (London: Oberon Books, 1992) discuss the significance of the Keskidee Centre.