Diversity in the West End

I do appreciate this, xanderl. But come on, the people in Pressure were white men and the people in Lehman were Jewish white men. You are suggesting we do a Hamilton for every show, every play?

Theatre is THE most non-naturalistic "sit down and watch as we tell you a story" art form there is, there is absolutely no reason to cling slavishly to "the real historical people were definitely all white in this particular incident so the cast will be all white too" when you've already made up the dialogue, created a set with an open space for the audience to sit, and rejigged the story so there's a hook just before the interval and some sort of narrative conclusion by the end. Embrace the non-naturalism and just go wild. Make them sing. Have them directly address the audience. Cast Beverley Knight as Emmeline Pankhurst.

It depends on the size of the cast, surely? If you're casting, say, fifty people it would be distinctly improbable to end up with all of them white, but with a cast of five it's perfectly reasonable. (In fact, in the UK population as a whole if you select five people at random there's an even chance they'll all be white.) To be fair you'd have to accept "It just turned out that way" as a justification, because anything else is a quota system being dishonest about what it is.

You seem to be implying that if a cast is entirely white it must be because someone is discriminating against non-whites. While that certainly does happen I really don't think that a guilty-by-default approach is helpful.

General question: Does anyone have an ethnic breakdown of actors currently working or looking for work in the UK? It would be interesting to work out the probability of an all-white cast happening just by chance. I can find figures for the ethnic breakdown of actors actually employed, but that's obviously no use for this purpose because it's the difference between the two that matters.

Nice thought, but reality is way too layered to give any meaningful results. How many non-white actors are in work? How many non-white actors are out of work? How many non-white actors graduated drama school? How many non-white actors auditioned for drama school, successfully or otherwise? How many non-white actors got lead roles in school plays or am dram, or received encouragement from drama teachers? And taking race out of it entirely, how on earth do you even quantify out-of-work actors? How do you know who's given up, who's between agents, who's genuinely resting?

Certainly what I hear from one of the leading non-London drama schools very much backs up kathryn's last point.

All of the BAME actors got agents very, very quickly. Not one of the white actors on the course did - at least not in the period immediately following their final showcase. This included those of the cohort who had won numerous awards and prizes during their course.

Some of the non-BAME students have finally secured representation - but far from all.

Clearly agents will only take on clients they believe for whom they can find work. But there is something wrong when the top male and female of the year didn't rapidly secure an agent.

Talent should be what matters.

Disability a similar thing. Despite not liking the play enough to see it out I did enjoy seeing actors on the stage who would not have made it back in the day. One of them is particularly talented.

As for colour diversity for want of a better expression, Emilia the character made the point in the play that she didn’t see people on the stage ( we're talking the original Globe) with whom she could identify. I find this very puzzling. There is no one in Hamlet with whom I can identify. But it is a play I am always moved by and always informed by. Plays about me would never get past first post. So how does that work then? I find it hard to understand this desire to see oneself on the stage or a representation of oneself. Thinking of the past, something like a Taste of Honey is so far from my experience I think I watched it with open mouth the first time and how powerful it was. ( I saw the movie version ) and its power was one of drama and taking me into feelings and ideas I hadn’t encountered. I wasn’t in it. I wasn’t even remotely in the same universe.

When I saw the wonderful Chinese drama at the RSC I was so moved and its emotions were universal. Again, the quality of the drama is what gave it power. Again a million miles from me.
I don’t care who does the acting and I don’t care if I’m not represented on the stage. Just let it be good.

It might be highly, highly unusual - but it is what has happened this year with this particular cohort.  I made no claim about anti-white racism.  I simply reported what has happened with this particular group.  

The tutors found it hard to explain the pattern of agent recruitment for this year - so it clearly was an unusual outcome.

Are there too many actors leaving drama school?  Yes.  Will all new graduates secure an agent?  No.  Is what happened with this group a one-off or part of a trend?  Who knows at this stage.

The demographics of BAME actors in the pool are almost certainly going to be lumpy across age ranges.

Everyone is super-keen to cast BAME actors now, but we know that hasn’t been the case in the last 10 years - which have also seen economic changes that made surviving as an aspiring actor more difficult, and meant that those from middle-class backgrounds with financial help were more likely to succeed than those from working class backgrounds. That is almost certainly going to mean that there are age-brackets with fewer BAME actors who have managed to keep working - and accrue experience and profile - than their white peers.

There’s going to be a pipeline issue.

I wasn't as furious about Pressure being all-white compared to Knights of the Rose. On one hand; it is all make-believe and acting. There could be and were people of colour in Britain at that time. Would I, as a BME, found it believable that they would have been working in High Command. Probably not but I was furious about Knights of the Rose, unlike Lehman and Pressure these were not true stories based on real people, there could have been BAME cast members (especially as it tried and failed to give off Game of Thrones vibes).

However, Queen Anne had a multiracial cast, which I loved. John Churchill was black, Sarah Churchill was white so their son was cast as mixed race. Maybe it was contrived but I thought it was really refreshing to do a period drama that didn't make people feel excluded (even if some ladies joked that Orange is the New Black as William IV was played by a black actor!)

Actually a lot of the characters in the Lehman Trilogy were women. Being played by men. Or children. Being played by adult men. And had a non-white actor been cast, the issue of whether the Lehman fortune was based on slavery might have been addressed. 

Really? You think that audiences aren't sophisticated enough to understand that  a black actor is playing a slave in this scene and a Jewish cotton merchant in the next scene? How would that have confused the issue?  Hopefully few of us want to go back to the days when black actors could only be cast as characters who the writer envisaged as non-white. But I really don't think that featuring the people who created the source of the Brothers' fortune would necessitate clumsy political preaching