Learning on ScreenBritish Black and Asian Shakespeare: Untold Stories
A Warwick University team has been awarded an AHRC grant for a project to put together the story of the contribution made to British Shakespeare by black and Asian theatre artists since 1930. Tony Howard is the project’s principal investigator and provides an introduction.
About the author: Tony Howard, the project’s principal investigator, is Professor of English at Warwick University and specialises in the relationship between performance and politics. He is the author of Women as Hamlet: Performance as Interpretation in Theatre, Film and Fiction (2007). With Barbara Bogoczek he translates from Polish, including lyrics for Zbigniew Preisner’s Diaries of Hope, which premiered at the Barbican in October 2013.
A Warwick University team has been awarded an AHRC grant for a project, Multicultural Shakespeare, which sets out to put together the story of the underrated contribution made to British Shakespeare by black and Asian theatre artists since 1930, when Paul Robeson played Othello at the Savoy Theatre.
We aim to produce a monograph, In Robeson’s Footsteps; a volume of essays edited by Delia Jarrett Macauley (biographer of the Jamaican-born radio pioneer Una Marson) involving contemporary BEM practitioners; an oral history website and performance database; and small touring exhibitions supported by young peoples’ workshops. The project sets out to disseminate information about the history of British Black and Asian Shakespeare as widely as possible; and so by the end of 2013 our panel exhibition To Tell My Story will have been seen at theatres in Coventry, Southwark (Shakespeare’s Globe), Barking and Leicester, and in new community libraries in Bristol and Lambeth. It also accompanied the Globe’s King Lear starring Joseph Marcell to his birthplace, St. Lucia. These showings have been accompanied by public events, and there have been requests to take the exhibition into schools in 2014. We seem to be meeting a need for knowledge which is reflected by the generosity with which companies, including Talawa and Tara Arts, and their photographers have shared materials and images.
The project evolved out of very successful collaboration between Warwick and the RSC to mark the 50th anniversary of Paul Robeson’s 1959 Stratford Othello. This fed into the 2011 BBC radio documentary The Robeson Files, and this summer sixty artists and writers came together at Warwick for a symposium on ethnicity in Shakespearean performance past and present. Mel Larson, recalling her work with Talawa in the 1990s said, ‘I feel a sense of pride to be part of this amazing history.’ The AHRC has made a short film raising awareness of the project:
