Sarah Grochala

Colourblind/Colourseen: Performing a British multicultural public in the National Theatre’s England People Very Nice

Richard Bean’s England People Very Nice, which premiered at London’s National Theatre in February 2009, purported to celebrate British multicultural society through its depiction of four waves of immigration into London’s east end. While some, like the critic Charles Spencer, praised Bean’s comedy as ‘wise, brave and true’, others followed the playwright Hussain Ismail in branding the production as ‘racist’ and ‘offensive’. The play reinvigorated theatrical debates about racism in Britain, which culminated in a storming of the National’s stage by protestors.

This paper will consider the role played in this controversy by the use of both colourblind and racially specific casting in the production’s representation of a British public. It will argue that Joseph Papp’s utopian vision of a theatre where race would have no signification is unachievable, as it assumes that an audience can be trained not to see race and to ignore the historical and personal signification of racial differences onstage. Drawing on Dwight Conquergood’s application of Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogical imagination to performance, this paper will instead consider colourblind casting as opening up a debate between the actor and the character’s racial identity. It will examine the ways in which colourblind casting interacted with Bean’s text to ameliorate moments of potential racial tension, while racially specific casting exacerbated them. From this examination, it will attempt to show how the play revealed an unresolved conflict in the British conceptio n of multiculturalism between integration on the one hand and respect for cultural diversity on the other.