[Livia]

I find it disturbing that a theatre can attempt to welcome only black people to a performance while at the same time casting black actors in roles clearly meant to be white characters. I saw a film recently where a black Guardsman was cast in Victorian times. The first black man entered the Guards in the 1986 and he had a bloody awful time. Pretending that there were black Guardsmen in Victoria's era is not only an insult to what he went through, it makes unthinking people imagine that it was true and everything was fine back then when the very reverse is true. For some people films will be the only history they ever get. I wonder why black people put up with it and don't demand that their history is not distorted. Casting black actors as members of English society in history is ridiculous, just as ridiculous as casting a Jew or a working class person. You can't have a discussion about this though, or you're racist.

We have some fine black actors in this country and seeing them in roles that are believable is great. But I saw The Mousetrap, about a middle-class group of people set in the 1940s and half the cast were black. I can suspend my disbelief, but not that far.