The Challenge of Binglish: Analysing Multi-cultural Productions

by Jatinder Verma

While the analyses of performance is at the best of times an exercise fraught with uncertainties - who decides what is perceived ? - the analyses of multi-cultural productions in contemporary Britain is fairly riddled with imprecision and muddled thinking. ‘Cross-cultural’, ‘inter-cultural’, ‘intra-cultural’, ‘integrated’, ‘culturally-diverse’...these are all terms that, in varying ways, are descriptive of ‘multi-cultural’.

In Britain, multi-cultural productions have evolved specifically as a practical response to a socio-political issue: the need to see on British stages performers from ‘coloured’ backgrounds: i.e., performers that are racially different from white Anglo-Saxons. In the 30 years since this issue began to emerge - on the backs of large-scale migration to Britain from the Indian sub-continent and the Caribbean - we have witnessed varying approaches to this new dynamic in British society. Many theatre productions today, both on main stages as well as small touring companies, feature some form of racially-mixed casts. This has in no small part been stimulated by the rise, also, of independent Asian and Black companies since the 1970s; three of which - Black Theatre Co-operative, Talawa and Tara Arts - are now firmly part of national theatre provision in Britain.

The very diversity of current expressions of ‘multi-cultural’ in theatre productions begs the need for clarification. Is a production by an Asian or Black theatre company - directed by a Black director, written by a Black and featuring Black performers - a ‘multi-cultural’ production ? Is a production featuring a racially-mixed cast, directed by a White director, written by a White, more properly to be termed a ‘multi-cultural’ production ? Or is the example offered by the work of Peter Brook and Ariane Mnouchkine in Paris the best definition of ‘multi-cultural’ ?

I propose the following conceptual clarifications; and thereby also lay out the focus of my own enquiry in this essay:

• Multi-cultural is a term most appropriately descriptive of those productions featuring a racially-mixed cast which, by not seeking to draw attention to the racial mix of the producing team, are not generally attempting to confront the dominant text-based convention of English theatre. The attempt here is to sustain a familiar view of the world, through use of existing conventions of English theatre and so subsume the potential for unfamiliarity created by the unconventional casting;
• Cross-cultural productions are those which overtly draw upon the encounters between different cultural sensibilities, as these are represented in their producing teams - actors, directors, designers, writers, etc. The intention here is invariably to re-imagine the world, with the conventions of the English or European stage largely ignored, or seriously questioned;
• Binglish is a term I propose to denote a distinct contemporary theatre praxis: featuring Asian or Black casts, produced by independent Asian or Black theatre companies. The attempt here, I would argue, is to directly challenge or provoke the dominant conventions of the English stage. Binglish productions can contain both the above definitions; but the former are not the same as Binglish productions.

[I appropriate the term Binglish from the word used by contemporary Singaporeans to describe their spoken language: ‘Singlish’. I use it to suggest a form of spoken English as much as a process: Asian and Black life in modern Britain is self-evidently "not-quite English"; and, equally, is characterised by a striving to - and at times an insistence upon - "be English". I believe it is this ambivalent sensibility that forms a sine qua non of Asian and Black life in Britain today; a sensibility that is at the heart of the title of my essay.]

The above definitions would suggest that the full scope of this topic is beyond the limitations of an essay-form. I will therefore confine myself to the analyses of Binglish productions. Given my assertion that such productions can be both multi- and cross-cultural, I would hope that, while limiting my field of reference, there will be insights gained that could be applied to multi- and cross-cultural productions.

How is a Binglish production to be analysed?
Irving Wardle’s comments in the Independent on Sunday on my production of Troilus and Cressida provide a pithy summary of the problematic of analysing Binglish productions. I quote: "...in the case of Jatinder Verma’s production of Troilus and Cressida, I feel an attack of blimpish nationalism coming on: damned outsider gatecrashing the club, doesn’t know the rules... Eventually, if not quite yet, the club will have to find room for it...." [1] Wardle accurately points-up the ‘outsider’ nature of Binglish productions; as much as, more reluctantly perhaps, their inevitability.

