Greasepaint -or black actors?
By Kathy Kirkham The recent battle between a wealthy theatre producer and the US actors" union, American Equity, over the staging on Broadway of the West End musical Miss Saigon", is still reverberating round the theatre establishment on both sides of the Atlantic.
For raising the issue of racism in the theatre, Equity was lambasted by the media, by theatre critics and by many of its own members for interfering with artistic freedom.
In London's West End, British actor Jonathan Pryce had been playing the lead character in "Miss Saigon", a Euro-Asian pimp, wearing prosthetics to give his eyes a slanted look. A reciprocal agreement between British and American Equity would have allowed him, as the star and a British Equity member, to transfer to the US production when it opened in New York next April.
However, the leaders of American Equity, apparently under pressure from the union's Race Equality Committee, told the show's producer Cameron Macintosh that Pryce's portrayal would offend the black community in the States. They ob jected to Pryce transferring to the US production and asked Macintosh to seek an American-Asian performer for the role.
The fact that "Miss Saigon' had already taken some $15 million in advance bookings on Broadway gave the union some extra leverage. But multi-millionaire Macintosh said he could afford to take the musical elsewhere. His threat to pull out put the much-needed jobs for 34 actors and large stage crew in the balance.
A truce looked possible at one point. After 600 members petitioned their union to come to an agreement, Equity announced it would welcome Jonathan Pryce - minus the prosthetics. In
retum, it sought undertakings from Cameron Macintosh that he would look for qualified Asian actors as replacements or understudies on Broadway, prioritise Asian actors for the lead role in future productions and assist with the vocal training of those Asian actors who might be considered for such roles.
Macintosh, however, maintained that quity had still not accepted his artistic freedom as the producer and cancelled the Broadway production altogether.
While the theatre establishment and the right wing inside both British and American Equity sigh that the union shot itself in the foot", the real issue -the dire situation of black performers - has been conveniently pushed to the background.
For every Eddie Murphy or Whoopie Goldberg there are thousands more black performers in the US and Britain who, as one union official put it, "celebrate if they even get an audition". American Equity's records indicate, for instance, that from April 1989 to May 1990, 33 out of a total of nearly 100 shows covered by union agreement - representing 504 roles - included no black actors at all. An additional 12 productions included only a couple.
Black actors have the worst of all worlds. Casting directors still give the majority of non colour-specific parts to white performers. Even when the plots of plays or films call for characters of a specific racial origin, the plum roles still go to white "stars'.
During the "Miss Saigon" affair American Equity was accused of advocating that casting be drawn strictly along racial or ethnic lines. How could anyone suggest that Laurence Oliver should not have played Othello
White actors get priority for most roles or Ben Kingsley, Ghandi, shocked theatre critics asked.
Equity calls this a total distortion of the issue: Jews (for example) have always been able to play Italians, Italians have always been able to play Jews, and both have always been able to play Asians. Asian actors, however, almost never have the opportunity to play either Jews or Italians and continue to strug gle even to play themselves.
The union also points out that the practice of white actors using make-up to darken their skins to play people of colour is likely to remain a highly sensitive issue as long as others are barred from roles solely because of the colour of their skin.
The question remains of how actors" unions can begin to address such widespread discrimination against their black members, especially in the now highly commercialised theatre world and in the film industry. The kind of positive demands which Equity belatedly began to make of Cameron Macintosh were a move in this direction i.e. towards "integrated casting'.
But unions have to formulate a concrete programme of action with their own black members and campaign for these throughout their organisations. Otherwise if they are resisted by producers, the unions will not have the support of their own members to back up these demands, as Equity found to its cost.
Only in the context of a programme of measures to win training, job opportunities and visibility for a growing number of black performers at all levels will it be possible to begin to break down the white star syndrome. SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 27, October 1990
A Mars a day ... Total Recall Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger Reviewed by BEV BYRNE NO GAUDY graphics, no spectacular stills, just the name of the movie and the name of the star, Amold Schwarzenegger: that is enough to guarantee another Hollywood blockbuster.
Schwarzenegger is of course big movie business, and it is he and his big biceps which put "bums on seats". The Schwarzenegger fans are there to sec him do what he does best - kill. It doesn't really matter whether Schwarzenegger is a good guy or the bad guy, his audience just want to see him bulging, blazing and burning to the bitter end.
Total Recall is no exception. It does, however differ from previous Schwarzenegger films: here Schwarzenegger talks! Previous Schwarzenegger scripts have tended to limit his verbal output: but here he is quipping and questioning like a couple of James Bonds who have been spliced together and made to wear futuristic casual gear.
