Abstract
In the second of the two commissioned interviews for this Special Issue, we discuss the experience and politics of casting from the perspective of ethnic minority actors. Although there were a number of individuals and organisations who could have been approached, here we talk to Daniel York, who initially drove the debates after he was auditioned for, but not cast in, The Orphan of Zhao, and to Anna Chen, who spearheaded the media campaign against the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). Both are also founding members of British East Asian Artists, a lobbying and production group that was formed during the RSC controversy to promote East Asian representation on stage and screen.
Nearly two years after the outcry around The Orphan of Zhao, there have been dramatic shifts in the representational visibility and self-produced performances of British East Asian (BEA) theatre-makers. It is therefore worth remembering what the terrain was like in September 2012, at what became a watershed moment. Yellow Earth Theatre, still the UK’s only BEA theatre company, seemed to have plateaued with the multiple shifts in Artistic Directorship since David Tse’s departure in 2009 and the loss of Arts Council England revenue funding in 2011. An article written in The Stage in 2009 called British theatre ‘racist’ owing to a lack of representation of BEA theatre practitioners both on and off stage at all the major theatre institutions.Footnote1 Such discussions reflected how diversity policies worked to include black and South Asian groups, but overlooked East Asians. In our own academic research and activities, such as at the Contesting British Chinese Cultures conference held at the University of Reading in September 2011, and during interviews with practitioners, the landscape of diversity and equal opportunities was consistently described as getting worse for BEA theatre-makers since the 1990s. And yet, this was a community developing in numbers and artistic range, creating a sense of frustration at the lack of recognition and creative opportunities in the mainstream.
In this context, The Orphan of Zhao’s casting was inevitably a tinderbox scenario. Indeed it was sparked because one of the BEA theatre community’s leading male actors, Daniel York, who has amassed a credible track record in theatre in the UK, Singapore, and the US, was nearly cast in a lead role.Footnote2 The production’s contextual dynamics point to the problems surrounding how to include racial-ethnic minority actors in colour-blind casting without falling prey to its representational iniquities. Indeed, as Anna Chen asserts, to be colour-blind on an equal playing field can come only from a position of white privilege.Footnote3 To suggest that race is invisible fails to recognise the challenges faced by racial-ethnic minority actors and the reinforcing of dominant identities and values. How can racial-ethnic minorities gain experience and a track record when all that is on offer are stereotypical portrayals, and when they have exceptionally few opportunities to perform classical theatre? The black British actor and playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah recently called this a form of ‘structural inequality’ that automatically disadvantages ethnic minority practitioners.Footnote4 Yet if there is equal talent on display, should a racial-ethnic minority actor be, as York highlights here ‘given the break’? Should theatre be more ‘colour-conscious’,Footnote5 rather than colour-blind, in recognising the different ways that race is perceived in performance in order to challenge conventional assumptions that surround particular identities? Can BEA actors do more to push themselves forward? Where does the burden of responsibility lie? This interview explores these challenges in discussing the tensions that surround casting practice.Footnote6
I would like to start by asking you, in general terms, about your own experiences of the casting process. I appreciate that it might be different for each production, but how do you prepare for auditions, what kind of things do you do?
I might start by reading the play three times. I do a lot of work and I know a lot of actors don’t do that. I feel I have to be five times as good as anyone else to even stand a chance of getting anywhere because not only am I British East Asian, I’m mixed East Asian. The industry goes a lot on what they see, what’s in front of them, and it’s a very small, self-perpetuating circle. There’s a myth that casting directors see huge numbers of people and I am not sure that is actually the case. What they tend to do is cast what is already open to them. So, it’s about who’s on TV at the time. We’re talking about particular programmes that are seen as mid- to high quality, things like period drama, which is where you traditionally get ‘quality actors’ from. By hook or by crook, I’ve managed to amass some pretty good theatre credits, but television is different. I mean it’s interesting, they did an episode of Holby City, and there were some Chinese actors in that. I wasn’t even called in to read. Casting directors often complain that they can’t find trained and experienced East Asian actors, so one in their forties who has played in big theatres would be even rarer by that reckoning. You would have thought that was a shoo-in, but it’s interesting that I wasn’t even in the ballpark with it.
