We can’t let bullies stop artists doing what they want
The rage to censor art is as old as art itself. Since the time of Plato, moralisers have tried to ban certain sorts of music or painting or opera, because they corrupted the moral fibre of the people, encouraged seditious thoughts, or disrespected a monarch.
However, the urge to ban has recently taken a new turn. Increasingly works of art are shouted down by protesters because they tread on the sensitivities of a particular community or race. Take last week’s storm over the forthcoming YA (Young Adult) novel American Heart. It centres on a white teenager coming to terms with racist attitudes in a dystopian version of America, where Muslims are rounded up in detention camps. Although yet to be published, it has already been much praised and received a top “starred review” from the influential book trade magazine Kirkus Reviews.
Unfortunately, though, its author Laura Moriarty is white, and that has been enough to draw the fury of some. “A white writer should not have tackled this story, and neither should a white character be the center of it,” was the view of one protester. Kirkus Reviews has now acknowledged the error of its ways, and subjected the book to an emergency “re-evaluation” – despite the fact the original favourable review was written by a Muslim woman.
It’s becoming a familiar pattern: a white artist tries, often with the best intentions, to represent nonwhite subjects. The artist is then told he or she has no right to engage with this subject, and that the work
‘One wonders if the protesters have really thought this through’
must be irrevocably tainted with “white supremacism”. Some might say this attitude is itself an example of flagrant racism, which should be stoutly resisted. Instead we get craven apologies and retractions.
Opera is particularly vulnerable to this sort of critique. It swarms with stereotypes, which might fairly be described as racist and sexist, or both; think of the submissive oriental maiden of Mascagni’s Iris and Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, the lustful Turkish slave Monostatos in Mozart’s Magic Flute, or the comic stereotypes of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado. No one has yet called for The Magic Flute to be censored, but the Mikado has certainly has been. Last year, San Francisco theatre company Lamplighters relocated the opera to Renaissance Italy and renamed all the characters, after protests from local community groups, while earlier this year Houston Grand Opera’s production of John Adams’s Nixon in China was attacked for casting white singers in the roles of Chairman and Madame Mao.
The latest opera to suffer this “death by grievance” is The Golden Dragon, which was premiered by Music Theatre Wales in July 2016. It’s a newly written parable about the fate of immigrants working in a Chinese restaurant, which was much praised in this newspaper and elsewhere. The production went on tour last month and was due to open at the Hackney Empire on Oct 31. But that performance will not now take place, owing to a storm of protest over the fact that all the singers were white.
From that point the story unfolded in the usual grim pattern. The directors of the company tried to defend themselves, by saying the show is not meant to be realistic, and that consideration of the race of the singers was beside the point. This only made the howls of protest grow louder. The dreaded words ‘“white supremacist” were uttered. So they did what had to be done. “We acknowledge that we have made mistakes,” they wrote. “These errors of judgment were ours alone… This is a transformative experience for the company and one from which we are determined to learn.”
The directors were accused of two crimes. One was that their failure to cast non-white performers revealed the paucity of those performers in the classical music and opera worlds. That is indeed a problem, though hardly one of Music Theatre Wales’s making. The way to tackle it is by levelling the playing field, making sure BAME singers and musicians and actors are entering the profession and can be auditioned alongside the white ones for the role of the Don in Don Giovanni and the like. What the protesters did, perhaps deliberately, was to mix this very laudable aim up with a completely different and not at all laudable aim, ie banning opera and theatre productions that aren’t made by performers who come from the same communities as those displayed in the drama.
One wonders whether the protesters have really thought this through. Imagine the dreariness of a world where representations of a certain race or group are only permitted by members of that group. Society would become atomised into myriad self-regarding communities, speaking only about themselves, none with the largeness of heart or vision to imagine other worlds and other ways of being. It is precisely to encourage that largeness of heart that art exists; which is why we must find the courage to resist the bullies of the grievance industry, and protect the freedom of artists to roam where they please.