Scottish Opera surrenders to the woke wars over Nixon in China production

The art form of opera is under attack. Hostile forces are homing in and scoring hits. Scottish Opera recently withdrew its lauded February production of John Adams’ Nixon in China from a nomination for a prestigious South Bank Sky Award. Why? 

A hitherto unheard-of band of self-appointed wokies, the British East and South East Asians in the Screen and Stage Industry (BEATS) had accused the company of the previously unknown crime of “yellowface”. The unheard-of was tripping on the unknown. Scottish Opera folded without a fight.

These campaigning arrivistes can’t even get their own acronym right – BESEASSI, to be strictly accurate. Not so catchy, but who cares about accuracy when your mission is simply to beat others around the head with any convenient politically correct stick that comes to hand. Uh, oh! I feel a hate campaign from #acronymdenouncerbias coming on. 

The BEATS’ charge sheet? White singers were cast as Chinese. Chairman Mao, played by English tenor Mark LeBrocq was especially offensive. He hailed from Cambridge, not Beijing. He was also Caucasian. Outrageous racism. This was demeaning to Chinese people. Especially in Glasgow.

Not many Glaswegian Chinese spoke out. None, actually. Labour MP Sarah Sarah Mei Lei Owen did – for the good folk of Luton, her constituency. It is not known how many dogs Lutonians have in this fight. 

Obviously, many of Glasgow’s estimable Chinese community are frustrated tenors. It’s well known they have troubadoured outside 282 Hope Street vainly for years. Their failed attempts to break down the locked doors of Scottish Opera’s Theatre Royal have, at long last, been recognised by BEATS. I’m sure they are grateful. 

“Yellowface in opera has to stop,” commented British baritone, Julian Chou-Lambert. “It’s like blackface, but applied to East and South-East Asian characters. It’s offensive and dehumanising for ESEA people. Opera folks, please learn about this and do better.”

Other members of the cast had, apparently, been made up to resemble people of Chinese ethnicity. Hitherto, this caused serious offence to no one but Chou-Lambert. The liberal Guardian was full of praise for Nixon in its February review.

As the role of President Nixon was performed by black baritone, Eric Greene, Scottish Opera was well placed to defend the choice of the cast on the grounds of artistic integrity, but some plonker in the organisation caved at the first BEATS tweet. 

Not one of the twelve directors on the Scottish Opera board spoke up in their company’s defence. Indeed, my exhaustive search has failed to identify who actually took the decision to pull the nomination. Was it chief executive, Alex Reedijk? The backstage cleaner? Who knows.

It may have seemed easier to simply back away from picking a fight with BEATS and hope these issues go away. But BEATS is an organisation as insidious and persistent as any cultural revolutionary in Mao’s China. They and their partners in crime are mounting a determined challenge to artistic freedom in the name of faux racism. They need to be confronted head-on. Patting them on the head and auto-apologising will simply encourage a further denouncement down the track.

BEATS has allies in its campaign. An American music theory professor from New York’s Hunter College, Philip Ewell, has received widespread bravos for his denunciations of classical music racism.

Ewell has “whiteness”, not “yellowness”, on the brain. During the Floyd riots, he compiled a glossary of music-related terms in common usage which he chose to label as euphemisms for whiteness: “authentic, canonic, civilized, classic(s), conventional, core (‘core’ requirement), European, function (‘functional’ tonality), fundamental, genius, German (‘German’ language requirement), great (‘great’ works), maestro, opus (magnum ‘opus’), piano (‘piano’ proficiency, skills), seminal, sophisticated, titan(ic), towering, traditional, and western.” All white terminology, he babbled. The Spotify of oppression.

Ewell thinks Beethoven is a nonentity elevated only on the grounds of white German supremacy. I leave you to judge. What he thinks of Richard Wagner is unknown. 

The logic of the likes of Ewell is self-servingly circular. Since everything is about race, according to him, any time you seem not to be talking about race – referring to someone’s piano skills, say – you are actually talking about race by dint of ignoring the topic. It’s no more than the savvy deployment of the rhetorical technique of turning an “absence” into a supposed “presence.” But the gullible are taken in. 