The ‘outsider’ view is shared by several critics. One such, when asked how he came to shows produced by Asian and Black theatre companies - did he, for example, come out of an interest in the type of theatre production that the company undertook or because of what the company represented as a type within British theatre - replied, to his credit I feel, that he went to shows by Asian or Black companies because these were "ethnic" companies [2].

Viewed as ‘outsiders’ or, at best, marginal, Binglish productions can (among the more liberal-minded) be generically analysed as ‘a good thing’; a form of political correct-ness that finds its correlative in the fact that many Asian and Black audiences flock to Binglish productions because they can relate more readily to the producers, the themes and the manners of their expression. Social goodwill, then, undoubtedly forms a part of any analyses of such productions.

Another defining feature of Binglish productions is their use of ‘other’ texts. I use the adjective ‘other’ to describe a wide range of texts: existing European texts, adaptations of such texts, new texts from Asian and Black writers, texts from Asia and Africa. What characterises their ‘other-ness’ ? Provocation. Yvonne Brewster’s Talawa Theatre company presented in the early-90s a production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. Featuring an all-Black cast, the text was presented in period and "as is": no adaptation was undertaken to justify the usage of an all-Black cast. But, as one national critic put it, "This Earnest opnes your eyes." ![3]

If the element of provocation is implicit in even the most conventional of Binglish productions, it achieves considerable amplification when considering adaptations and texts from the non-European world. It is worth here re-reading Irving Wardle’s comments above on my production of Troilus and Cressida. The same critic also commented on my production of an ancient Indian play, The Little Clay Cart, for the Royal National Theatre: "...A few more shows like this and Western linear theatre will start looking primitive." [4]

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘provocative’ has the sense of "tending to excite or enrage" as much as of "stimulating, irritating". I believe all these range of meanings are in operation in the perception of Binglish productions, in both producers and audiences alike. This sensibility of provocation is implicit, of course, in the very act of forming independent companies; which act, in turn, takes its impetus from contemporary British life. The impact of relatively large-scale coloured immigration into Britain since the late-50s has in essence been provocative. Provoking issues of race, nationality, ethnicity, identity, community, equality of opportunity, justice, law and order...; these form the often ‘hidden texts’ of modern multi-cultural Britain. Post-colonial Britain, by an ironic act of symmetry, is under-going the same uncertain groping towards defining itself as are the countries that were once colonised by Britain.

The provocation of Binglish productions, I would contend, is to stimulate other ways of ‘seeing’. Is a French classic, with its history of translation into English theatre as a stylised comedy of manners, so bound within this defining convention as to be incapable of being seen as an ‘Indian’ play ? Stylised according to an Indian vocabulary of gesture, mode of speech, dress, music, theatrical convention ? Theoretically, one should be able to answer, Why not ? In practice, however, the provocation of such an act is not to be under-estimated. Both my productions of Moliere’s comedies (Tartuffe for the Royal National Theatre and Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme for Tara Arts) were exercises in "tradaptation", to use Robert LePage’s term.[5] Set in equivalent periods in India to when Moliere originally wrote the texts, they provoked a re-perception of the Moliere classic. As I overheard one irate member of the audience remark to the box office attendant at Glasgow’s Tron Theatre during the interval of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, "this is not Moliere" ![6] A sentiment echoed by Margaret Burgess in a regional paper during the tour of Tartuffe: "Somewhere in France this week Moliere is turning in his grave...For me, [the conception of Tartuffe] was as valid as transporting A Passage to India to Paris !" [7] What is ‘acceptable’ is here being confronted; what is being contested is the notion of the ‘authentic’.

The ‘foreign-ness’ of Indian music, dress, mode of speech ("sing-song English") - indeed, the very ‘foreign-ness’ of seeing a troupe of Indian performers flirting with the English language - these are all elements which are out-of-the-norm for the average British theatre-goer.