To be fair, he's quite a jolly sort of chap. And it is quite nice to see him in the opening shots at home with his loving and lascivious young wife as she comforts him after a nasty nightmare in which his face explodes on Mars.
The world in which Douglas Quaid (Schwarzenegger) lives, loves and works is reminiscent of our own dear planet, but with whizzier streamlined cars, lots of Corbusian concrete, and heavy security. It is the year 2084, and work appears to be the only thing which has not been transformed by technology.
Quaid, afraid to be late, rushes to his job as a construction worker, complete with heavy duty Kango. His dreams about Mars haunt him, and he decides to go to a firm called Rekall Inc, who will, for a few hundred credits, implant a memory of a holiday in your head (cheaper than taking the shuttle greyhound to Saturn or Venus). This memory implant SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 27, October 1990
REVIEWS will enable Quaid to play out a fantasy as an undercover agent on Mars with the aid of a 'sleazy, athletic, but demure brunette, chosen out of a mix and match catalogue.
Of course the whole thing goes terribly wrong (thus proving that private medicine is not so great after all) and Quaid finds himself up against a ruthless bunch of killers - minus his memory. The story then follows his search for his missing mind.
The opening sequences of the film are promising, and when Quaid attempts to pass through Mars immigration dressed as a woman in a brilliant and grotesque scene, expectations are high. However the art director failed to exploit the visual potential of a future world that is both familiar and 'sci-fi' strange. One can't help but compare this with the totally believable world depicted in Ridley Scott's Bladerunner, where a similar post-holocaust homegenous society inhabits a decaying. damp and discarded city. Scott's gahstly vision of the future struck a balance between reality and fiction: Total Recall on the other hand presents a world looking exactly like Mexico City.
Once the action shifts fo Mars, any hope of an imaginative movie totally disintegrates. It is reminiscent of 1950s science fiction without any of the laughs; lots of rock, red dust, domes and caves.
Mars is controlled by a crazed capitalist who is exploiting the workforce, many of whom have developed mutations due to the poor living conditions on the Red Planet. Quaid becomes involved with a revolutionary group, and with the aid of a dusky maiden (literally the woman of his dreams) battles with the oppres-
It is here that plot-wise things become difficult to follow. Quaid knows that he has been someone else because a video recording of his mirror image tells him "You're not you. You're me". The crazed capitalist is constantly telling him that he is a smooth and be-suited ally. The revolutionaries hail him as a
DRES
Schwarzenegger's audiences are now much easier to find mountainous Che Guevara. Will the real Quaid please stand up?
This is further complicated by the implication that all the action on Mars is merely a figment of Quaid's memory implant, and that therefore none of it exists. The audience is constantly invited to doubt which is reality. Quaid is the good guy and the bad guy; his earthly wife is a faithless fraud; the revolutionary leader Kuato tums out to be two people literally rolled into one. But does any of it matter, since the events may not be happening anyway?
This is the most fascinating element proposed in the film: but one scene undermines the tension between dream, reality and duplicity. It becomes clear Quaid is living a reality - and from that point on the audience knows that Mars exists and Quaid/Schwarzenegger can get on with saving the planet.
One might think that all the tampering with reality would drag Total Recall out of the genre of run-of-the-mill sci-fi with expensive special effects. The author of the original story, Philip K. Dick, loves to play around with cosmic quantum questions. But instead of using the world of film artifice to describe phenomena which are normally inaccessible, the director has chosen to make Rambo goes to Mars'.
Schwarzenegger lumbers round the unimaginative Martian film set, stirring up insurrection, panic, passion and lots of red dust and polystyrene. Each new scene contains a twist and a tum. But everyone knows that in the end Quaid will discover that he is a nice guy after all and will save the world - or at least Mars.
The expensive special effects only serve to beef up some very dull and repetitive battle scenes, and there are so many of them that you forget to put your fingers over your eyes in the end.
There is of course a grand *finale where everything explodes, including a few more heads. As the extras stand around gazing at the new blue sky which Quaid has somehow manufactured out of thin air, one can't help but think that Mars is a pretty dull place, even with охудеп.
Why is it that Hollywood takes all the potential wonder and fascination out of the future? The chaps who made this movie chose to ignore all the interesting bits and just make a "blow 'em away movie.
However, to judge from the whooping and clapping which went on in the cinema every time Schwarzenegger blasted someon's face, perhaps Hollywood possesses more insight into our present society than it does of our future.
