Welcome to the first of a new series of virtual roundtable discussions hosted by Wales Arts Review, where a group of experts offer a detailed breakdown of a particular issue from several cutting-edge perspectives. In this episode, Gary Raymond chairs a talk about the diversity problems perceived with Welsh National Opera’s suffragette comic opera Rhondda Rips It Up! The most vocal responses to this bawdy musical telling the life story of leading activist Margret Haig Thomas (Lady Rhondda) have been ones of celebration and enthusiasm, but Wales Arts Review has rarely received more correspondence from readers about one show than on this occasion. Those contacting us were raising issues that the general critical responses had seemingly missed, issues about the ethnic diversity of the show, about the representation of women, of the way the show tackles Haig Thomas’ homosexuality, and the strange case of the show’s sense of humour.
Dr Alix Beeston is a writer and scholar based in Cardiff. She is currently Lecturer in English at Cardiff University, where she teaches twentieth and twenty-first century literature and visual culture, feminism and gender studies, and critical race studies.
Norena Shopland has extensively researched the heritage of LGBT people and issues in Wales. Her work has appeared in international media, radio and TV, and she regularly provides advice and support on the subject. Her book Forbidden Lives: LGBT stories from Wales (Seren Books) is the first on Welsh LGBT history.
Rajvi Glasbrook Griffiths is a deputy head teacher. She is a director for the Caerleon Gateway Project and organises the annual Literature Caerleon festival. Rajvi has written for the IWA, Wales Arts Review and Western Mail.
Dr Michelle Deininger is a lecturer in Humanities at Cardiff University’s department of Continuing and Professional Education. She is a writer and critic specialising in Welsh women’s literature.
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Gary Raymond
If we could begin by talking about perhaps the most striking thing about Rhondda Rips It Up!, which was the issues surrounding its lack of diversity.
Alix Beeston
Sure, well, like others – and certainly many in the audience on the opening night in Newport – I did enjoy the madcap, frenetic energy of Rhondda Rips It Up! as part of the show’s feminist revaluation of this key figure in Wales in the early twentieth century. And I could see how its comedy, which so often sat right at the edge of propriety, resonated with the suffragettes’ lawbreaking strategies of civil disobedience: for this show, to rip it up is to run riot, to rip up the rulebook for female behaviour and to reimagine women’s place in society.
But unfortunately, the comedy also fell prey to the more generalised pitfalls of commemorating the #suffragette movement today. I was reminded of the backlash against the 2015 British film Suffragette for its conspicuous whiteness – which was even more overdetermined when, on the film’s press tour, Meryl Streep and the other white stars wore tees saying, “I’d rather be a rebel than a slave”. These words were taken from the great suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst, and they are emblematic of not only the whiteness of the movement but how it actually co-opted the language of other women’s struggles, black women’s struggles, in articulating its concerns.
Any commemoration of the suffragette movement needs to reckon with its racial and class politics, not sweep them under the rug. But there were no women of colour in the cast or crew of the WNO production at all. None.
Rajvi Glasbrook Griffiths
I agree – it promised a great deal for the first five minutes: the set was creative and vibrant and Lesley Garrett’s singing and presence was impressive and absorbing. But the all-white cast was immediately apparent.
I had broad problems with its ideas of comedy. Was the ‘ample iron thigh’ libretto necessary in the same breath as food being the point of comedy? The Hunger Strikes and the Cat and Mouse Act were both reduced to the ridiculous. A smarter production would have been able to treat the serious with humour without making it daft. All of the fainting over willies and salivating breathlessness over cakes did was actually confirm the famous banner seen early on, a “diagram” showing a women’s mind only fit for thoughts of kittens marriage and domestic chores.
Alix Beeston
The jokes that troubled me the most were the ones that only worked, as far as I could tell, in racial terms. I’m thinking especially of the song about the “beautiful big black ballot box” to which the wealthy, white suffragettes gained access.
Rajvi Glasbrook Griffiths
The overwhelmingly white audience smiling along to the 100% white cast singing ‘It’s big and it’s black and it’s beautiful’ to the ballot box was wrong. Apart from the obvious racial overtones, the right to vote is not a phallic triumph.