Actually, I’ve been on both sides of this, as I have worked as an actor and as a director. I try very hard when I’m doing auditions myself to give whoever comes as much of an opportunity as possible. I try and allow them a good half an hour each for a start, which is not what you get at a lot of auditions – that’s generally only 15 minutes. I try and send them a script beforehand and talk to them about the script.
There’s a saying in this industry and I think it’s probably true, unfortunately, that nine times out of ten they’ve made up their mind as soon as you walk through the door. It’s very tempting, when people do their first read, to think, ‘We’ve worked out whether or not you are appropriate’ – and your instincts are generally correct. But I do try and direct them and give them another go at it. This is especially because the main thing that I’m trying to create is good drama and good opportunities for East Asian actors. I try very hard to work with them, and to take into account the fact that they’re maybe not that confident. I always feel it’s difficult for East Asian actors in the sense that we’re coming in from the cold most of the time. There just isn’t that sense of infrastructure that supports and develops us. We need to be at the same level as Caucasian actors in terms of technique and professional demeanour; in fact, we probably need to be better, yet we just haven’t had the artistic environment to enable that.
I was quite interested by the comment you made about the fact that nine times out of ten you, as a director, get a feeling about someone as soon as they walk in the audition room. What is it specifically about those first few seconds that you see as significant?
It’s something I got quite obsessed by for a long time as an actor. If you counted up my auditions in a 20-year career, I’ve actually been to about a quarter of the auditions that someone else has been to and produced a similar amount of work. If there was a room with people like Benedict Wong and Tom Wu, and you asked anyone to say, ‘How would you describe that guy?’ they’d go, ‘Well he’s Chinese.’ If I walked in there and you ask someone to describe me, they’re going to say, ‘Well he’s kind of swarthy….’ The primary dramatic function of most of those characters in TV dramas – I wouldn’t even call them characters, ciphers really – is that they’re ‘Chinese’. I wasn’t getting these parts and I would kind of get obsessed with that, like, ‘Am I doing something wrong?’ This is how inadequacies set in because the gatekeepers are playing off stereotypes; they want something that is almost cartoon ‘Chinese’.
I’m reading this book at the moment by David T. Wellman called Portraits of White Racism.Footnote7 The whole book is about the fact that people tend to think of racism as a kind of prejudice, whereas he actually talks about the advantage of certain races over others. Everything is geared around the white race and in the theatre that’s reflected because you’ve got a clear hierarchy.
It’s not just a hierarchy, it’s coming from the centre: it’s their point of view. Everything in their eyesight comes from their own experience.
There is virtually always a sense when they’re casting minority ethnic actors that they’re picking exotic flowers for their garden: ‘That little brown one there is gorgeous, I must have it.’ You’re not being evaluated in the same way at all.
They are practically the arts-wing of imperialism.
I think that there is a kind of environment where you can end up having to give what you’re expected to give. The expectation placed on you is to just turn up and be as ‘yellow’ as possible. […] It means over-sexualising females, desexualising males, presenting them as generally sly but thick, devious, dangerous, and maybe even geeky, but ultimately disempowered. We are on the exotic periphery. We are not generally allowed to have presence, to be equal, and be intelligent. When you turn up at an audition and you are not exotic or ‘foreign’, casting directors tend to think you are being inauthentic. The East Asian actors that often get cast, certainly in TV, are not from Britain, but from overseas. It is like they embody the ‘authentic’ exotic otherness they are looking for more easily.
I’ve actually stopped going to auditions. I really wanted to be an actor from when I was very young. I asked, ‘How do I get an Equity card?’ And I was told, ‘Well if you go dancing in Dubai we’ll give you an Equity card.’ So, I think, ‘How else can I get one?’ Little by little, I would get small parts like at the Bear Gardens. When I was about 20, I was in Macbeth and I was going to play Hecate. Now, Hecate is one of the roles that is normally cut. I had a fair degree of charisma for my age at that time and some of the actors told me I should have been playing Lady Macbeth. I told them I was too young and that I would never be cast in such a role. Spurred on by that, I tried to get an Equity card, but I couldn’t get one even though I’d had those speaking parts. It felt like, ‘No, no, no, no. There are hardly any Chinese actors, and we’ve got Tsai Chin anyway.’ That was it. Ten years later I’m still trying, turning up and it’s the cattle call, and I realised I’m never going to get to do what I want.
