Farrukh Dhondy | Multi-ethnic casting rows nothing new, just look back
Deccan ChronicleA question -- if it is acceptable for a black actor to play Julius Caesar, is it just as acceptable for a white actor to pay Othello? Before Olivier’s principled disregard for blacking up, presumably on the grounds that actors are sui generis being somebody else, there was a public outcry against The Black and White Minstrel Show, in which white singers and musicians blacked up in costumes and caricatured African Americans, singing in peculiar accents and playing banjos. It doesn’t matter whether Julius Caesar is black or white -- as long as he doesn’t speak in a Gujarati accent. At the time I was employed as a commissioning editor at Channel Four TV and one of my colleagues, Michael Kustow, proposed transforming Brook’s stage play into a nine-hour TV serial. They did and I said: “He was saying he welcomes the venture but won’t commit the government to endorse or get close to a play which has different ethnicities playing Hindu gods and demi-gods.
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