Sadly, BEATS and Ewell are not alone. The influential Sphinx Organization is another outfit determined to denigrate the Western musical tradition. In the US, Sphinx has been campaigning for race consciousness in classical music since 1997. It advocates separate competitions for young black and Hispanic musicians, supports minority-only ensembles, and provides colour-coded training and financial assistance. Actually, they promote racism by putting their supposed “victims” in designated silos. Rich white folks cheer them on, beat their breasts about poor black folks, then smugly move along. 

They are quota maniacs, insisting on strict percentage representation of minorities in orchestras even though there is often a shortage of skilled musicians in these groups. I’m told they’re having a bit of a problem applying the principle to string quartets, but I’m sure they won’t let a petty detail like a maximum number of four get in their way. 

BEATS has no foundation for its authoritative outpourings. Its fourteen strong working group share one thing in common. They all derive their livings from publicly subsidised arts activities – often with self-conferred roles. 

The CV of one activist – a writer “covering queer, religion, race and gender”, also claims she “is a proud Sussex girl & loves Jaffa Cakes”. There you go. No wonder Scottish Opera shook in its shoes. Being denounced by someone who loves Jaffa Cakes is a game set and match. Forget the knee. Take the biscuit! Or, is that a cake?

Opera is, probably above all, about the suspension of belief. Without that it is meaningless. Directors need artistic licence to assign whoever, in their view, is best suited to deliver in a role. In his current, tragically final, production, Lady MacBeth of Mtsensk, the late director Graham Vick took audiences on a journey unusually populated by black principals – with the exception of Sergei who was white. Not very Mtsensk. The up its own fundament logic of BEATS should have condemned Vick for Oblastwashing. The Oblast population of Mtsensk has remained curiously silent on the subject. 

Vick’s likely rebuttal, that Nicola Sturgeon was busy delivering daily Covid lectures, so unavailable to play Lady MacBeth – a role for which she is typecast – would have held no water. Reductio ad absurdum. Of course, what Graham Vick was up to was his Regietheater speciality of re-interpreting an artwork to point the finger at a contemporary social dilemma. This is also known as artistic freedom. A concept hated by the likes of BEATS.

Where does this Alice in Wonderland perspective on opera inevitably lead? Will aging, plump sopranos be banned from taking on youthful, courtesan roles such as Violetta in La Traviata? The eternal problem of sympathetically casting the Moor, Othello, will become insoluble. What about “trouser roles”, like Cherubino in Figaro? But that is probably more to do with self-identifying lifestyle choices, so OK.

Can American composer Mark Grey’s new tour de force, Frankenstein, ever be performed in his home country? BEATS must be in a bit of a quandary since the creature was played at the Theatre La Monnaie in Paris by Topi Lehtipuu, a Finnish tenor. The news that they are insisting Grey scour downtown New York for the genuine article, an electrifying performer with a bolt through his neck, to take on the role at the Thomas Street Flea Theater in Tribeca is probably only taking time to reach us due to internet packet loss.

Of course, all art has to move with the times. The memory of George Mitchell’s Black and White Minstrel Show, the show that graced British prime time television from the late ’50s to the mid-’70s, featuring white singers in heavy black face paint rehashing American south slave ballads, makes everyone cringe now. Back in the day, the audience topped 16 million. It was a different era. The BBC apologises on its website today, but simply pocketed the ratings at the time.

The recently rebooted Kung Fu 1970s series on US TV replaces David Carradine, always an unlikely Shaolin monk, with Olivia Liang, a more believable spiritual traveller. No activist group forced the change. It just makes better television. Bending to relentless agenda-driven pressure groups is, however, quite different from understanding that time does not standstill.

Even so, surely to shrug and “move on” after the Scottish Opera debacle would be wise. I don’t think so. Today, the struggling company is small, doing its best, but perpetually under the financial cosh. 

That the company was forced to surrender the artistic credit it deserved for successfully mounting a challenging work, Nixon in China, is shocking enough. That Scottish Opera compounded the crisis by failing to mount a robust campaign in defence of its own artistic standards is incomprehensible.