That is why I started to write my own material, and came up with Suzy Wrong – Human Cannon, which was the first British Chinese solo show to play Edinburgh in 1994, with a national tour in 1995.Footnote8 I was doing stuff that was quite groundbreaking and I thought, ‘Well I’m certainly bound to get work now.’ I’d done a film before that as well where they ended up dubbing me to sound like I spoke pidgin English! But my view with auditions is I walk in, they look at me, I’m big [tall], I don’t fit any of the stereotypes. It’s almost burnt into their retina: they’ve got a Chinese person in mind and it’s not us, especially if your size is all wrong. I was told that I had a certain presence, but you’re not supposed to be like that. You’re supposed to be evil and be dripping in mystery. I’m a Chinese girl from Hackney and I can express a whole range of emotions, but they are not reflected in the work. Instead of being given the full palette to work with, we’re always limited in what we can do.
Now this shapes the way we are seen in society and the kind of racism that can result. For instance, the government tried to blame us as a minority with the foot and mouth disease outbreak in 2000, 2001. It is relatively easy for them to point the finger. Valerie Elliott of The Times was briefed by MAFF [Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food], and Michael White and Nicholas Watt in the Guardian implied that the outbreak was caused by illegally imported meat being used in Chinese restaurants with the leftovers served as pigswill – which was an easy way of making it seem like the foreigner Chinese starting up foot and mouth disease – rather than the fact that the government had done nothing to ban pigswill and, anyway, Chinese restaurants all bought their meat at the British butchers like the rest of us.Footnote9 Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Ian Burrell of the Independent stood up for us.Footnote10 But the danger is if people control how we’re seen, we get to a point where they want to start what one Jewish person described to me as ‘an anti-Chinese pogrom’. If you remember the hysteria of the farmers shooting themselves, and Chinese people in takeaways in Cumbria starting to be beaten up and being spat at, then there is a political dimension to not being humanised. If you are a blank canvas, then they can project their own inner demons onto you.
One of the arguments they use in casting is ‘we just don’t consider colour, we don’t consider race’. You can only do that from a position of privilege having never felt the impact of race.
This complicates the idea of ‘rightness’ for the role that you mentioned earlier. What is that ‘rightness’?
It depends on the role I suppose, but I like to think that if I had a good actor in front of me I could find it. If I had a play like The Orphan of Zhao, and I had a good actor I could find a role for them.
There is a lot of talk about positive discrimination. Chris Rock came out with a hilarious quote the other day: ‘Look, look, look’, he said, ‘I don’t want a leg up if a white guy’s more qualified than me. Give it to the white guy. But if we’re equally qualified you should give me the job. They’ve had a 400-year head start on me!’Footnote11 This is my beef at The Orphan of Zhao. Gregory Doran was open to casting me. I know because I got a letter. He even considered me for the biggest part in the play that I’m probably 15 years too young for. So, personally, I think they should have moved heaven and earth. I’m sorry, that was my right, they should have. They missed a great opportunity for themselves. They had more chance of selling the season if they had cast BEA actors more imaginatively.
It would have fitted in with the fact that they were doing their first Chinese play. It would have made them look good and it just would have been fairer aside from anything else. I think that’s why everything exploded, because it was so blatantly unfair. It was a golden opportunity to correct a persistent situation where highly trained East Asian actors are told they are not getting the work because there aren’t the parts written for East Asians and yet they can’t play roles that traditionally go to Caucasian actors. Instead, these experienced BEA actors were ignored, were being judged by some kind of template being projected on to us. The arts establishment has carved round holes and we are square pegs, and there is just no way we are going to fit in.
It was a desperately poor decision. What I’m saying, and this made the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) very defensive, is that I wasn’t treated the same. I said, ‘You gave me a speech of the Orphan’ which is what they gave to all the male Chinese actors. I know I’m not going to play this. He’s supposed to be 17. But I learnt it. Then Greg got very excited and he told me I was quite good at sight-reading and considered me for one of the generals. At the start of the play the doctor’s got the baby, the General susses that he’s got the baby, and there’s a great scene where he interrogates him. It looks like he’s going to say, ‘Look I know what you’re up to’, but he lets him off, he lets him off the hook.