Page 31
An outstanding intellectual for the
The death of Louis Sinclair after a serious illness, on Saturday, 7 July 1990, has removed from the ranks of the Fourth International one of its outstanding intellectuals. Louis entered the Trotskyist movement when he joined the Glasgow branch of the Revolutionary Socialist League, an affiliate of the International Left Opposition, in 1937. In 1943, he was in Italy with the British army. Mussolini had been suppressed ousted: The socialist and communist move- ments emerged from under- ground. From their cellars and attics, booksellers produced the banned works of Marx, Engels, Labriola, Lenin and other Mar- xists; some of them still uncut. It was a time of political fer- ment. This was the sort of intel- lectual atmosphere in which Louis thrived. With other Trotskyists in the British and American armed forces, he es- tablished contact with the small Trotskyist group around Nicola di Bartolomea (Fosca. With his fluent French and rapidly aquired Italian, Louis was a big asset in educating young cadres and winning their adherence to the ideas of the Fourth Intera- tional. On his retum to Glasgow in 1945, he immediately dispatched to the the comrades in Naples his precious collection of Trotsky's works in French. For a short time after its founding in 1945, he was a member of the Revolutionary Com- munist Party, then the British section of the Fourth International. For the rest of his long life, he was not formally a member of any or- ganisation, but remained a loyal supporter, South African Trotskyism In Socialist Outlook 26 there is a review by Charlie van Gelderen of my book Yours for the Union. In his comments, Charlie ques tioned the accuracy of my statement that Max Gordon, the organiser of black trade unions in the 1930s in the Witwatersrand, was a mem- ber of the Workers Party of South Africa. Not so, he writes, Gordon was a member of the Lenin Club. I am not certain whether many of your readers stopped to ask themselves what these organisations were - or indeed where Charlie obtained his information. Very briefly, those socialists who sym- Page 32
OBITUARY/LETTER Fourth International Louis Sinclair 1909 - 1990 both politically and materially, of the Fourth International. For him, Trotskyism was the marxism of the second half of the twentieth century. spent on compiling his massive Trotsky bibli- ography, which is now in its second enlarged edition and has become a standard work of reference. In the pursuit of this project, he ac- A meeting to commemorate the unique contribu- tion of Louis Sinclair to Trotskyism and the University of Glasgow Tony Southall Glasgow, G41 cumulated library of Glasgow University lection. get hold of. There can hardly be a second- pathised with the left opposition in the carly club at which socialist ideas could be dis- Lenin Club as an open forum. for some years had to rely on the information and his account was accepted, with the reser- vation that oral testimony has to be checked.
The greater part of the next twenty years he the counter. Louis Sinclair Fourth International will take place at: Adam Smith Building on Friday September 28th at 7.30pm All communications to: 67 Gleneff Street Telephone: (041) 423 7929 an unrivalled collection of Trotsky's writings, and of books and articles form the archives. on Trotsky. This collection is now in the and should surely now be named The Louis Sinclair col- It was no easy task. He must have visited every major library in Europe and America in his search for material; ransacked the archives him. of every Trotskyist or ex-Trotskyist he could 1930s in Cape Town coalesced to launch a cussed. That was the Lenin Club. Unfor- tunately two factions emerged, and after some discussion the majority broke away to form provide the Workers Party. The minority formed the Communist League and they retained the In trying to write the history of those groups interviewed some early activists and obtained from them. Charlie was most hepiful London
hand bookshop that he did not enter or write to. It was quite a revelation, when accompany- ing him of some of these excursions to see how readily he was recognised. As soon as he entered the premises, the bookseller would say: "Mr Sinclair, I have the book you have been looking for", and produce it from under He corresponded with people in all parts of the world and nearly every post would bring him some- thing. I remember with what pride he showed me a copy of Trotsky's Germany: What Next? in an obscure Indonesian dialect. Louis rarely spoke from a public platform. He was most at home speaking to small groups, and especially enjoyed talking to young comrades, probing their brains and help ing them with their problems. He was always being consulted by students writing theses on Trotskyism and related sub- jects, and by would-be authors: he was always more than ready with his help and advice. He look a great interest in recent events in the Soviet Union, and always on the look- out for new material Trotsky and the Left Opposition emerging He also compiled an index of pre-war in- temal bulletins of the Fourth International which should be a valuable source for research for historians and students of the period. He will be sorely missed as a friend and teacher by all who knew him and leamed from By Charlie van Gelderen It was only recently that I received a box of papers containing all the records from Cape Town for the year 1935. These are, as far as 1 know, the only records of the early Trotskyist movement in South Africa, and this will now documentary evidence of the ac- tivities of those pioneer Trotskyists. In respect to Gordon the situation is now beyond doubt. In January 1935, Gordon signed a membership form showing that he was a charter member of the Workers Party. I relied on other testimony when I wrote my book - but obviously I was correct. Baruch Hirson SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 27, October 1990
path to the Labour voters, the working class and by "campaigning' outside the Labour Party but
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK
Ultra-left farewell to socialism?
