Red Velvet

'Chakrabarti has crafted a rich psychological study that's also a shrewd portrait of the theatre as an institution - its vanities and strange conventions, its politics and sense of community, the opportunities it presents for both progress and blinkered traditionalism.' EVENING STANDARD Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, 1833. Edmund Kean, the greatest actor of his generation, has collapsed on stage while playing Othello. A young Black American actor has been asked to take over the role. But as the public riot in the streets over the abolition of slavery, how will the cast, critics and audience react to the revolution taking place in the theatre? Red Velvet uses imagined experiences based on the true story of Ira Aldridge, a Black American actor who, in the nineteenth century, built an incredible reputation on the stages of London and Europe. This Student Edition contains commentary and notes by Lydia Valentine, Research Fellow and Lecturer at Shakespeare's Globe.

Lolita Chakrabarti OBE works as an actor, writer, dramaturg and producer. Her writing for the stage includes Red Velvet (2012) and Hymn (2021) and adaptations of Invisible Cities (2019), Life of Pi (2019) and Hamnet (2023). Red Velvet won Chakrabarti the Charles Wintour Award for Most Promising Playwright at the 2012 Evening Standard Theatre Awards and, the following year, she won the award for Most Promising Playwright at the Critics' Circle Awards and received the AWA Award for Arts and Culture. Lydia Valentine was awarded her PhD by King's College London and Shakespeare's Globe as part of LAHP'S Collaborative Doctoral Award programme. She is currently the blog editor for the Early Modern Scholars of Colour Network (EMSOC) and one of the organisers of 'The Abstract' research seminar series at KCL. Her research examines the relationship between race, kinship and embodiment in early modern drama.

Chronology Who was Ira Aldridge? Historical, Social and Cultural Contexts > Race, Shakespeare and Othello > Race and Performance in the Nineteenth Century > Black Shakespeare: Making Ira Aldridge Visible Red Velvet in Performance > Temporality > Sound > Metatheatricality > Staging the Characters Performance History and Critical Reception Themes > Tradition > Anti-Black Racism and Stereotypes of Black Masculinity > Forgotten Histories > Englishness and National Identity RED VELVET Notes