Errr....okay.
When the Print Room, a London theatre, cast white actors in Howard Barker’s In the Depths of Dead Love – a play set in ancient China, with characters named Chin and Mrs Hu – members of the BAME artist community took it as an insult, an assertion that there simply weren’t, in the mind of the company, the director and the playwright, sufficiently talented artists of Asian descent in London to embody these characters. With the release of a statement on Monday attempting to explain their process, the leadership of the Print Room hasn't defended themselves by protesting that they had indeed attempted to cast the role with Asian actors. Rather, they denied that race and ethnicity mattered at all in casting. In doing so, the theatre showed that it does not comprehend what yellowface and racial erasure mean, and have made no effort to show any empathy to the community they have affronted.
Read it in full.
