Of course Black Lives Matter and so does saving our theatres: Nick Ahad

Were there any further convincing needed, two already iconic photos from last weekend’s London demonstrations provide it. One a photo of a man who travelled to London to ‘protect memorials’ urinating in the street next to one, and a picture of a black man carrying an injured white man to safety amid violent clashes between protesters.

I’m not sure how there can be a choosing of ‘sides’ when those are the options: in this discussion there are absolute rights and wrongs. It’s when we look below the surface of the discussion that things become, for some, a little less clear. In a world where lies run amok and truth doesn’t know which falsehood to chase down first, clarity is vital.

The necessity of arguing that black people’s lives matter is the thick end of a wedge and there was a perfect example from the arts world, I’m sad to say, of the thin end of that wedge, last weekend in The Sunday Times. Previewing Macbeth on BBC Four, John Dugdale recommended it partly because it was ‘less garishly diverse in casting than (a previous screening) Romeo and Juliet’.

The ‘garish’ diversity in the RSC production included an Asian actor as Romeo and a woman as Mercutio. That’s what drove Dugdale to decry the production: a brown man as Romeo and a woman in a role normally played by a man. The RSC, to its enormous credit, was unequivocal. It said in a statement: “Such a deliberate and offensive use of language demonstrates clear prejudice and devalues people, in this case specifically devaluing the work of RSC artists.” That is how it’s done. The RSC knew the right side and with that statement firmly placed itself on it.

There is another obvious right and wrong in the world of theatre this week. In an open letter to Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Culture minister Oliver Dowden, 98 theatre creatives from Phoebe Waller-Bridge to Tom Stoppard have called for drastic and immediate assistance to our theatre industry which we now face the very real danger of losing.

There ought to be as little there to add as there is to the Black Lives Matter argument. For the Government to allow our theatres to simply wither and die is a moral dereliction of duty. Some things simply are. It’s time we started saying so.

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