Trailblazers of Black British Theatre

INTRODUCTION

'THE WOMEN ON WHOSE SHOULDERS WE NOW STAND'

On 2 December 2017 I had the pleasure of taking part in Palimpsest Symposium: A Celebration of Black Women in Theatre at the National Theatre. It was the actress Martina Laird who invited me to take part and celebrate the work of those she described as 'the women on whose shoulders we now stand'. I said I would be happy to start the event (which included two panel discussions) with an illustrated talk about early appearances of Black actresses in British theatre. I gave it the title 'Black Women in British Theatre: The Beginnings 1750s to 1950s' and I began by acknowledging the actress who had played Shakespeare's Juliet in Lancashire in the late 1700s. The attendees included many Black women who were drama students, actresses, playwrights and directors. I wasn't sure how many of them would have heard about the actresses I discussed. There is very little accessible information about the early years of Black British theatre and so the lives and achievements of many of these women have been lost to time.

The actress who played Juliet in the 1790s remains unidentified, but the reference to her ethnicity is clear. When John Jackson published The History of the Scottish Stage in 1793, he noted the following:

I had accidently seen the lady, as I was passing through Lancashire, in the part of Polly [in John Gay's The Beggar's Opera]. I could not help observing to my friend in the pit, when Macheath addressed her with 'Pretty Polly', that it would have been more germain to the matter, had he changed the phrase to 'SOOTY Polly.' I was informed, that a few nights before, she had enacted Juliet.1

Having begun my talk with this unidentified actress, I closed with Cleo Laine's dramatic debut in Flesh to a Tiger at the Royal Court in 1958. I also spoke about Emma Williams, the West African who acted in George Bernard Shaw's Back to Methuselah in the 1920s, sharing the stage of the Royal Court Theatre with Edith Evans and a young Laurence Olivier. After 1931, Emma vanishes, but other Black British actresses surface in the 1940s, including Ida Shepley and Pauline Henriques. I hoped that the talk would draw attention to the lives of these extraordinary women.

Emma Williams as Doll in And So to Bed at the Queen's Theatre, 1926. (Author's collection)

Afterwards, I took part in a panel discussion hosted by Martina Laird and Natasha Bonnelame, Archive Associate at the National Theatre. The panellists also included Yvonne Brewster and Angela Wynter. It was an enjoyable and inspiring morning session. In the afternoon, Martina and Natasha hosted another panel discussion, this time bringing Yvonne and Angela back together alongside the actresses Anni Domingo, Noma Dumezweni and Suzette Llewellyn.

In the 1980s and 1990s I had the pleasure of befriending some of the women who are featured in this book. They include Elisabeth Welch, Pauline Henriques, Carmen Munroe, Cleo Sylvestre, Pearl Connor-Mogotsi, Nadia Cattouse, Isabelle Lucas, Joan Hooley, Corinne Skinner-Carter and Anni Domingo. Over a long period of time, these personal friendships have given me insights into the work of Black women whose lives intertwined with many aspects of Black British theatre. They have trusted me with their stories and, in some cases, shared their memorabilia. It has been a wonderful experience.

Sadly, I have never met the brilliant Mona Hammond. Somehow, I missed her. However, in 1989, I did see her wonderful performance as Lady Bracknell, directed by Yvonne Brewster, in the Black-cast version of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. Shortly afterwards, when I was interviewed on BBC Radio, I met the actor Paul Barber at BBC Broadcasting House and we talked about Hammond. He told me that she is 'our Judi Dench'. Hammond had come to Britain from Jamaica in 1959 with a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. It was her dream to play Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth, but such a plum role was unavailable to Hammond at the start of her career. However, in 1972, when she played her first leading role in the theatre at the Roundhouse Theatre, she was cast as the Wife of Mbeth (Lady Macbeth) in Peter Coe's innovative version of the Shakespeare tragedy. Set in Africa, it was called The Black Macbeth and co-starred Oscar James as Mbeth. On 24 February 1972, Irving Wardle of The Times noted Hammond's 'reading of true passion and originality whose stone-faced exhaustion after the banquet and sleep-walk scene are as good as any I have seen'. In her biography for the programme, Hammond called the role 'a dream come true'. In the early 1970s, she followed her appearance in The Black Macbeth with parts in Mustapha Matura's As Time Goes By, Michael Abbensetts's Sweet Talk and Alfred Fagon's 11 Josephine House and The Death of a Black Man. In 2005, Hammond received an OBE for her services to drama.