The casting director tries to explain the decision to me. Look, I can guess what happened. The role ends up being played by another actor who is also playing a big part in another of the plays. So it probably went that Michael Boyd sat there with Greg and said, ‘Look, I need him to play this part so Daniel should step down.’ I think that between the other actor and myself, in terms of theatre, there is probably not much between us regarding our CVs, and I should have got the break. It is because they were trying to cast three plays and keep all the directors happy. I was told that they couldn’t find a through line for me across the three plays.
Every time there is a choice, they pick the one that reinforces the status quo, which means that there is entropy built into this. You are constantly in a spiral that is only ever going down and inwards, and it is a massive disservice to British culture by the publicly funded arts establishment. What was shocking for me was that they used that as part of the excuse: how can someone who is Chinese possibly play a Russian? It’s like, ‘Hello, have you seen how the continents work?!’ The idea that someone with high cheekbones, who looks semi-Asiatic, can’t play the role of a Russian, with their high cheekbones and often semi-Asiatic appearance is, quite frankly, ludicrous.
But this is the thing. I’m used to not getting parts. Every actor is used to not getting auditions, but this one was different. When I eventually got the phone call and was told that it’s not going to go any further, I nearly dropped the phone. I was staggered. I was like, ‘Are you serious? Are you absolutely serious with me?’
But it’s all the established East Asian actors. We’ve only got a few but none of them were in this.
How did you hear about The Orphan of Zhao and how did you voice your objections?
I think I emailed you [Chen] about it.
Yes. There were a couple of things that you wrote to me that suggested things had suddenly intensified. Then the news broke about the cast and that’s the point where I suddenly started to pay proper attention and realised what had just happened. I thought this was so backward considering it was the Royal Shakespeare Company, public money, they’d made a huge fuss about this being the first Chinese play they had put on, it was the Chinese Hamlet, and yet it seemed like a colossal slap in the face to British Chinese artists and to the Chinese people they were marketing it to.
I was aware they were casting it and I flagged it up to Equity. This is how much I think we’ve shifted the terrain because when it happened before, when the Young Vic did The Good Person of Szechwan (2008) and did not cast any East Asians, it wasn’t even remarked upon. I can understand the argument on an intellectual level – people would argue that this was Brecht who writes non-realistically and non-naturalistically and that he was, on the face of it, writing this play for actors who weren’t of East Asian origin. However, it’s a little known fact that when he was trying to get the play produced in America, he went to New York to try and persuade Anna May Wong to play the title role. And I think that you need positive action; if you want to break down the barriers to diversity and reflect what Britain is actually like, then you have to take opportunities. Brecht was very open to East Asian theatre styles, East Asian characters, and, I think, East Asian actors, and this was in the early part of the twentieth century. I firmly believe that in modern Britain, when you have an opportunity to put diversity on the stage, it’s your moral responsibility as a publicly funded artist to do it.
It’s interesting how with The Good Person of Szechwan that if you cast with Brecht’s alienation effect in mind, then colour-blind casting might contribute to the separation between actor and role. Yet, when it came to Life of Galileo at the RSC in the same season as The Orphan of Zhao, they were doing the opposite, so which is it? It’s a moveable feast. The rules that apply always privilege the white actor.
So what happened after you flagged it to Equity?
Yes. I saw that they were doing The Orphan of Zhao and I said to my agent, ‘Look, I want to be in the door with that.’ I got on to the Equalities Officer at Equity straightaway, who’s very much on our side. I said, ‘Someone should say to the RSC that they ought to be opening the door to East Asian actors because, so far, they haven’t.’ An Equity theatre officer had a polite word with the RSC, reinforcing Equity’s position that the RSC should be casting East Asians in East Asian roles. Then I got called in for the casting and it had gone terribly well. There was palpable excitement. I got a phone call the next day to go back. Generally, the way it works with the RSC is that if you impress one of them, you’re in with a fair chance. I was shocked when it wasn’t taken any further. I thought, ‘Let’s see what happens; let’s see who gets cast.’ I was checking the website every day for the cast announcement, but I knew that they had already started rehearsing. Apparently two of those East Asian actors had been cast once they started rehearsing, and although this is not an absolutely unusual set of circumstances, one Artistic Director I know called it ‘last-minute panic buying’.
When the cast list came out, I was expecting waves of apathy because I’ve made a noise about these things before. People say, ‘Yeah he’s just bitter and twisted’, but I thought this was something I should stick with. So I put something on Facebook, asking people who felt the same way as me to write to the Arts Council. One by one people started responding.
