Shakespeare Performances in England 2009

Summary

18 January 2009. I'm in the Arts Centre at Warwick University, breathing down the necks of the men who are putting up the exhibition that's going to open in two days’ time, curated by my colleague, Tony Howard. I'm getting in their way, but I hardly notice, because my whole concentration is on the panels they're fixing to the wall. These storyboards are telling of a life – its ‘battles, sieges, fortunes’, ‘disastrous chances…moving accidents…hair-breadth scapes’ – that's making a Desdemona of me. Headlined ‘A Slave's Son at Stratford’, the storyboards remember a date fifty years ago. 7 April 1959. When Paul Robeson kept an appointment at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre.

He'd been somewhat delayed. In August 1950 the US State Department had ordered Robeson to surrender his passport. Any trip abroad ‘would not be in the interests of the United States’. The UK Home Office agreed. The actor, singer, international political activist for labour, race and social equality, was, a Home Office minute from August 1950 declared, ‘a nuisance’. He'd supported the Welsh miners in the 1930s (after he'd first come to London to play Othello in 1930); he'd ‘played a leading part in the formation of the World Peace Congress’ in 1949; given the chance, he would ‘play a dangerous part in his capacity of Saviour of the Negro and Oppressed Colonial’. So Robeson, stripped of his passport, was condemned to internal exile in the US. The FBI and MI5 kept him under surveillance. The House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) interrogated him in 1956. Blacklisted, denied work on stage or screen, the most extraordinary voice in America was gagged. But not silenced. In 1957, spearheaded in Britain by trades unions, artists and the Left, the ‘Let Paul Robeson Sing!’ campaign organized an international concert in London and Wales via the transatlantic telephone cable.