Love a Good Play: Red Velvet
Jan 23, 2016 Garrick Theatre
Not a play about cupcakes. This is a play about the angry young man of his day Ira Aldridge (the first black actor to play Covent Garden) and his quest to be accepted among the theatrical elite on that stage. In the 1830s.
In an enlightened world of 2016 we have new versions of Cymbeline at the RSC where Cymbeline is a woman and wonderful all female Henry IV at the Donmar. It might have been 1833 but it was truly sickening to hear the critic reviews of the day read out (presumably verbatim).
The Spectator thought it ridiculous for a black man to play Othello “as ridiculous as a fat man playing Falstaff” and The Times took it one step further in its shocking open racism.
The play is wonderfully structured by Lolita Chakrabati starting with an older Ira, through the memory of the fated Covent Garden performances and leading you to a superbly sad last scene of the older Ira getting ready to play Lear in a German theatre.
Her hubby, Adrian Lester’s, performance as Ira is wonderful. And having him seen play Othello in the NT production in 2013, this had me equally transfixed. It also seemed all the more poignant. I tried to imagine a world in which his performance would have caused outrage. Couldn’t.
Othello is a HUGE role. He’s a man enraged by jealousy, who kills his wife, and the “society” of the day was not ready for such a powerful passionate and less “teapot school of acting” performance from a black man. I read somewhere that Ellen Tree (the actress who played Desdemona) was supposed to have been in quite a state after the first performance as she actually thought he had become enraged and wasn’t acting at all. This was done beautifully at the end of the first half. The power of Lester’s voice here was astonishing.
The play brought back all the Descartes and Rousseau nature/nurture stuff I studied at Uni and how ridiculous I remember thinking some of the theories were. How uncomfortable it made me feel to think another human had written that.
How the hell did we treat other human beings like that? How is it we still do?
5/5. Almost too relevant for today. Brilliant first play to open 2016.