Aside from adaptations, ‘other’ texts also include themes which are new to Britain. An example is provided by Tamasha Theatre company’s production of The Untouchable in 1989. Based on a novel by Mulk Raj Anand, one of India’s greatest living novelists (who was first introduced to English tastes by Graham Greene) the play considered the plight of the ‘untouchable’ community in India. As a specific social group, the ‘untouchables’ have no correlative in Britain - except within the Asian community. Yet, it requires no great exercise in imagination to see in this play a metaphor for the new ‘untouchables’ of Britain: the coloured Britons. As in India, these are also barred from certain occupations and areas of settlement. Their touch is ‘polluting’; though a pollution that, unlike in India, has no religious or cultural validation.

Underlining the other-ness of the texts, Binglish productions are also characterised by a linguistic distinction: what I alluded to above when talking of ‘flirting with the English language’. Flirtation is the ‘ambivalent sensibility’ that is central to Binglish. Talawa Theatre company’s production of King Lear in 1993 and Tamasha’s Women of Dust (1992) offer two contrasting though related illustrations of such flirtation. While Talawa’s King Lear did not set out to adapt Shakespeare’s text (unlike what I attempted with Troilus), the audience was nevertheless made to experience a variety of langue: Caribbean, West African, as much as an RSC-derived "received pronunciation" vied with each other to create a rich tapestry of the sound of English. The resonance of the Caribbean accent, in particular, took on associative meanings for Black members of the audience that made Shakespeare’s text immediately their own. Here it could be claimed with some justification that ownership of the text was being contested through the sounds of the English language: when the production was employing a more conventional spoken English, white members of the audience were ‘in tune’; when it was less conventional, it was time for the Black members to assert their ownership - which they often did with great vocal gusto.

In Tamasha’s Women of Dust, conventional spoken English was distorted by the adoption of Rajasthani speech patterns (the play explored the lives of Rajasthani women migrant workers in North India). This was further distorted by exclamations in Hindi. To English years, Indian-English speech is governed by conventions that derive ultimately from Empire days: ‘sing-song’, a curious penchant for dropping definite articles, florid. A convention that achieved its defining caricature at the hands of Peter Sellers in the film, The Party. Indian languages per se, of course, remain wholly foreign. (Though I should qualify this: waiting at a suburban London railway station recently on a cold wet night, I was astounded when an elderly Englishman came up to me and started speaking in Hindi ! It took me a few beats to realise that is what he was doing and reply in Hindi. He had been a trader in India during the Independence era - selling goods to both warring factions along the Indo-Pakistani border !)

One characteristic feature of spoken English-English (as opposed to American or any other form of English) it seems to me is under-statement: typified by the caricature of the ‘stiff upper-lip’. All caricatures have some basis in reality, and this is no exception. The under-statement of English-English is a development of imperial times, when little England was assured of its power across the globe. This mode can therefore also be seen as form of excluding others from power - the colonised, the working classes, those that don’t fit-in in ‘the club’. A mode which, in daily life, quintessentially expresses English racial discrimination. From this perspective, Asians and Blacks, excluded therefore from English-English, have learnt the art of direct statement. Our use of English is more expressive, more emotive, more declamatory..."rhetorical" to English-English ears. The conventional English comedy of manners for example, under such conditions, is bound to sound provocative.

Langue, as used in this essay, has therefore come to mean language, accent and mode of speech. And it is these varieties of langue that English-English audiences are having to negotiate in Binglish productions. Such negotiation of langue, I would argue, is a defining feature of Binglish - using the term here in both its senses: as a form of language and a distinctive theatre praxis. It is this negotiation that modern audiences are most obviously confronted with in Binglish productions. Introducing them to a greater auditory experience; and, by implication, challenging them - most especially, critics in their midst - to acquire a wider auditory range. These varying langues - Caribbean, Hindi, Punjabi, Gujarati, Urdu, Bengali, Tamil, Ghananian, Nigerian, Somali - form part of the linguistic map of modern Britain: they cannot be expected to be absent from modern British theatre. Such training of the ear, I would argue, is also a challenge thrown up by ‘cross-cultural’ productions; as was evident in Michael Billington’s response to Sotigui Kouyote’s characterisation of Prospero in Peter Brook’s version of The Tempest [8]

