Look who's taking the stage
It was an offer she almost refused. But when Josette Bushell-Mingo - actor, director and zealous promoter of black British theatre - finally overcame her reservations about taking on a US production, and brought Langston Hughes's 1950s musical Simply Heavenly to the Young Vic in April, it was a resounding success.
The London Evening Standard declared itself seduced "almost at first sight and sound". "The cast was like a pantheon of black British history," says Bushell-Mingo. "I've never seen such acting or heard such singing."
There are more plays being written, produced or directed by black and Asian women than ever before in the history of British theatre. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that our theatre is in the process of a quiet revolution with black and Asian women at its helm. For example, under Karena Johnson, Britain's only black female theatrical programmer, London's Oval House has enjoyed a succession of inspired productions, including Dipo Agboluaje's Early Morning, a satire about Nigerian cleaners mounting a coup, and Troy Andrew Fairclough's You Don't Kiss, exploring black male gay relationships.
Johnson's vision - to programme a broad spectrum of black British productions - stems from her frustration at plays that are "either total escapism, where we sing, dance and be funny, or the other extreme, dramas about police brutality. Somewhere in between, that is the place that most of us live, and that's what I want to see reflected."
Tanika Gupta's adaptation of Harold Brighouse's classic Hobson's Choice, transposed to Salford's Asian community, opened to great reviews at the Young Vic this month; in April, it was her Fragile Land at Hampstead theatre that caught the zeitgeist. It portrayed British-Asian teenagers talking in appropriated black vernacular about disaffection, radical Islam, Islamaphobia and mixed relationships.
"There is a point when a character raises his fist and says, 'My Muslim brothers,'" says Gupta, at which moment the Hampstead faithful would "go very quiet". In contrast were the children in the afternoon audience: "Half of them had their fists in the air - including the white boys!"
Bollywood has made a big impact, too. Bombay Dreams, Andrew Lloyd Webber's £4.5m extravaganza, co-scripted by Meera Syal, opened to mixed reviews last year, but it is still showing to packed houses at the London Apollo and set to transfer to Broadway. And Leicester Haymarket had a hit in May with Kully Thiarai's production of Bollywood Jane, which staged Bollywood-style musical sequences in what the Guardian's Lyn Gardner described as "the most successful integration I have ever seen".
As that success demonstrates, the new wave is by no means just a London thing. "The regions are vibrant," says playwright Amber Lone, whose Paradise, which explored why young Muslims might be drawn to fighting for their faith, debuted at the Birmingham Rep in March. And Moon On A Rainbow Shawl, Errol John's Trinidadian classic, ended a tour of Nottingham, Ipswich and Bristol under Paulette Randall's direction.
Such triumphs are all the more remarkable in an industry that was last year deemed institutionally racist by the Arts Council, and is dominated by a male, Oxbridge coterie. To date, Britain's only Asian woman artistic director is Leicester Haymarket's Thiarai, who says, "There's still a real sense that theatre is for the Oxbridge crowd. Sometimes I think, 'I'm a working-class girl - what am I doing here?' Those barriers remain real issues."
"I wouldn't be here if I didn't feel a wind of change was possible," says Denise Wong, once director of the influential but now defunct Black Mime Theatre, and currently running the Streets Alive company. "But it's hard to remain when everything says that we should leave quietly through the back door."
This is a long-standing struggle. In the face of mainstream exclusion, the likes of Pearl Connor, who in 1956 co-founded an agency for non-white artists, and actor Carmen Munroe forged small power bases in the shape of informal networks and companies. "I have to pay homage to the pioneers who stood there and took the bullets," says Yvonne Brewster, grande dame of black British theatre and co-founder in 1985 of Talawa theatre company. "Without them, what you see now would not be happening."
For the generation after her, however, the road stayed rocky: "My back is covered in footprints," says actor/director Jo Martin, who co-founded the Aarawak Moon theatre company in 1998. "I've carried the hod and the cement; now it's for the third generation to keep on building."
One playwright in that new generation is Debbie Tucker Green. "Love it or loathe it, Tucker Green's work is already making its mark," said the Independent of her play Born Bad, which explored long-held tensions in a black family. She welcomes the debate about her work - "Great, let's have a dialogue" - but is less than happy about the lack of diversity that still exists in theatre: "Sometimes, you just have to check your watch and think, what, this is 2003?"
