All the world’s a stage: the struggle to bring ethnic and gender diversity to British theatre

British theatre appears to be experiencing a golden age of diversity, but behind the scenes minority and female artists are still facing limits on what they can and can’t achieve. Louis Cheslaw talks to leading theatre figures about efforts to make the stage a more representative place

Paapa Essiedu (left) takes the role of Hamlet in this year’s Royal Shakespeare Company production of the play (RSC)

In March, for the first time in its 50-year history, the Royal Shakespeare Company in London gave the role of Hamlet to a black actor, Paapa Essiedu. The month before, the artistic director of the capital’s National Theatre, Rufus Norris, made a commitment to gender equality amongst the venue’s writers and directors by 2021. Long overdue developments, certainly, but surely positive ones nonetheless?

According to some leading figures in new British theatre, however, it’s not as simple as the number of names on paper. A wider range of voices are being invited to participate, but there are often a number of unseen limits being placed upon those voices, both in the conception and reception of the plays in which they’re involved.

Paulette Randall: ‘My experience and understanding of what is black is unique to me’ (Getty) (Getty Images)

One such restriction is the implicit expectation often placed upon directors from ethnic minorities to focus on work that comes from, or draws upon, their cultural communities. Paulette Randall has an MBE for her services to drama and, among other achievements over a 30-year career, was the associate director of the lauded 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony. Still it is only now, she says, that she’s “getting work that’s not just black”. In 2013, only three years ago, Randall became the first black woman to direct a drama in the West End.

What strikes Randall in particular about these limitations is the assumption, just because of the colour of her skin, that she is more qualified to direct any black production. “My experience and understanding of what is black is unique to me, so the notion that because you simply have a particular hue means that you have an understanding is nonsense,” she says. “I would still have to do research if it’s an area that’s nothing to do with my experience or my knowledge.”

I first met Paulette at a panel discussion on equality that followed a performance of the new play Fury, during its third week at London’s Soho Theatre. The theatre’s artistic director, Steve Marmion, was also on the panel, and over lunch in the theatre’s bustling bar he outlined his concerns to me about the ease with which some apply broad terms to directors from minority backgrounds, rather than actually making the effort to assess the work of the individual.

Steve Marmion, artistic director of the Soho Theatre (Getty) (Getty Images for The Old Vic)

“There’s a laziness to pigeonholing, and it’s deeply unhelpful,” he says. “I’ve directed more women than men, and yet no one has ever called me a feminist director, even though I am one and my practice has shown it. Yet when Paulette directs a piece that has a 50 per cent black cast, someone will say that’s her doing niche work – whereas when my panto in Oxford had 50 per cent black actors, it got none of those reviews at all.”

Hannah Hauer-King, the director of Fury, echoes the above sentiment. “We’re increasingly allowing diverse and minority voices spacebut only on specific platforms,” she says. Hauer-King is a co-founder of Damsel Productions, a company that seeks to put women’s stories and issues centre stage, with a core creative team made up of women. Fury was one such production, but when its writer, Phoebe Eclair-Powell, set out to tell the story, she didn’t expect the kind of questions that would follow.

Fury is an affecting, relentless piece that follows Sam, a wayward young mother neglected by those around her. Having never set out to write a treatise on the state of single young motherhood in Britain, however, Eclair-Powell was surprised when a number of critics felt that her character should serve as the physical embodiment of single mothers everywhere. “A lot of the reviews seemed very annoyed that I hadn’t managed to boil down the entirety of female existence,” she says. “They were holding me responsible for somehow representing all of womanhood, whereas a white man can tell a story for an hour just about himself, and we don’t question why that man should be up onstage telling that story. He’s not representing all of mankind.”

The Soho Theatre production of ‘Fury’, directed by Hannah Hauer-King

This is indicative of another worrying trend. Frequently, when the lead character in a new production is not a straight, white male, that character is assumed by critics to be a symbol of their entire “group”. When Hauer-King began doing publicity for the same production, she found, like Eclair-Powell, that she was expected to talk about more than the production she had staged. “I went on a radio show, and they asked me to talk to them about single mothers’ experiences, and the truth is I can talk about our character’s experience as a single mother, and if you identify with it, great, but the danger is people saying ‘This is a play about femininity and therefore it has have to represent all women.’”

A further obstacle in the fight for greater diversity in our theatres today is ensuring that the make-up of audiences reflects the progress being made on stage. As the artistic director of a theatre in one of the world’s most diverse cities, Marmion wants to ensure the Soho Theatre audience looks like the city they’re in. Audience numbers might well have tripled during his tenure, but that isn’t the sole aim. “The point of theatre is change, and if audiences aren’t changing, you’re not doing the right thing,” he says. “You’ve just kind of mutually masturbated and it doesn’t make the world better. There is some value in preaching to the choir, in that people leave more enthused, but that’s not a big enough change for me. It’s an energising of what exists.”

One frequently offered solution to the question of audience diversity is reducing ticket prices. It’s a convincing enough proposition but, for Randall, it’s an unnecessary measure that actually gets away from the issue at hand. “It’s not just about money,” she says. “Theatre can be a working-class pursuit as well – it can be for anyone as long as you introduce it to them. It’s nonsense to say audiences are how they are because theatre tickets are expensive – so are tickets to go to a rave. It’s about the choices people make and the options that they’re introduced to. But don’t dismiss a whole bunch of people, be they working-class or black or any kind of ethnic minority, because it’s too expensive.”

Marmion, Hauer-King, Randall and Eclair-Powell are united in their belief that theatres can and must do more to involve young people of all backgrounds, which isn’t to say that there haven’t already been considerable efforts made over the past few years. Marmion cites in particular the work of Madani Younis at the Bush Theatre and Kerry Michael at Stratford East for their efforts to push voices to the forefront that weren’t getting as loud a shout. He and Hauer-King also individually celebrated the recent appointment of Ellen McDougall at the Gate Theatre, while both Hauer-King and Eclair-Powell noted Soho’s outsize influence in their own careers – Eclair-Powell wrote Fury with the support of the Soho Theatre Young Writer’s Lab, and it was Marmion that contacted Hauer-King about directing the production.

Marmion is modest about why the Soho Theatre is further ahead of the West End when it comes to championing new voices and conversations on its main stages. “We’re a speedboat rather than an oil tanker, so we can change direction a bit quicker sometimes,” he says. Hauer-King has slightly less sympathy towards the capital’s larger theatres, however, suggesting that even if West End establishments do have greater financial obligations, they should still all “build one part of their program towards a stated aim to involve people that would otherwise not get in the room. Whether that’s empowering actors who couldn’t afford training, or young lighting directors, for example.”

What the above boils down to, in essence, is a clarion call for greater freedom. Greater freedom for the black director who wishes to take on Shakespeare; greater freedom for the Asian writer who wants to answer questions about her stories and not her upbringing; and greater freedom for the general public to be informed about the many forms of theatre available to them. Much is already being done, not least by the four artists interviewed here, but as is the case with the issue of equality in almost all fields, there is an embarrassing and concerning history to amend, and a world of potential to be tapped into.