I wrote a piece for the Guardian about two dogs and a maid. And how insulting is it, that out of 17 parts, you know that snapshot? I would love a still of that scene where all the ethnics are the servants kneeling on the floor and the white actors are swanning about in the lordly robes and that image to me, I thought, ‘I just want that picture.’ I wouldn’t write an essay about it, I would just put that picture up and say, ‘unpack that’. Then Gregory Doran responded and that was a real mistake. He wrote a very anodyne piece trying to smooth it over and ignore the concerns. Whilst I don’t believe for one moment that Gregory Doran is a racist, it nevertheless exposed the unconscious discrimination and issues of dominance that run to the heart of the establishment. Suddenly, everyone piled in and that was magic. Normally no one cares, but it became an international talking point. The shameful thing was that the Americans got their statement out before we did. David Henry Hwang wrote a holder statement and then AAPAC [Asian American Performers’ Action Coalition] wrote their statement in support of us.Footnote12 That galvanised me to get our [British East Asian Artists] statement out [reproduced in this special issue].
The great thing about David Henry Hwang is that he’s got a certain profile. He can come up with brilliantly unequivocal statements. His statement, that the casting says more about the RSC’s inherent prejudice than it does about East Asian actors in Britain, was gorgeous stuff. No one here would dare to do that because they’d be ridiculed.
Yet there is also the importance of having a track record, particularly for an institution like the National Theatre or the RSC.
In terms of profile, and only in the industry, it is important. But it is not important to the public’s perception.
But what about when you get somebody who does have a track record? [Referencing York:] Who has performed at the National Theatre and also the RSC in Moby Dick? But then they still say, ‘No.’ That makes me feel that we are being subjected to some kind of race conflict where we are being discriminated against for being perceived as different, and that keeps us invisible. That’s why I felt so strongly.
The RSC uses colour-blind casting. Do you think that colour-blind casting is actually a useful approach to casting?
In an ideal world.
I think there are some young directors coming through who probably are quite colour-blind. What we need at the moment is more colour-conscious casting. There’s just a certain area of privilege and a sense of entitlement, a sense of tradition and a sense of people who are ‘in the game’. You can say the word ‘actor’ to most people in Britain and what will probably come into their head is someone like Benedict Cumberbatch, maybe Brad Pitt, or a very florid fantastical creature like Doctor Who with fruity luvvie tones because that is what the standard definition [is] of what an actor is in this country. There was an interview recently with Nina Gould talking about how she cast Colin Firth in The King’s Speech, what qualities she looks for in an actor, and all of the examples being discussed were with white actors.Footnote13 So there is an accepted career path for actors, particularly from a certain background. When you get to minority ethnic casting, that same career path becomes far more difficult, and the further East you get, such dynamics get even more pronounced. David Harewood, for instance; he did not work for a year after Homeland aired here. Now that’s happening to a black actor who is playing a leading role in an American television series. What chance does an East Asian actor, particularly one who is not full-blooded Chinese, have of forging a career? You’re sat opposite a miracle!
The counter-argument would be to say that a play like Noel Coward’s Private Lives or Hayfever, if the actors were black or Asian, then the audience might not respond positively.
Then how come you can have white people playing Chinese roles in The Orphan of Zhao? Doesn’t the same thing apply?
Cush Jumbo’s just played Nora in A Doll’s House, and Jimmy Akingbola played Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger. It is a big deal when it happens. Casting directors have to make a conscious decision to do that, whereas to cast Benedict Cumberbatch, Jonny Lee Miller, any of those people, it’s just ‘casting’. They have to make a conscious decision to do it with us and it becomes a big deal. The idea that we’re all on this level playing field is totally untrue.
Perhaps the problem with colour-blindness is that it is from a particular perspective? If there is colour-blindness, who is blind?
It means making everything white.
But it could be democratising? It shouldn’t matter who you are. Yet, perhaps colour-blind casting argues that race does matter?
We recognise it, but we’ll be blind to it.
We don’t have colour-blind casting here, especially if you compare the situation here to American TV.
In America a lot of racial-ethnic minorities would say they haven’t got colour-blind casting either.
No they complain about it a lot, but it’s even less prominent here.
Look at the Star Trek franchises, for example; they are very racially diverse, and I cannot imagine Americans making something like The Blind Banker in the second series of BBC’s Sherlock.Footnote14
No. They’re much more race-aware.
