Fringe race rules urged after ‘yellowface’ play complaint
THE Edinburgh Fringe is facing calls to introduce guidelines for next year’s festival after a “yellowface” row in which Asian people said they were subjected to “publicly licensed racism on stage”.
The campaign group British East and South East Asians working in the Theatre and Screen industry (Beats) took issue with Tea Ceremony, a play in which a white male actor, Marios Ioannou, appeared as a geisha – a Japanese hostess trained to entertain men.
The group said the show, in which Ioannou wore white face paint, deployed “unashamed yellowface”, which it said was “extremely triggering and traumatic” to those who “bear historical weight” of historical abuses.
Beats said that while “no one wants rules” at the Fringe, “surely there can be guidelines” to prevent what “we can only describe as publicly licensed racism on stage”.
But the show’s producer has rejected any accusations of racism in the show and Ioannou, a Cypriot performer, also said the claims were unfair. He said: “I am in contact with the Japanese people who worked on this performance, because they did work on it and they didn’t believe it was inappropriate.
“We are working on an answer from all of us. It is a very big discussion about cultural appropriation in art, and we are happy to open up a dialogue.
“But I was surprised this was not spoken about while we were there, only after we left, which is not very nice.
“There will be another staging of the Tea Ceremony in London, so it would be good to sort things out before that. We were not racist, so it was a very unnecessary comment.”
This year’s Fringe was hit with another censorship row after the cancellation of a show by comedian Jerry Sadowitz after he used racist language and exposed himself on stage.
Supporters claimed the controversial elements had been an established part of his act for decades and that when on stage Sadowitz is depicting a character.
The Tea Ceremony play sees the geisha begin to question her role as a servant and entertainer and “leads the audience on a journey of modern-day abuse, child labour, human trafficking, torture and slavery, and the high price we pay for our joy and greed”.
The statement from Beats said: “We have no wish to see a sanitised and conservative Fringe. The problem is, though, that with outdated racist performance tropes, a sanitised and conservative Fringe is exactly what we get.”
A play at the Edinburgh Fringe called Tea Ceremony led the audience “on a journey of modern-day abuse, child labour, human trafficking, torture and slavery, and the high price we pay for our joy and greed”. It doesn’t sound much fun. But that is not the reason it has been denounced by a pressure group, but because the actor Marios Ioannou, who dressed in a geisha costume to perform the piece, is Cypriot, not Asian, and was therefore guilty of “yellowface”. This apparently made the drama “extremely triggering and traumatic”. It is not that the actor’s face was literally yellow; playing a geisha, he painted it white. The producers of the play defended their artistic choice of “a cisgender Caucasian male performing the role of geisha”. Caucasian? Oh dear, now the many ethnicities of the Caucasus will be up in arms, too.