If the spoken language offers a challenge to audiences of Binglish productions, then no less do the forms of presentation. Using imagery and other stage vocabulary derived from the non-European parts of the world, Binglish productions challenge the dominant European imagery of theatre. These challenges in form vary from company to company. I will concentrate a while on the practice of Tara Arts, a company with which I am obviously very familiar. I do so because Tara more consistently challenges forms from this perspective than any other independent Asian or Black company at present. This assertion merely reflects a conscious search by Tara for a distinctive theatrical form; a search that is at least a decade-old now.

Tara’s search is premised on classical Indian aesthetics. The central premise of classical Indian theatre - which is shared by classical Chinese, Japanese and all south-east Asian theatres - is its eschewing of the photographic sense of "reality". As the earliest treatise on the theatre - the Natya Shastra - puts it, drama must be "a delight to the eyes as much as the ears".[9]

Composed c. 4th century AD. (the composition is attributed to Bharata - which is also a generic name for India), this treatise is the most comprehensive manual on the art of performance anywhere in the world - superseding in its practical detail and depth of theory even the works of Aristotle and Stanislavski. Bharata posits four constituent elements of theatre: Abhinaya - Gesture (which includes movement), Vacikam - Speech (which includes music), Aharayam - Costume (which includes make-up) and Sattvikam - the Mind (which includes emotion). These four achieve their classical representation in the image of the god Shiva, dancing with one foot on the earth, and one foot along with the arms held aloft. An image re-produced in countless sculptures and paintings and evoked in countless poems. This four-fold conception of theatre led to a practice that Brecht, much later, in 1935, described as "total theatre" - on seeing a troupe of Beijing Opera actors in Berlin [10]. Movement and music, in this conception, are not ancillary to the spoken word but form an integral part of the ‘text’ of performance.

At the heart of the Natya-Shastra is the theory of rasa: translated by one modern commentary as "aesthetic rapture".[11] The closest modern rendering of the word would be "flavour", as in the flavour of food - a metaphor that Bharata makes much use of in the Natya-Shastra. For the act of savouring food is an emotive as much as a functional act. A discussion of rasa is outside the scope of this article but I cannot leave the subject without offering the highly-suggestive rendering by Abhinavagupta, an early-medieval Indian literary critic: "The actor...does not experience rasa, nor does the original character, nor even the author. For rasa implies distance. Without this aesthetic distance, there cannot exist literature, only the primary world."[12]

I have gone to some lengths to sketch Tara’s approach to performance to suggest what underpins the company’s rejection of the dominant convention of the modern English stage - the spoken word. Gesture is speech, as much as a phrase of music is a sentence - or the passage of time. It is in this sense that the word, in Tara’s productions, takes on the texture also of dance and music. Removing one element immeasurably reduces the whole production. The apparent simplicity of this assertion is dispelled the moment one pauses to consider that both the movement and music vocabularies are Indian based. To most Western eyes and ears these are at best, respectively, exotic and foreign.

This drawing upon other, non-European vocabularies of movement, music and imagery is in my view a defining characteristic of all Binglish productions. In Tamasha’s Women of Dust, for example, much of the play was spent by the characters sitting on the floor on their haunches. Such physical expression of manual labour is quite foreign to Britain. While Talawa and Black Theatre Co-operative do not draw upon Indian theatre practice, in their usage of African and Caribbean music, movement and ritual forms, they share a common tendency.

Such productions can therefore also be characterised as negotiating a foreign-ness. A foreign-ness not quite "pure" as it is expressed in a flirtatious English (Binglish) ! Thus a modern white audience in Britain experiencing a Binglish production could be said to be oscillating continuously between the sense of the native, the familiar, and the foreign. It is this characteristic, more than any other, that distinguishes Binglish productions from multi-cultural ones (in the sense in which I have defined the latter). Multi-cultural productions are premised on the familiar; even their experiments in integrated casting aim to make the un-familiar (Asian or Black faces amidst White) acceptable. Binglish productions, on the other hand, overtly seek to establish other rules of the game.

