Review: ALL IS BUT FANTASY starring Whitney White, RSC, The Other Place

I recall my first encounter with Shakespeare - and it was an encounter, a thump in the solar plexus. I was a 14 year-old schoolboy listening to teachers talk about iambic pentameter and blank verse when I wanted to know about the goodies and the baddies in this play - a literary format I had never seen in real life. What am I doing here?, was the question in my mind. 

The insurmountable distance came as much in the names and the language as it did in the jargon. I knew a Mark or two, but a Brutus? A Calpurnia? A Lepidus? And what did “Prithee” and “Forsooth” mean? Honestly, an afternoon spent on differential calculus was a breeze after that.

There was no easy path through these Elizabethan thickets and it riles me to this day that it took years, perhaps decades, for me to see the beauty in the language, catch the universality of the love and the hate, understand how Shakey took a scalpel to human psychology to peel back its carapace of delusions and reveal its bleeding heart.

I was, like the vast majority of theatremakers, audiences and readers of the plays through history, white and male, so I was starting on second, maybe third base, and I still just didn’t get it. So how much further does a 14 year-old black girl have to travel? 

Where are the women with agency, the women who do not die, the women who do not arrive on stage to feed a man a line and then withdraw again? Where are the black characters? With the exception of one, usually played by a white man in blackface, natch.

Muhammad Ali, as so often, put it best in a BBC interview in 1971.

“And I always asked my mother, I said, "Mother, how come is everything white?" I said, "Why is Jesus white with blond hair and blue eyes? Why is the Lord's supper all white men? Angels are white, the Pope, Mary, and even the angels." I said, "Mother, when we die, do we go to Heaven?" She said, "Naturally we go to Heaven." I said, "Well, what happened to all the black angels? They took the pictures?" I said, "Oh, I know. If the white folks is in Heaven too, then the black angels were in the kitchen, preparing the milk and honey." She said, "Listen, you quit saying that, boy."

Whitney White, a black girl in the Midwest, was far more distant than me from Shakespeare - perhaps only tentatively walking to the plate, never mind on base - but she got the plays, she got the drama, the comedy, the tragedy. And she first devoured them and then tilted them, turning some upside down. She also put black women at the centre of the narratives, returning agency, representation and universality to the texts, injecting class and privilege explicitly into the texts. Adding songs too, she re-imagines (more re-invents really) the familiar, transforming it into something both shockingly new and comfortably familiar.

There may be none of the great boxer’s requested black angels in All Is But Fantasy, but there is a black Juliet, a black Lady Macbeth, a black Emilia and a black Richard III. Sure it takes a large slice of chutzpah and, as is almost always the case with such boldness, it doesn’t all work, but enough does to make me understand that colour-blind and gender-blind casting is not merely a redressing of balance, but a hands-on defibrillator shock delivered to 400 year-old works that sets them back on their feet.

Wright plays Woman and Daniel Krikler plays Man, the generic titles allowing them to inhabit four different characters in four different plays, but retain a thread that connects them. The genders are separate not just in function, but, crucially, in power whether it be poor doomed Emilia with the weasel Iago, but pixie dream girl Juliet crazy in love with the swaggering Romeo. 

They are supported by three witches (Georgina Onuorah, Timmika Ramsay and Renée Lamb, a veteran of Six, with which this show shares themes and vibes) who go on to form a Greek Chorus, challenging audience and actors alike. The cast is rounded out by Juliette Crosby who, with a touch of nominative determinism, plays Juliet and Desdemona as Pre-Raphaelite idealised visions - exactly how the roles were cast for hundreds of years.

What could feel like the experience of observing a somewhat dry theatremakers’ workshop - there’s a lot of meta breaking of character and the fourth wall is pretty flimsy - is continually lifted by songs that allow the passion to fly. Tom Knowles’ band are onstage throughout, sometimes interacting with the cast and cycling through genres of music such as Blues, Gospel, Rock and Pop without a misstep. Everyone can sing, and sing really well, though mics and belting in a house of this size can sometimes overwhelm the message with too much volume. 

If there are moments in the four plays, each roughly an hour long and presented in pairs, where you find yourself wondering if it’s all working and, inevitably, one gravitates towards one’s favourites (like White, for me, it’s Othello), you’re bowled along by the scale of the ambition and the commitment to its execution. It’s never less than a delight when key speeches are spoken, and critiqued, on stage.

It’s pushing half a century since I first heard the dreaded iambic pentameter phrase, but I’m still learning now and it is to the credit of the show, and the RSC, that I learned as much across these four hours as I had across the previous four years.

All Is But Fantasy is at The RSC, The Other Place, Stratford Upon Avon until 21 February