Michelle Deininger
Yes, I came away feeling decidedly uncomfortable.
Norena Shopland
Playing devil’s advocate – perhaps the objections to the ‘beautiful black box’ comment could be developed more? After all, people could argue that it is indeed a black box, and it was carried around the stage.
Alix Beeston
Okay; so sure, it’s an actual black box – but the line isn’t funny unless it also gives a wink to different kinds of access, in this case, to beautiful black bodies. I think in these moments the danger is that the comedy will condense the significant political issues at stake, or simply gesture toward them vaguely, without actually working through them in any meaningful way. Jokes can be beguiling or seductive in that way – they can promise more than they deliver.
Gary Raymond
We have to state clearly though, don’t we, that it’s surprising to see that there seems to be a place for race-based humour in theatres that would never get on television nowadays? The fetishisation of the black body – the sexualisation of the blackness as some kind of primal unshackling of the buttoned-up white woman is straight out of best-forgotten 70s sitcoms. And this white sexualisation of black male bodies has a strong tie to the oppression of people of colour throughout history. Using as a source of humour white women sexualising the black male body is hugely problematic.
Isn’t this the actual argument for diversity? Diversity means that when an at-best-questionable innuendo about blackness is written into the show, there will be people in the cast and crew who will notice and say “this is inappropriate”.
My feeling coming out was that I had just watched a Daily Mail production for a Daily Mail audience, but maybe it was much more innocent than that. But I couldn’t help feel WNO have produced a particular type of show for a particular audience, knowing that by not challenging any of that audience’s sensibilities then they will have something people will rave about. As Paul Chambers pointed out on my radio show recently, this is a show designed to be not engaged with critically. Which is I think is a very sad thing.
Alix Beeston
Certainly, the celebratory tone of the show makes any kind of critique seem in bad faith. The production felt like a very belated party for Lady Rhondda, a kind of welcome into popular Welsh cultural history that she should have received many, many years before, and at the same time an optimistic rallying-cry for continued feminist activism and labour in her wake. But then why put on an opera? Why not just have a party instead?
The show seemed to me to be a huge missed opportunity, especially since it wanted to draw a line of continuity between the suffragettes and the feminist cause today. Any ongoing feminist work worth its name should, I think, pursue gender equality as it connects to other forms of social difference – race, class, sexuality, and so on.
Michelle Deininger
Like you say, Alix – a missed opportunity to do something more.
Alix Beeston
The irony is that Margaret Haig Thomas herself was highly progressive, in her way: she spent literally decades working for better rights for widows and children, for instance. The open-mindedness of her politics – as well as the limits of her politics – were in my view underserved by the show.
Norena Shopland
As for drawing lines, I think the critical responses have been limited. The Wales Arts Review piece, for instance, states that ‘nobody had heard of Lady Rhondda before,’ which is to ignore the work that I, and others interested in LGBT history of Wales, have been doing on raising awareness of her. I featured her in my book, and when I worked as the historical consultant for Pride Cymru’s ‘Icons’ exhibition we included her. An exhibition that has been touring for over a year.
Gary Raymond
So, here there is both again the raising of a suspicion that WNO have created a show for a certain audience, perhaps an audience that would never normally engage directly with LGBT issues, or with journalism, literature, and art, that engage with LGBT issues. And then the feeling that this Rhondda Rips It Up! has done very little to highlight the reality of work in this area. So it’s a big fun musical that is all white, and largely skirts over LGBT issues?
Norena Shopland
Also, the comments made praising WNO for its outreach program of workshops do not take into account that none of the workshops included diversity. When I was invited to get in touch about a possible LGBT workshop one suggestion I made to the WNO was the issue of cross-dressing – particularly given there is so much in the production. At the time of Lady Rhondda, women could still be arrested for wearing ‘male attire’ as it was assumed they were up to no good. It is not until after WW2 that it started to become socially acceptable, and now it is not even thought about in western cultures. But in many countries today women are banned from wearing trousers, and if caught can face being viciously whipped, or other punishments. I have spoken to youth groups about this and it always results in astonishment, followed by heated debates and engagement. Again, a lost opportunity.
