Real crime is limiting freedom not stereotypes based on race

Perhaps the most depressing aspect of the withdrawal of Scottish Opera’s production of ‘Nixon in China’ from the list of nominations for the South Bank Sky Arts Awards is the craven attitude of Scottish Opera itself.

It apologises in a frenzy of breastbeating remorse – ironically reminiscent of the ideology of the Cultural Revolution that the opera represents – for “the offence caused”, and promises “to take time to review and learn from this and take on board all the comments made”.

Some might feel that a more appropriate response would have been to tell the complainants to get knotted.

I saw this production last February and reviewed it in these pages. I didn’t greatly like the staging, but the performance as a whole (to which, along with several other critics, I gave four stars) richly merits a place in any list of the year’s best. Removing it from the awards is grossly unfair to the musicians and theatre practitioners involved. The opera explores Richard Nixon’s diplomatic visit to Mao’s China in 1972. Not exactly a satire or a comedy, its tone is complex and subtle, and its idiom poetically stylised. Only a complete idiot would take it literally.

One person’s sensibility seems to have ignited this fracas. Julian-chou Lambert is a young British-chinese musician, formerly a choral scholar at Cambridge. He tweeted to his 341 followers that the production was guilty of dehumanising “yellowface” caricature, and called for the opera industry to “do better”.

His whinge was then taken up by Beats, a pressure group representing Asian people in the entertainment industry, which announced, without justifying their illogical position, that while they “welcome and support the casting of a black singer, Eric Greene, in the American role of Richard Nixon, to cast white singers in such roles as Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai is highly inappropriate”.

Well, why? If only Asian people can play Asian people, doesn’t it follow that only white Europeans should play white Europeans? The real offence here is nothing to do with racial stereotypes: it’s the offence against the artistic freedom to criticise, subvert, imagine and challenge orthodoxy.