One of the UK’s most distinguished actors has been criticized for claiming theater is a “white invention” that is ingrained in the DNA of the Caucasian race.
Dame Janet Suzman, known for her Shakespearean roles, was responding to the views of Meera Syal, a British-Asian comedian, who last week urged theater companies to do more to involve the UK’s Asian community.
Author Meera Syal.(AFP Photo / Evan Agostini)Author Meera Syal.(AFP Photo / Evan Agostini)“Theater is a white invention, a European invention, and white people go to it,” Suzman claimed. “It’s in their DNA. It starts with Shakespeare.”
Suzman also complained that people from ethnic minority backgrounds simply don’t go to the theatre because it isn’t part of their culture.
“I’ve just done a South African play. My co-star is a young black man from the slums of Cape Town. Totally brilliant actor! I saw one black face in the room, at the Print Room [London theater],” she said.
“And they don’t bloody come. They’re not interested. It’s not in their culture, that’s why. Just as their stuff is not in white culture,” she added.
The people who support high culture in America are overwhelmingly white (though in Japan and China, of course, they are Japanese and Chinese). The people who go to the opera and to the symphony in America are largely white. The people who subscribe to The New Yorker and the New York Times are largely white. The leading intellectuals of the left and right are largely white.
Show me the Proust of the Zulus said Allen Bloom. It’s a good challenge.
On the other hand, I don’t think there is anything inherent in race that leads to these results. Rather, genetics plus environment produces culture. Change the genetics and change the environment and you get different cultures.