Did you see The Wrong Mans on television? There were all these Chinese gangsters.Footnote15 It was quite funny, but it was the Chinese who were the stereotypical ‘baddies’. I was hoping there would be a twist, but there wasn’t.
Exactly. That was my argument with The Blind Banker. I thought there was going to be a subversive twist and it never came.
I watched The Blind Banker recently as research for my play The Fu Manchu Complex, in case I was asked if yellow peril was an outdated idea in a Question & Answer session. I watched it and I was astounded by some of it. There was a fantastic line where Cumberbatch said, ‘Entry visas out of China are very rare!’ It is 2010! Really, it was just ridiculous.
They rebooted everything to bring it up to date, everything except their colonial views of the deadly chinky.
Perhaps it’s about equal opportunities rather than race. Nobody ever asked for this, but would it have been a good idea for The Orphan of Zhao to have been an all-East Asian cast?
I think that’s an interesting idea, actually. I don’t have a problem with it – in theory it’s a wonderful idea – but part of what diversity means to me is not ten middle-class white people and three East Asians playing dogs and maids [sic]; what diverse means is Peter Brook’s Mahabharata. The Season was called A World Elsewhere and I certainly think the majority of the cast should have been of minority ethnic background; that’s far more exciting and interesting to me.
I know that some people thought it should have been done that way. I would have been happy if several of those leading roles had been played by East Asian actors – it’s about diversity and fair representation. It’s not neutral ground; they are actually excluding us on the flimsiest of excuses. To have ethnic minority performers as embellishments rather than the actual fabric of the production looks like tourism, is disempowering, and is grossly unfair.
But then the reverse of that would be the implication that you can only play Chinese roles.
I think they needed to have a good two or three of those leading roles played by Chinese people. It would have been an acknowledgement that they were trying to spread things out. The three who were cast were in minor roles and were inexperienced, as if established British East Asian actors couldn’t be trusted to be in protagonist roles where they were acting rather than acted upon. The maid is making a decision but she is powerless. We don’t see a loss of status at risk, because the characters played by East Asian actors have no status. So we are stuck in this low-status servile ghetto.
On what basis would you say that?
It is a Chinese classic, and it’s about Chinese people. We have lots of Chinese people in Britain, and it has to reflect this. All these things are connected. You cannot suddenly try and draw an artificial line around it. The terrain is not neutral. It is not that there were only mostly white actors in the cast; it is the fact that they made a choice not to have Chinese actors that are out there. If Daniel was the only one they could find then absolutely he should have been in it. I want to know what was behind the decision to do a Chinese play, to put everything in the advertising in Mandarin – so you’re trying to get Chinese money – and then you’re presenting them with their own culture with no ethnically Chinese actors! How unhinged is this?
If there was a fantastic record of East Asian actors working at the RSC up until now, you might be tempted to cut them a bit more slack. The fact is there isn’t. It was a golden opportunity for them and I think it was an opportunity that they were compelled to take. They had black people there, and South Asian, too. They had to take the opportunity. They absolutely had to.
This wasn’t a neutral decision, and that is what really, really, really maddens me about this. You only need to read Edward Said’s Orientalism to understand the context of what we are arguing about. There was no sense of self-examination, intellectual engagement, or a different way of interrogating the world.
Perhaps the RSC would argue that it simply didn’t work out and it’s just one of those decisions.
Then they were asleep at the wheel.
Perhaps they were simply applying processes of colour-blind casting?
From a position of privilege.
Yes, it is to their advantage. If they don’t understand what the issues are by now in the arts with public funding, then they’re ignorant, they’re not doing their job. It’s lip service.
If you, me, and Anna put on a Greek-Cypriot play, is there no way we’re going to discuss that? We’re absolutely going to discuss that, are we not? I can’t imagine us not having a huge discussion about whether we get the whole thing on without any Greek-Cypriot actors.
Right. If you put on Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, you are not going to put black actors in the minor roles as the spear-carriers, and not have any leading black actors. This is why I stand by the BEAA [British East Asian Actors] statement where we demanded an apology.
The RSC is effectively a global brand, a corporation. Was it likely that a new incoming Artistic Director would apologise?
This is why I took the fight onto Chinese soil with my South China Morning Post article.Footnote16 They were trying to get Chinese money and I’m glad they at least had the decency to be embarrassed.
