Covent Garden, 1833. Edmund Kean, the greatest tragedian of his age, has collapsed while playing the title role in Othello at the Theatre Royal. His son, Charles, is all set to take over and has just prised the lid off a trusty tin of boot polish ready to smear dark grease all over his peachy white cheeks. But, instead, a black American actor, Ira Aldridge, is engaged to play the lead. Kean’s company are aghast by this affront to their man’s talent and authority. But his fiancée, Ellen Tree, who plays Desdemona, is smitten by the charismatic American and tries to embrace his realistic new emotional acting style.
This is the starting point for Lolita Chakrabarti’s wonderful new play, Red Velvet, at the Tricycle theatre. The play’s achievement is to animate the themes of racism without descending into preachiness or I-told-you-so sermonising. The writer has deftly taken the Shakespearean issues of racial prejudice and sexual prurience and relocated them to Victorian Britain. And she finds all kinds of new resonances in Othello. Indhu Rubasingham directs with a light touch.
Early scenes show the actors rehearsing in the stiff, grand manner of the Victorian theatre. Each speech is accompanied by formalised postures and elaborate hand movements that emphasise the emotional accents and climaxes. It all looks very false and silly to us. And it’s hilarious to watch. But the play resists the temptation to mock the Victorians without mercy. It’s all done with warmth and a sense of proportion.
When Aldridge played the Moor he scored an unexpected triumph and the doubts of his fellow actors were partially allayed. But then came the reviews. One paper hailed the arrival of ‘a genuine nigger’ at the Theatre Royal. ‘His hair is woolly and his features, though African, are considerably humanised. But owing to the shape of his lips it is utterly impossible for him to pronounce English.’
The schemers pounced. Kean, who disliked Aldridge’s physical roughness with his fiancée, hired a doctor to examine her arms. Bruises were found. ‘I was acting,’ she protested fruitlessly. Gossips whispered that she and Aldridge were conducting an affair. Quite untrue, of course, but enough to get the show cancelled. Aldridge left for Europe where he forged a new career as one of the greatest of all Shakespearean interpreters. Adrian Lester (Aldridge) has a seemingly infinite store of actorly blessings. Good looks, personal magnetism, enormous vocal power, a certain unpredictability on stage, and the complete physical mastery of a natural mime. He gets excellent support from Charlotte Lucas as a beaming and buxom Ellen Tree, and from Ryan Kiggell as the stodgy bigot, Charles Kean. Doubtless there are producers panting to take this show into the West End. They may be gazumped by Broadway.
To Shoreditch, for The Revenger’s Tragedy set in Hoxton Hall. This tiny Victorian theatre looks like a boutique parliament with a compact stage and an intimate little auditorium overlooked by three tiers of tall, elegant balconies. A wonderful ensemble. The authorship of the play has been variously assigned to Thomas Middleton and to Cyril Tourneur. Neither scribe seems to have made much effort to bag the credit. Little wonder. It’s an absurd blood-and guts Italian thriller best known for two live acts of butchery. A tongue is gouged out and tossed on stage. A little later, an eyeball gets the same treatment. The big draw here is Jaime Winstone, whose father Ray has passed to her the full genetic legacy of his looks, physique and vocal range. She makes a decent tilt at Castiza, a scheming heiress stranded in a court of traitors and cut-throats. It should be added that her elocution lessons have yet to yield their full dividend and her attempt to capture the manners of the Italian nobility is somewhat marred by her pronunciation of ‘mother’ as ‘muvva’.
The production struggles for clarity. The costumes are a random harvest from Next, Oxfam and Camden Market. The set looks like a spirited attempt to enter Albert Steptoe’s house for the Turner Prize. There are piles of complicated junk lying here and there with old TV sets pumping out barmy snatches of filmed action. The programme assigns the lighting credit to ‘Tupac Martir’, which I assume is an anagram intended to disguise the culprit’s identity. It was so bad I learned things from it. I really had no idea that four spotlights could be trained on an actor’s face and still leave it a mass of illegible shadows. Throughout, a hulking great arc-lamp at the rear of the stage smashed white light into the audience’s eyeballs, thus rendering the action invisible. These aren’t failures of ‘lighting’ or even of ‘theatrical art’. Just common sense. Quite an ordeal, really. But I’d go back to Hoxton Hall any day. A fabulously atmospheric building.
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