Red Velvet

Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage to April 21, 2024
Tickets from $29 at www.artsclub.com or 604-687-1644

Posted March 28, 2024

It could hardly be more fitting that the Arts Club opened Red Velvet, a 2012 play by Lolita Chakrabarti, on March 27, 2024, International Theatre Day because the main issue raised in the play – set in 1833 and 1867 – persists to this day. Is there ever an argument for casting white actors in non-white roles? Or vice versa? Even using terms like ‘white’ and ‘non-white’ seems irrelevant now.

In this play-within-a-rehearsal-for-a-play, Chakrabarti looks at the career of Ira Aldridge, the first black actor to tread the London theatre boards as Othello. The year was 1833; renowned Shakespearean actor Edmund Kean had collapsed on the Covent Garden stage during the previous evening’s performance of Othello.

Pierre Laporte (John Emmet Tracy), the theatre company manager, has quickly engaged Aldridge (Quincy Armorer), a well-known African-American actor to fill in for Kean. The company is aghast: a black actor to play opposite Ellen Tree’s white Desdemona? Shocking. Especially out of sorts is Edmund Kean’s petulant son Charles (Sebastien Archibald) who feels that the role should be his. And besides, Ellen Tree (Lindsey Angell) is Charles’ fiancée and the thought of Aldridge laying a black hand on Tree renders Charles apoplectic.

As well as breaking down racial barriers, Aldridge brought new stagecraft to the British stage. He attempted, with some success, to banish the prevailing highly stylized and exaggerated gestures and to introduce some realism in performance to the stage. In the acting style of the period, Angell as Tree/ Desdemona speaks not to Othello but to the audience; and her Desdemona shows absolutely no physical attraction to Othello. Tree is shocked – as is the entire company – when Aldridge/Othello actually places his hands on her throat while fiancée Charles Kean looks on, aghast. This kind of physicality was new and unacceptable. At the time, British parliament was hotly debating abolishing slavery in its colonies so race issues were very much in the news.

Everything in Red Velvet leads up to the 1833 London performance of Othello, which we see from behind a curtain looking out at the imagined audience, and later to the reviews the following morning. The critics are vicious, including this one from The Times: “Owing to the shape of his lips it is utterly impossible for him [Aldridge] to pronounce English in a manner to satisfy even the unfastidious ears of the gallery.”

Following the media uproar, the show temporarily closed, reopening only when Edmund Kean was sufficiently well enough to continue the run.

Once again, the playwright takes us to 1867 and Aldridge’s Lodz theatre dressing room;  now a huge success across Europe, he prepares to play King Lear.

Quincy Armorer as Aldridge is the fire that ignites this production of Red Velvet, directed by Omari Newton. Just as Aldridge did, Armorer brings passion and excitement to this otherwise sedate production. His interactions with Angell are dynamic and show the undercurrents of sexuality that we have come to expect in Shakespeare’s Othello. Angell’s elegant, almost ephemeral Desdemona begins to melt under this Othello’s fervour and their scenes together breathe life into this Arts Club production.

Sebastien Archibald is appropriately priggish and nasty as Charles Kean; and Anthony F. Ingram waffles nicely  back and forth as Bernard Warde. Degenstein triples as the Polish journalist, company member Betty Lovell and Aldridge’s wife Margaret. Completing the cast is Nathan Kay as a somewhat younger, more liberal-minded member of the company, and Kyla Ward as black servant Connie.

Amir Ofek’s set design,  evocatively lit by Jonathan Kim, is minimal and gorgeous with a handsome proscenium stage, fabulous period settees and faux gas lanterns placed across the apron. Beautiful period costumes – rivalling anything at the Oscar’s – are by CS Fergusson-Vaux.

In a program note for a 2014 production, Chakrabarti admits: “After years of intent study, I realised his [Aldridge’s] life was too sprawling for me to narrow it down into a single, engaging, dramatic tale” and, indeed, Red Velvet is intermittently engaging. It’s slow to get going but the final image is sharply ironic: Armorer, as Aldridge, applies white face, white beard and white bushy brows and places the crown of King Lear on his head. It’s a strange kind of full circle.