It was embarrassing for them.
Perhaps it comes back to the question of who the production was actually for?
They’re marketing it in Mandarin to Chinese people. It is clear, isn’t it? If you’re putting advertising text in hanzi then you’re clearly aiming at the mainland Chinese tourist market which, as we know, is booming. And the child in the poster was East Asian, so you are clearly, again, saying, ‘Look you’re coming to see an exotic otherworldly experience.’ What you got are actors you could see on TV any day of the week.
You educate people. I don’t go to the theatre expecting to know everything, but I expect to have my horizons expanded. This is what they could have done with The Orphan of Zhao. You’ve got the theatre programmes and they could have explained the reasons behind choosing the work. […] The appearance of the Ninja assassin was really the defining moment for me. It was like they were thinking no one is going to know the difference between Chinese and Japanese culture. Also, the moment of tragedy and blood, symbolised by red petals falling. I thought, ‘Well, actually, that’s quite happy, that’s like Chinese confetti, red confetti.’ Why did no one say, ‘Don’t you know that red is the colour of good luck?’ If you’re looking at symbolism here, you’re really giving the wrong messages at the moment when everyone is being killed!
What was the outcome with Equity? How were things left with Equity once this all blew over?
I would say the management are 100 percent behind us. The trouble is they have to get behind their members and many are conservative in their politics, though this is changing rapidly. I got invited to the Stage Committee the other day to speak about the work of the Minority Ethnic Members Committee. Apparently, about five or six years ago, when the Minority Ethnic Members Committee got up to carry their motion at the Annual Conference, people would just start talking amongst themselves, switch off. Now, they’re actually very respectful and a lot of the women in particular are quite affronted on our behalf. What I’m trying to do is get all of the equalities committees – that’s the Minority Ethnic Members Committee, the Women’s Committee, the Disabilities Committee – to agree to a motion that pressurises the Arts Council for proper monitoring statistics [this was done and has now been achieved]. I think the world is changing, there’s no doubt about it.
We’re on the right side of history. I just wish it would hurry up a bit.
Notes
1. Lalayn Baluch, ‘British East Asian Artists Lambast “racist” British Theatre for Lack of Acting Roles’, Stage, 9 June 2009, <http://www.thestage.co.uk/news/2009/06/british-east-asian-artists-lambast-racist-british-theatre-for-lack-of-acting-roles/> [accessed 28 February 2014]. Please note that the title of this article does not refer to the organisation ‘British East Asian Artists’; rather, it was relaying the opinions of a number of BEA practitioners.
2. Daniel York is of mixed Singapore and British heritage and grew up in the UK. As an actor he has appeared at the Royal Court, the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre, Hampstead Theatre, and most recently at the National Theatre (2013) in The World Of Extreme Happiness, as well as extensively in Singapore where he won the 2012 Life! Theatre Best Supporting Actor award for his performance in Patrick Marber’s Dealer’s Choice. He was recently awarded an Arts Council grant to produce his first full-length play The Fu Manchu Complex at the Ovalhouse (2013), directed by Justin Audibert, and his short play Song Of Four Seasons was performed at Tamasha’s Music & Migration Scratch Night. He is currently a member of the Royal Court’s Studio group as well as the Orange Tree Writers’ Collective. His short play, Muddy Water, was recently performed at the Orange Tree. He is currently Chair of the Equity Minority Ethnic Members’ Committee.
3. Anna Chen is a writer, performer, poet, and broadcaster. She writes and presents programmes for BBC Radio 4 as a freelancer (including A Celestial Star in Piccadilly: Anna May Wong [2009], Chopsticks At Dawn [2010], and Madam Mao’s Golden Oldies [2012]) and presents her series, Madam Miaow’s Culture Lounge, at Resonance 104.4 FM. Her blog, Madam Miaow Says, was shortlisted in the 2010 Orwell Prize for blogs, and longlisted in 2012. She was the first British Chinese writer and performer to take a show to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and was the first to appear on British television, in Stewart Lee and Richard Herring’s show, Fist of Fun (BBC2), in 1995. She is the author of I, Imelda (1998), Anna May Wong Must Die! (2009, 2011), and The Steampunk Opium Wars (2012).