Rajvi Glasbrook Griffiths
The way sexuality was handled was problematic throughout. Notably also, Humphrey, Lady Rhondda’s husband, was a portrayed as a ‘Carry On’ caricature of homosexuality – camp and ridiculous.
Gary Raymond
To go back to the critical response for a moment, most critics seem to have been bowled over by it, and yet the whole reason we are having this conversation is because so many people have spoken to me about the problems they saw in the show that are not being represented in the media. We’ve already talked about how it’s a celebration, and it has defeated most critics who have been won over by the party atmosphere.
Rajvi Glasbrook Griffiths
I’m not sure if the critics have been won over, but I can’t agree with them on the whole. Steph Power’s review in The Stage made me rethink: ‘If the fetishisation of cakes, ballot boxes and penises raises eyebrows, perhaps the point is that – still, today – genuine equality remains elusive for women while conflicting stereotypes of humourless feminism and chick-lit triviality persist’. This production was every bit full of ‘chick-lit triviality’ and only served to corroborate it.
Gary Raymond
There is no getting away from the fact a substantial amount of the humour comes from the portrayal of the supporting cast suffragettes as being silly.
Michelle Deininger
I think there is something in the notion that the show is sweeping audiences away. The Times review ‘def[ies] anyone not to be swept away by this rule-breaking production’. And there lies the main problem – that the audience is swept away, uncritically, by the production’s enthusiasm in putting what they present as an untold story centre stage. Innuendos and quandaries are ‘deliciously observed’, it goes on, and that again underpins the problems with the production – it’s something to be consumed, something palatable, something delicious like the scenes with the cakes (which to me seemed to be infantilising women’s food choices and had more in common with an 80s edition of Woman’s Own magazine – but that’s an aside). Watching this performance of white, middle-class identity, I wondered how anyone could connect with the issues – about voice, representation, equality – that are still so pressing today if they weren’t white and middle-class themselves.
Gary Raymond
So again, the suspicion that WNO know very well which side their bread is buttered.
Norena Shopland
The comment I would make, and is one I made in my blog on Rhondda Rips It Up!, is that WNO’s attitude towards diversity, according to my experience with them, is that it is of very low priority. This is particularly annoying given the numerous opportunities they had to publicise this production to an LGBT audience either through me, who had been in touch with them for about a year, or through organisations such as Pride Cymru or Stonewall Cymru.
Gary Raymond
This is further supported by WNO Artistic Director David Pountney in January putting out a rather ill-advised statement in response to accusations that the theatre industry of Wales was struggling on diversity issues, claiming WNO operate a “policy of colour-blind casting”. The use of this anachronistic phrase suggests the only blindness in WNO is to accusations of their own institutional racism. I think we all fully recognise that the problem of diversity is an issue that goes deep in opera (and other performing arts) and you can’t just solve that overnight. But to say you operate a policy of colour-blind casting is to say you have no problem, you recognise no problem, and that you are, essentially, leading on this. And then you put up a show with an all-white cast and crew.
Norena Shopland
Precisely. Under the Equality Act (2010) WNO have a duty of care to ensure all of society is represented, but they can’t even be bothered to include the words ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’ on their site so that it comes up on their search engine. Even when they have a play with gay content. Indeed, according to their own website lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender people simply don’t exist – put the words into WNO’s search engine and the return message is ‘sorry, we couldn’t find anything.’
Michelle Deininger
The representation of lesbian identity was so problematic. It felt, at times, like something out of a pantomime. This was an opportunity to decentre popular understandings of the suffrage movement as something predominantly led by heterosexual women. But it played it safe.
How does this opera represent modern Wales? It’s a story about the past, but it’s as much about its future. In an age of Brexit, what does it mean to have a predominantly white, middle-class audience giving the cast a standing ovation for a story that is made palatable in the eyes of white, heteronormative experience? And while the lack of any meaningful diversity in the cast may well point more towards the issues prevalent in attracting a wider range of people into opera and the arts more generally, what does it say about modern Wales as it tours the country perpetuating a vision of the country’s past and its future? Is this how we want to be seen?
Gary Raymond
A good point to end on.
Thank you everyone for taking the time to talk.