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Raising the Bar: 100 Years of Black British Theatre and Screen

Raising the Bar: 100 Years of Black British Theatre and Screen: Omnibus: Part 1

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Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

13/11/2015

Omnibus: Part 1

BBC Radio 4 Extra - Raising the Bar: 100 Years of Black British Theatre and Screen, Omnibus: Part 1

Lenny Henry on 100 years of black British theatre and screen.

Lenny Henry presents a history of black British theatre and screen, from the first black Othello on the London stage, to the latest talent making theatrical waves.

In April 1833, at the height of the anti-slavery debate, a young African-American named Ira Aldridge took to the stage of the Covent Garden theatre in London as the star of the latest production of Shakespeare's Othello. Two days later, the production closed, ostensibly as the result of illness, but amid howling reviews that decried, in deeply racist language, the elevation of a black actor to the role of Shakespeare's tragic hero. Yet Aldridge was a superstar, feted across Europe who settled in Britain and married a British woman.

In this first of two programmes, Lenny Henry traces the long and painful road that black British performers, playwrights and film-makers have travelled, from the overt racial discrimination of the 19th century, via the thinly veiled slurs that persisted through the first 70 years of the 20th, to today's more equal society. This week, Lenny talks to playwrights Mustapha Matura, Roy Williams, Lolita Chakrabarti and Kwame Kwei-Armah and actors and directors Carmen Munroe, Yvonne Brewster and Paulette Randall. As well as Aldridge's Othello, he hears how racial issues were reflected on TV from the Black and White Minstrel Show to Love Thy Neighbour and Desmond's, and in films like Horace Ové's Pressure.

Consultant: Dr Michael Pearce
Producer: Simon Elmes.

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Lenny Henry presents a series tracing a century of black British theatre and screen

Lenny Henry presents a series of programmes tracing a century of black British theatre and screen

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