Trevor Nunn’s production of Timon of Athens for the Young Vic in 1991, offers a interesting example. Nunn, as he neared his retirement from the RSC, came increasingly to see the necessity of multi-cultural productions, as his celebrated Othello with Willard White testifies. In Timon, his cast included one Asian. The production, inevitably perhaps given Nunn’s history, was determined by the RSC’s approach to speaking Shakespeare’s text: the infamous "received pronunciation". Yet in its Asian member of cast, the production possessed an actor who could not speak in such a manner even if he tried: his English is clearly conditioned by the rhythms of his Gujarati mother-tongue. For me, this actor ‘stood out’, unfavourably, in comparison to the rest of the cast. I found myself feeling "why can’t he speak like the others". The failure of the production, for me, lies not in Trevor Nunn’s decision to have a multi-racial cast - indeed, I would applaud him for that - but in failing to recognise the challenge such an actor posed to his own conception of how Shakespeare ought to be spoke. Had all the cast been encouraged to employ their natural accents or variants of English speech - Lancastrian, Yorkshire, Cornish, etc - the sense of having an integrated cast would have gone further. Instead of leaving a faint after-taste of having been witness to a de-racinating process. Which I believe to be the ultimate implication of a ‘colour-blind’ approach to casting. (A term which I must confess to have never been able to understand. How can I, as a member of the audience or a practitioner, be oblivious to my colour or the colour of the actors I see on stage ? It is part of what makes me particular in the world today. And is not theatre the art of making the particular reveal connections with other particularities ?)

Summary
In conclusion, I would argue that the particular type of multi-cultural productions I have analysed (Binglish) are characterised by their usage of ‘other’ texts, distinctive langue, and non-European stage vocabulary. What I have called their flirtation with English leads both practitioners and audiences alike to experience a constant negotiation between the familiar and the unfamiliar: between the sense of ‘native’ and ‘foreign’. And this flirtation, I have tried to suggest, is a reflection of contemporary ambivalence to and of the new Britons: Asians and Blacks. Binglish productions are, in sum, creating a "different sort of noise" in English theatre (to use Salman Rushdie’s trenchant phrase [13] ), by a combination of colour, langue and forms of expression.
By implication, I am arguing also for the necessity of extending the current critical vocabulary of theatre, if multi-cultural productions generally, and Binglish productions in particular, are properly to be appreciated. I can only hope that this essay is a contribution to such an extension.

Footnotes:

1. Irving Wardle, Independent on Sunday, 3 October 1993
2. A conversation with Michael Coveney, of The Observer
3. Alex Renton, The Independent, 18 May 1989.
4. Irving Wardle, Independent on Sunday, 8 December 1991
5. Interview with Robert LePage, The Guardian, 5 October 1994. LePage uses the term to convey the sense of annexing old texts to new cultural contexts.
6. Tron Theatre, Glasgow, Friday, 30 September 1994.
7. Review by Margaret Burgess, Surrey Advertiser, 28 June 1991
8. Michael Billington, The Guardian, 28 May 1993
9. The Natya-Shastra, trans. Dr. Adya Rangacharya, IBH Prakashana, Bangalore, 1986.
10. ‘Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting’, John Willett (trans. and ed.) Brecht on Theatre, London 1964, pp. 91-97
11. J.L. Masson and M.V. Patwardhan, Aesthetic Rapture, 2 vols,, Deccan College, Poona, 1970. This excellent book analyses Abhinangupta’s ideas, as found in his commentary, the Abhinavabharati, composed in the 9th century AD.
12. ibid., Masson and Patwardhan, vol.1, p.24
13. Interview with Jeremy Isaacs, ‘Face to Face’, BBC TV, 10 October 1994.