4. Kwame Kwei-Armah, quoted in Tim Adams, ‘Kwame Kwei-Armah: “I was constantly moaning in London”’, Guardian, 2 February 2014 <http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/feb/02/kwame-kwei-armah-center-stage> [accessed 28 February 2014].
5. Ayanna Thompson, Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race and Contemporary America (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 80.
6. Amanda Rogers (Swansea University) and Ashley Thorpe (Royal Holloway, University of London) conducted this interview on 3 February 2014 at the National Theatre, London. As interviewers, we should highlight that we are both also members of British East Asian Artists.
7. David T. Wellman, Portraits of White Racism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
8. Mulan Theatre Company, Suzy Wrong – Human Cannon, written and dir. by Anna Chen, Pleasance Theatre, Edinburgh, first performed 11 August 1994.
9. Michael White and Nicholas Watt, ‘Smuggled Meat Blamed’, Guardian, 27 March 2001 <http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/mar/27/footandmouth5> [accessed 30 June 2014]; see also BBC, ‘Farm Disease Linked to Smuggled Meat’, BBC News, 27 March 2001 <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1245131.stm> [accessed 30 June 2014]; Unknown author, ‘Sheep and Sow Source’, Daily Mirror, 28 March 2001, p. 1. This last reference was a front-page headline with an image of a Chinese dinner on the cover. For a full discussion see the comments thread at British Chinese Online, 27 March–17 October 2001 <http://www.britishchineseonline.com/forum/showthread.php?t=409> [accessed 20 June 2014].
10. Articles removed from the Independent Online. See also Peter Hitchens, ‘Brown’s Chinese Restaurant Lie’, Daily Mail, 15 April 2001 <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/columnists/article-124925/Browns-Chinese-restaurant-lie.html> [accessed 30 June 2014].
11. Chris Rock, Never Scared, dir. by Joel Gallen (HBO, 2004). The full joke that York refers to is: ‘I don’t think I should get accepted to a school over a white person if I get a lower mark on a test. But if there’s a tie? Fuck him! Shit, you had a 400-year head start, motherfucker!’
12. David Henry Hwang wrote: ‘The Orphan of Zhao casting controversy says less about Britain’s Asian acting community, than it does about the RSC’s laziness and lack of artistic integrity. Early in my career, when I wrote Asian characters, production teams in America often had to expend extra effort to find Asian actors to play them. Yet they did so, both to maintain artistic authenticity and to provide opportunities for actors who are virtually never allowed to even audition for “white” roles. By producing The Orphan of Zhao, the RSC seeks to exploit the public’s growing interest in China; through its casting choices, the company reveals that its commitment to Asia is only skin-deep.’ See: Madam Miaow, ‘The Orphan of Zhao: RSC Casts Asians as Dogs and Maid in Chinese Classic’, Madam Miaow Says, 17 October 2012, <http://madammiaow.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/the-orphan-of-zhao-rsc-casts-asians-as.html> [accessed 26 June 2014]; Madam Miaow, ‘American Actors Call for Action Over RSC in New York’, Madam Miaow Says, 23 October 2012 <http://madammiaow.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/american-actors-call-for-action-over.html> [accessed 16 July 2014].
13. The King’s Speech, dir. by Tom Hooper (Momentum Pictures, 2010).
14. The episode referred to here involved Sherlock Holmes and Watson tracing a series of ‘mysterious’ Chinese symbols. As they find individuals linked to these messages, they discover them dead at every turn. Eventually, Sherlock decodes the symbols and uncovers a Chinese smuggling ring. This gang is looking for a piece of missing treasure and is taking revenge on the people they believe stole from them. After antics involving tea ceremonies, a Chinese circus, and a kidnapping, Sherlock finds the treasure and the gang’s leader is killed. However, the episode is notable for its complete lack of irony (in contrast to all other episodes) and simply reproduces stereotypes of Chinese exoticism and otherness, including beautiful women who must die, gangsters, opium dens, torture, circus acrobatics, and the use of cod accents. ‘The Blind Banker’, Sherlock, BBC, Series 1, Episode 2, (2010).
15. The Wrong Mans, series dir. Jim Field Smith (BBC, 2013).
16. Anna Chen, ‘Now is the Winter of our Discontent’, South China Morning Post Magazine, 7 January 2013 <http://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/article/1104357/city-scope-now-winter-our-discontent> [accessed 26 June 2014].