Review: RED VELVET, Garrick Theatre, February 2 2016

With the row over diversity in the Oscars nominations rumbling on, Red Velvet's transfer to the Garrick Theatre (until 27 February) is particularly well-timed, but, if truth be told, pretty much any month in the last 183 years would do, as the themes the play explores have not gone away, nor are they likely to any time soon.

It's 1833 and London's greatest actor - Edmund Kean - collapses on stage during Othello. Producer Pierre Laporte (French and therefore dodgy) asks American actor Ira Aldridge, (Black and therefore very dodgy) to take his place, playing Othello not in blackface, but as a black man. A Covent Garden debut was a big thing back then and the challenge presented by Aldridge's more naturalistic acting technique, his "uppity" confidence and most of all (with the anti-slavery movement gaining ground on the streets of London) his black body, drives the narrative towards its inevitable, if utterly maddening, conclusion.

At its best, Lolita Chakrabarti's play is a beautifully realised morality tale about how talent and goodwill are not enough to overcome fear and cowardice. We know Aldridge should be playing Othello (Adrian Lester, excellent throughout, is electrifying when he speaks Shakespeare's words and the actor and the character fuse). We even know that the most reactionary of Laporte's company know it too - they explicitly refer to the threat to their livelihoods of an influx of Jewish Shylocks, chubby Falstaffs and teenage Juliets. But we also know that, nearly two centuries on, a "black actor" is far too often seen as black first and actor second. And so, Aldridge gets shafted and pursues a life acting in touring productions all over Europe - their gain, London's loss..

Lester, though you can't take your eyes off him when he's on stage, hardly needs it, but he does get good support from a strong cast in which Mark Edel-Hunt and Ayesha Antoine are the standouts as Kean's odious son Charles (playing Iago, natch) and Jamaican maid Connie, who punctures Aldridge's carapace of confidence by speaking truth to power while holding newspapers spewing racist reviews of his performance.

If the framing device of the young female journalist's pursuit of the ageing Aldridge is a little heavy-handed in crowbarring in women's struggle for equality and if the crucial scene between Aldridge and Laporte sees them veer towards sloganising rather than speaking, that's a price worth paying for the passion on show and the reminder that the fight for practitioners from ethnic minorities to be fully established in cultural production is a battle that has lasted centuries - and still has a long way to go.

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