Shakespeare, Race and Performance: The Diverse Bard ed. by Delia Jarrett-Macauley (review)

This collection of essays is a timely contribution to wider theatre research across culture and performance. Indeed, as one of the contributors, the late Naseem Khan, asserts, the book is “not bound in by ethnicity” (44) but links to common themes across contemporary theatre, highlighting the intersectionality of performing Shakespeare through historical, political and colonial contexts.

Through the experience of performing and producing Shakespeare within a multicultural society, the processes of cultural production, creative performance and audience perception and reception are explored. This structure provides an accessible overview of how the performance and dissemination of Shakespeare remain connected to contemporary identity politics and continue to reflect wider equality debates around gender, class and sexualities.

Throughout the themes of power, hierarchy, casting, representation and accessibility intersect to provide a good balance of new insights as well as revisiting the historical and colonial legacy of performing Shakespeare. “Imperial Britain universalised Shakespeare” as a tool of Empire (32) as Jatinder Verma reminds us here. Shakespeare’s plays were transported to foreign lands to support a doctrine of European superiority and therefore today the plays maintain a highly charged relationship within the diaspora. As Ayanna Thompson contends in her interview with Dawn Monique Williams, Shakespeare is still used to mark, classify and exclude. These points and more are intelligently and honestly discussed drawing on a mix of classic texts, new scholarship and interviews.

Questions for audiences, performers and scholars are raised in connection with creative practice and inclusion. Interrogating who gets to perform Shakespeare and when recalls a time of Empire, and encourages us to reflect on a history of colonial power over access and cultural control, as Pat Cumper’s chapter “Tropical Shakespeare” highlights. Yet the issue of sustainability and progression for British Asian and Black British actors marks a contemporary history of access and control, as Jami Rogers and Michael McMillan argue. Shakespeare accounts for a huge percentage of theatrical work available. The number of careers that have been thwarted by being denied opportunity, “considered” (111) but not seen as Rogers puts it, has yet to be written about. Thompson and Williams call for “colour conscious casting” (51) instead of colour blind casting, since “amnesia is allowed to occur” (54) if we don’t actively apply this to all productions. Yet as Williams points out “tensions are high because people feel like making room for other people at the table is the same as asking them to give up their seat” (53).

Structural racism is a recurring theme, yet these disparities, as highlighted in Eldred Durosimi’s chapter “The Bard Abroad in Africa”, inspire responses of active resistance through the action of reinterpretation and translation at the heart of intercultural Shakespearean performances. Durosimi Jones highlights how Shakespeare speaks “relevantly in Africa, and often communicates ideas in the prevailing political climate about which local writers dare not speak”(28). Michael Pearce marks this quality of the Bard as he argues that it is the multi-locationality that shapes Shakespeare in performance through cross-cultural encounters on the global stage. Naseem Khan, author in 1976 of the ground-breaking report The Arts Britain Ignores, provides a set of provocative guiding principles for intercultural performance seeking to challenge the inequality of exchange, through diverse understandings of our shared commonalities. The production of Shakespeare’s work is thus resituated as an intercultural, transnational space for creative opportunities of exchange and dialogue. As Iqbal Khan highlights, these are “unstable texts” (140) and it is that quality which makes Shakespeare still contemporary, where “the unremarked are given voice”(144) capturing the plurality of our identities and allowing different voices.