Programme cover for The Black Macbeth at the Wyvern Theatre in Swindon, 1972. (Author's collection)

In 1987 I met Carmen Munroe for the first time when I interviewed her for the magazine Plays and Players in her dressing room at the Lyric Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue. Munroe was taking it easy between the matinee and evening performances of James Baldwin's The Amen Corner, in which she played - brilliantly - the leading role of Sister Margaret. Carmen told me that her first professional appearance had been as a maid in Tennessee Williams's Period of Adjustment at the Royal Court in 1962, 'but I never played a maid again. I figured once you have played a maid, there didn't seem much point in playing another.'

Eventually some good theatre work came her way, including Alun Owen's There'll Be Some Changes Made (1969): 'I thought "Gosh, this is the opening that I've been dying for." We had wonderful reviews and I thought, "I hope this continues."' And it did, with a revival of Jean Genet's The Blacks (1970) at the Roundhouse: 'This gave Black actors and actresses a great opportunity to get together and really put on what turned out to be a wonderful production.' Then came George Bernard Shaw's The Apple Cart (1970) at the Mermaid. 'Following in Dame Edith Evans's footsteps,' wrote one reviewer. 'Why doesn't someone write something for this girl?' wrote B.A. Young in the Financial Times.

For Carmen, these years were particularly rewarding. But, in 1971, the work suddenly stopped: 'I did a lot of work. Mainly because directors wanted to use me. Then it changed. Suddenly Black artists became a "threat" to the establishment.' Carmen believes that Enoch Powell's inflammatory 'Rivers of Blood' speech in 1968 was partly responsible for this. In 1973, she seriously considered giving up her acting career: 'For almost a year I spent a depressing time believing that I was not going to realise my potential. This is a hard thing to take. But I hung on.'

In 1985, she played Lena Younger in Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, directed by Yvonne Brewster, at the Tricycle Theatre. And when The Amen Corner came along, she told me she found it:

Amazing to be in a cast where people are doing something wonderful. It is fulfilling to be part of this. To experience this. I've been in the business a quarter of a century and I'm aiming to partake in the next quarter of a century too, and hope there will be more work like The Amen Corner.

There was, and Carmen continued to win critical acclaim for her leading roles in such plays as Alice Childress's Trouble in Mind at the Tricycle in 1992.

I met Isabelle Lucas in 1989 at her beautiful home in Kingston upon Thames. Isabelle had arrived here from Canada in 1954 with dreams of a career as an opera singer, but Covent Garden and Sadler's Wells turned her away. Penniless and desperate for work, Isabelle answered an advert in The Stage newspaper and successfully auditioned for The Jazz Train (1955), a Black-cast revue at the Piccadilly Theatre: 'I sang "Dat's Love" from Carmen Jones so my ambition to sing opera on the London stage was fulfilled, but not at Covent Garden!'

Isabelle then alternated between musicals and drama. Her stage work in the 1960s included Ex-Africa at the 1963 Edinburgh Festival, described as 'a Black odyssey in jazz, rhyme and calypso'; Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1964), a Glasgow Citizens' production in which she was the first woman to play the Storyteller; the Negro Theatre Workshop's Bethlehem Blues (1964); and as Barbra Streisand's maid in the 1966 London production of the Broadway hit Funny Girl.

In 1968, two years after the release of the Oscar-winning film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Isabelle and Thomas Baptiste were cast as the first Black Martha and George in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Connaught Theatre in Worthing. This was inspired casting, and it took a British production to make this breakthrough with a recent American stage classic. Isabelle proudly showed me photographs from this innovative...