The Blacks

Synopsis

The Queen comes to a Command Performance at Theatre Royal Stratford East. But DJ Excalibah and his company of rappers, poets and comedians serve up an entertainment that is nothing like any Royal Variety Show ever seen before! 200 years after the abolition of the slave trade in the UK and 50 since Ghana gained independence from imperial rule, we proudly present one of the most controversial plays ever to hit the stage. Anarchic, provocative, outrageous - The Blacks is as exciting and entertaining as it is damning and challenging.

Our Review:

22 October 2007

With Ionesco and Max Frisch at the Royal Court, Fernando Arrabal any day now at the Gate, Notting Hill, and Jean Genet revived out at Stratford East, we are in the middle of a fascinating period of re-visiting the European avant-garde of half a century ago, when Beckett had re-defined modern drama in a post-war vision of apocalypse.

Genet’s The Blacks, first seen here at the Royal Court in 1961, is a play-within-a-play: a tribunal of white authority figures (black actors in masks) witnesses a company of black actors performing a ceremonial ritual designed to embarrass a white audience. A white woman has been killed. But something “real” is happening off-stage: a black traitor has been executed by his own people.

At Stratford, the “remix” by the single-named duo of director/designer Ultz and composer Excalibah adds another layer by attacking the minority whites in a majority audience of local blacks and Asians. It adds a fascinating frisson, but ...

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