Red Velvet is about the nineteenth century black American actor Ira Aldridge. In a theatre dressing room in Poland an elderly and sick Aldridge prepares to play King Lear. The intrusion of a young female journalist forces him to look back on the defining moment of his...
"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."...
It's like being at a crossroads - a point of absolute, unequivocal change. It makes the blood rush. Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, 1833. Edmund Kean, the greatest actor of his generation, has collapsed on stage whilst playing Othello. A young black American actor...