Cutaway: Black Is Queen

Black is QUEEN

On June 1st 2021, my interview with Jodie Turner-Smith for The British Blacklist about her upcoming role starring in Channel 5’s Anne Boleyn was shared on Twitter. The first comment: “You cannot rewrite history so don’t try.” Concerns about ‘rewriting history’ have circulated ever since, a year earlier, on June 7th 2020, Black Lives Matter protesters pulled down a statue of Edward Colston in Bristol. Their purpose was to challenge the way history has commemorated Edward Colston as a philanthropist, selectively editing out the atrocities he committed in the name of the British Empire. The protesters pointed out the core problem with history – that it is never objective truth, but subjective memory designed to reinforce existing structures of power. To challenge structures of power, then, requires a certain ‘revising’ of history. But, what does it mean to change the race of a

Queen Charlotte

historical figure – to cast Jodie TurnerSmith in the role of Anne Boleyn? For me, it meant that, for the first time, I empathised with this distant historical figure. I found myself fuming at how Henry could be messing around his missus right under her nose. While this attests to the humanity of Turner-Smith’s performance, I also realised it pointed to the long-standing failure of British period dramas to cast actors that looked like me. >>

As Turner-Smith shared in our interview, it is a strange experience reading period novels and envisioning yourself as the protagonist, then watching their film or television adaptation and realising, “Oh wait a minute, there’s actually no place for me in a story like this.” But, who decided that there was no place for us in period dramas? Because, the truth is, Black Britons have also lived in this country for centuries. Take Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George III and respected monarch at the centre of Bridgerton, played by Golda Rosheuvel. For a long time, hypotheses have circulated that Queen Charlotte might have been Britain’s first Black queen. To erase us from period dramas is to erase our histories. For example, repeatedly choosing to cast white actors, like Elizabeth Taylor or Gal Gadot, to perform the Egyptian queen Cleopatra, contributes to the erasure of North African and Arabic people from film and television, while simultaneously reinforcing Europe’s white-washed historical depiction of Ancient Egypt in general. The difference between casting white actors to play Cleopatra, and casting Jodie Turner-Smith to play Anne Boleyn is that, while history has tried to erase Cleopatra’s potential African ancestry, the British education system does not hesitate to drill into students that Anne Boleyn was one of Henry VIII’s six white queens.

Gal Gadot as Cleopatra

Jodie Turner-Smith as Anne Boleyn

Of course, one might ask, why tell the stories of a white queen like Anne Boleyn over and over again anyway? In this context, the casting of Turner-Smith might be defined as colour-blind (or newly coined colour-conscious) casting – a practice August Wilson famously condemned, instead arguing that African American artists should create art that showcases ‘their own way of responding

to the world, their own values, style, linguistics, their own religion and aesthetics’.

On the other hand, retelling such “classically English” stories as the life of Anne Boleyn, or Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, by casting actors like Jodie Turner-Smith and Dev Patel in the leading roles, powerfully challenges audience perceptions about what “Englishness” actually is. They probe audiences to reconsider the way that television and film have traditionally represented Britain’s history; instead reminding audiences that we have always been here, we will be here as long as we like, and our right to be represented on screen is as equal as everyone else’s. Hannah Shury-Smith n

Golda Rosheuvel as Queen Charlotte