Why is a West End theatre putting on ‘black only’ performances?

Jawad Iqbal I 29 February 2024 I Spectator World

Why would the producers of a new West End play think it a good idea to put on select performances for all-black audiences, effectively telling white theatregoers they’re not welcome on those nights? The idea of Black Out nights (as they have become known) amounts to segregation by race and skin colour. Yet this is exactly what will take place when Slave Play, written by American playwright Jeremy O Harris, starts its run at the No?l Coward Theatre this summer.

Is he suggesting black people can only feel safe with other black people?

Two nights – 17 July and 17 September – have been allocated to all-black audiences to watch the play ‘free from the white gaze’. What does this phrase even mean??It doesn’t take much to imagine the outrage if someone suggested theatre nights for all-white audiences because theatregoers were at risk from ‘the black gaze’. Other questions loom. Who gets to decide who is black enough to attend, especially when it is suggested that those who ‘identify as black’ qualify for entry? What of married couples, where one partner is white and the other black, what happens then? The play’s co-star,?Kit Harington – who played Jon Snow in Game of Thrones – happens to be white. How will the audience on the black-only nights be spared his white gaze? Perhaps he should be replaced as well? It is both daft and sinister, and doesn’t reflect well on a supine theatre world that appears all too happy to go along with such divisive racial nonsense.

The playwright O Harris appears to have no qualms. Slave Play – a controversial production about race and sexuality – was a huge Broadway hit when it opened in 2019. O Harris introduced the idea of Black Out nights during the?run. When interviewed on the BBC about the West End opening of his play, he declared that he was?‘so excited’ by the prospect of black-only audiences, adding: ‘It is a necessity to radically invite them in with initiatives that say “you’re invited”. Specifically you.’ This is, to put it politely, twaddle. O Harris went on:

‘The idea of a Black Out night is to say that this is a night we are specifically inviting black people to fill up the space, to feel safe with a lot of other black people in a place where they often do not feel safe.’

“People have to be radically invited into a space to know that they belong there.”

Is he suggesting black people can only feel safe with other black people? Indeed, the mere presence of a white person threatens to make the entire theatre?space dangerous for black audience members. Really? It is a mystery how anyone – let alone a playwright – gets away with spouting this drivel.

It is just as troubling that such racially exclusionary theatre performances are becoming more frequent. O Harris’s most recent play, Daddy, also about sexual and racial dynamics,?staged a Black Out night during its run at London’s Almeida theatre in 2022. Last summer,?Theatre Royal Stratford East?was criticised after it said white patrons should not go to a performance of Tambo and Bones on 5 July. It too trotted out the same justification that this would allow black audiences to enjoy the play ‘free from the white gaze’. Matthew Xia, the director, said it was important theatre created a space where black theatregoers could ‘explore complex, nuanced race-related issues’. By this?logic, the mere presence of a white person in the vicinity might reduce every black theatregoer?to a trembling wreck, incapable of even the most basic thought processes. How offensive and patronising. Is it any wonder that theatre is in such trouble when savants like this are running the show?

In any other walk of life, the very idea of segregating people would be considered beyond the pale. Yet in theatre land, it is somehow deemed ‘progressive’ and ‘radical’. No and no. Those who advocate this nonsense claim that it is just for one or two nights in a long run, that it allows black audiences to watch the play together as a community, so what’s the harm? Anyone who dares to disagree is dismissed as a reactionary or worse. This presumably is why people who know better prefer to keep quiet. It won’t do. Putting on a show and telling any one ethnic group not to come is wrong in principle. It is a dangerous and divisive form of prejudice, plain and simple. Please stop.