Winsome Pinnock - who, thanks to work such as Leave Taking, is thought of as the godmother of black British playwrights - offers this analysis: "Theatre is a sort of moral conscience of a society, an arena where a society can examine itself. If some voices are missing, I don't think that it's honestly fulfilling that role and is, in fact, practising a subtle form of censorship."
That subtle censorship by a largely white, male theatrical establishment is a fundamental characteristic of all these women's journeys. Pat Cumper, a Jamaican-born playwright, came to Britain in the mid-1990s armed with four Caribbean awards - and struggled to find anyone who would stage her work. British theatre's agenda for black plays, she says, is "a vaguely heroic white figure who forgives you and you forgive them, and then it's all good. It's society forgiving itself, and that wasn't what I was interested in writing about. I wanted to write black female characters, and that's an automatic no-no. Most theatres think you can't get an audience for plays with black women in the lead. The response to most of my scripts was, 'It's really well written, but we can't put it on.'"
It's a story familiar to Brewster: in 1956, on her first day as a drama student at Rose Bruford college, London, she was told she would never work. Undeterred, she made her directorial debut in 1971, with the Jamaican play Lippo The New Noah. Officially, Brewster had been brought in to "assist", but she soon found herself having to persuade the black cast members to resume rehearsals: they had downed tools after taking offence at being told by white people how to "act Jamaican".
It is a sign of how far things have come that Brewster is now a patron of Rose Bruford. Brewster's nearest Asian equivalent is director Kristine Landon-Smith, whose Tamasha company, formed with writer/actor Sudha Bhuchar in 1989, has brought to a mainstream audience previously marginalised Asian work. Along with the commercial success of Fourteen Songs, Two Weddings And A Funeral in spring 2001, Tamasha's production of East Is East was nominated for an Olivier Award and went on to win the London Critics' Circle award for best screenplay for its subsequent film adaptation.
Black and Asian theatre was born of exclusion - now other doors are opening, and newcomers increasingly head straight for the mainstream. Director Indu Rubasingham - whose credits include works as culturally diverse as Valmiki's Indian classic The Ramayana and MoliËre's 17th-century drama The Misanthrope - is a case in point: she decided against establishing an Asian company, although she was advised to do so "by practically everyone ".
"When anyone talks about black arts to me, I say, 'Define white arts and then I can talk about black arts.'" Yet for all their confidence, there is still a sense of nervousness among these women, an awareness that the rug could be pulled from under them. While acknowledging that she has benefited from attempts to address diversity, director Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa resents having to ask herself if she would have made it anyway. Hers is a mixed body of work, including Early Morning for Oval House and HeartPiece for the RSC's The Other Place. But her colour means that assumptions are made about her capabilities. "No one has ever rung me up about Chekhov - 99% of the calls are about black plays. No one ever asks, say, Adrian Noble, before he does Chekhov, if he has any experience of Russia. That's infuriating because I can do other work."
Some theatre directors are catching up, however. Philip Hedley, of Stratford's Theatre Royal, became a champion of diverse theatre after taking a good look at himself and his own prejudices: "As a white liberal, you assume, 'I'm not racist.' It's a bit like when you catch sight of yourself in a window and you think, 'Who's that old man?' Then you realise it's you." Hedley has a record of programming productions others would consider "too black" - Da Boyz, for instance, a hip-hop version of the Rodgers and Hart musical The Boys From Syracuse.
London's Tricycle Theatre also has a reputation for showing a diverse body of work - the only recent offer made to Randall to direct a non-black play came from there. And Jeanie O'Hare, literary manager at Hampstead theatre, says "there's a hunger for a really big black show that's going to break into the West End".
The transition from Brewster being told she'd never work to Talawa being on the brink of having its own theatre is perhaps the most exciting proof of change. But while progress has been made, says Randall, "It's still a political act to put a black person on stage." To transform the abstract concept of diversity into reality involves a shaking-up of power structures. The industry as a whole will have to listen, and grapple with the same uncomfortable process many other public bodies are currently undergoing. Only then can theatre function as Pinnock's "moral conscience of a society".