Lenny Henry’s absorbing 10-parter on the history of black (here defined as “Afro-Caribbean”) involvement in British drama, film and television (9–20 November) began not in 1833, when an un-made-up Othello was permitted to tread the boards of the Covent Garden Theatre, but in 2005 with the staging of Kwame Kwei-Armah’s Elmina’s Kitchen at the Garrick – the first time that the work of a black playwright had made it to a major West End stage.Context, Henry assured us, was all. The vanguard of fresh new talent in which Kwei-Armah marched was a direct response to the tensions of the 1990s, in which the Macpherson Report into the murder of the black teenager, Stephen Lawrence, had shown London’s Metropolitan Police to be “institutionally rac
26 November 2015, The Tablet
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