The end of the sovereignty of Labour conference, the accountability of MPs and the rank and file individual and affiliated members's direct involvement in policy-making could be the outcome of this year's Labour Party Conference.
Jane Wells seems to share this view. In her article in the June issue of Socialist Outlook she stresses the threat the proposals to be put before this year's conference pose, and that thought they are described by the Party's General Secretary as "tinkering amendments", they are far from being so. She makes clear that they represent the first instalment of changes to be completed at the conference following the next general election.
One might therefore have expected Jane Wells to urge all sections of the left within the Party to unite behind demands which (if carried at conference) would frustrate the NEC's plans.
Yet whilst the Campaign for Labour Party democracy (CLPD) and Labour Left Liaison are mobilising the rank and file in favour of resolutions to this year's conference countering the NEC proposals (i.e. in the immediate present) Jane Wells (and presumably Socialist Outlook) argue that what is needed is an ap proach which "embraces and builds on the experience of struggles that working people face every day, and brings them into the Party to join the fight for working class democracy".
With this approach, she effectively writes off the struggle for socialism in the admittedly unfavourable circumstances of the political present, and - in the best social-democratic tradition - postpones the 'real' struggle to some indefinite future.
The underlying idea of "Economism" is the prioritisation of the economic struggle of the working class as against the political struggle. In the Labour Party today we have a mass political organisation arising out of its close ties with mass trade union organisations.
Unlike the left-wing Russian Social Democrats, the early British socialists proved incapable of striking deep roots in the mass movement. Not surprisingly, the reformist ideology of the Parliamentary labour Party managed to firmly establish itself in the inevitably reformist minded trade union movement.
The Labour Party's close relationship with the trade union movement nevertheless means that Labour is the mass party of the British working class. For socialists, therefore, the SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 27, October 1990
LETTERS
Harry Sloan Is on hollday: last seen somewhere in the vicinity of Baghdad the masses in general leads through the Labour by Party.
Yet, like supporters of "Economism" in Russia at the tum of the century, our present-day says: proponents of this doctrine shrink from the formidable Labour movement for socialism.
In order to justify what is effectively a withdrawal from politics, they have invented the "theory" that support of the mass political party for socialist policies can somehow be won outside that party, or alternatively, by setting up a halfway house on that party's periphery, by building, to quote Jane Wells again "on the experiences working people face every day". (ie. the economic struggles of the working class).
Organisations with imaginary high political potential are being set up - outside the real political mass organisation of the working class. Behind an elaborate structure of self-deception, pseudo-political activities - such as the concentration on producing innumerable weeklies, fortnightlies, monthlies, quarterlies or the holding of innumerable meetings and conferences -are being passed off as "campaigning", and being substituted for involvement in the arena in which political class struggle is being forced out: the Labour Party.
Like their Russian predecessors the advocates of the current version of "Economism" leave politics to those intent on preserving capitalist society.
Jane Wells disregards 70 years of failed attempts to create an effective socialist force outside the Labour Party. Mimiltant workers and non-Labour socialists will not be convinced of the need to join the Labour Party by building castles in the air - such as the "campaigning" of the Socialist Movement - but only when the Labour left is successful. This was demonstrated during the years of the Bevanite advance and more recently when significant gains were achieved both on 'issues such as nuclear disarmament and public ownership, and during the struggles for mandatory reselection and wider franchise for the lection of the Leader and Deputy Leader, These victories were not won
persistent and systematic efforts of socialists within it.
To whom is Jane Wells referring when she
"It is a serious mistake ... to argue (as some political task of winning the mass do) that ... you lay the groundwork for leftwing policies not by campaigning for socialist politics now, but by refining party procedures to make sure the structures for accountability are there ready for when the Left is on the up again".
It can only be CLPD. Yet this is not CLPD's position. CLPD does not separate campaigning for socialist policies from campaigning for Party democracy in the way Jane Wells suggests, for in its view the two go together and cannot be separated.
This year one of CLPD's model resolutions demands the reduction of defence expenditure - not exactly a demand to refine party proce dures.
The fact that CLPD is prioritising constitutional issues (as well as the cuts in defence expenditure) is above all because of the dire results for the Party if the present leadership succeeds in pushing through the changes outlined above. These changes would allow the leadership, and a future labour govemment, to be immune to rank and file pressure.
It is a pity that the Left's limited resources are being dispersed in all directions at this time, when repelling the attack on what remains of the democratic gains of 1979-81 is an absolute priority.
Vladimir Derer
London
(This letter was cut from 2,300 words: Ed.)
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