An Octoroon revisited
I saw An Octoroon for the second time last night. I had loved it bigtime a month ago. That night I had been in a really vocal audience; we shrieked with laughter at pretty much everything. It had all felt so incredibly new and surprising. My experience of melodrama has been so limited; it’s basically died out as a form in actual real London theatres now. Seeing those tropes and techniques brought to life, even as they were subverted and exposed, felt like theatreMAX.
On a second viewing they had been normalised a little by my memory, and the fact I have talked about it a lot in the intervening period, but while it didn’t feel quite so heightened, I was able to follow the thread of its narrative more closely, and find its politics spoken more plainly.
A few conversations from the previous weeks have stuck with me, primarily those had with a couple of different artists of colour. These were enormously helpful. I am increasingly aware of my own whiteness, both as the shade of my skin and something I had grown up to feel was normal/neutral, but also as the political and social lens through which I look at the world. Only through moving around the country over the last decade, and facing up to the inequalities of the industry in which I work, have I been invited to interrogate my own white lens. (I am aware, of course, that I shouldn’t have needed an invitation.) It’s taken me a long time to start thinking in this way, thinking about my identity in terms of its privilege, but on seeing An Octoroon for the first time at the end of May, I was aware that my love for it should not be taken as the final word, nor as objective or distanced or any of those bollocks concepts. Indeed, on the subject of a show about both historic and contemporary racial politics (‘what’s the difference?’ I hear you ask), my opinion was significantly less important than those from people of colour.
The conversations I sought out informed my opinion deeply. I loved it still, but became increasingly aware that I had, in some ways, depoliticised it for myself. For me it had become, in a way, a show which used racial politics to tell a story about theatre, rather than a show which used theatre to tell a story about racial politics. This, perhaps, was because this production had — as well as the obvious melodramatic performance style — made some extreme design choices which seemed to speak to our current love of making a right fucking mess onstage. With my frames of reference, and my lens of whiteness, I saw resonances with contemporary aesthetic trends more clearly than the continuous, systematic oppression of black people. But I think it’s perfectly possible — likely even — that this switch of A-plot and B-plot had happened because I wanted to subconsciously protect myself from the difficult soul-searching that has to be done, urgently, by white people. That soul-searching, and the serious and practical adjustments we all need to make in order to address society’s vast inequalities, makes us vulnerable. My first reading of An Octoroon was an example of a deep unwillingness to make myself vulnerable. Let me see the invention here, and smile at the subversion of theatrical forms, and grow accustomed to hearing the n-word as if it doesn’t slice open a new wound every time, but please god let me go back to my white person life and my white person friends and my white person job at the end of the 2+ hours.
Take that central projected image of the lynchings in the Deep South. The first time around it had felt like the anchor of the whole show — the sudden snap back to reality, a recent reality, that seemed to give the whole story its weight. I had felt it was crucial to everything as without it our white person laughter would not necessarily have been quietened. “Act IV of a melodrama,” we are told, “is the heart of the play”, the moment where, historically, theatremakers would try to shock and astound their public with magic tricks and feats of daring. In 2017 though, when we’re jaded by technical achievements and every Hollywood blockbuster is built on CGI, Branden Jacob-Jenkins explains that the way to do this is by making us face the sheer brutality of lynchings. Last night, however, this followed a moment of genuine threat, of real, live tension, just as the detail on melodramatic structure was given: the projector screen fell to bits. The cast made a brave attempt to fix the problem, but then a couple of crew members joined them onstage. It was all skilfully handled and entirely in character and in keeping with the style and tone of the show, and we gave an appreciative whoop and cheer of thanks once it all got sorted out, but the result was that the projected image did not then penetrate in the same way. Of course this could have been for a number of reasons, including the fact that I knew what was coming this time, but maybe it was also because the show doesn’t really need that image after all. Whereas the first time round its shock-value had punctured my bubble of whiteness for a moment, it had also allowed me to retreat, allowed me a sense of relief when it was quickly removed and we got back to the jokes. If I’m really to face my privilege, and to counter my lens of whiteness, I cannot work at it intermittently, and I must not require art — or the world — to slap me in the face with extreme imagery before I get fucking cracking.
