Raising the Bar: 100 Years of Black British Theatre and Screen Audiobook (Free)

Lenny Henry presents this groundbreaking BBC radio series exploring a hundred years of black Uk theatre, TV and film

In this fascinating ten-part series, Lenny Henry traces the longer and painful street that black Britons have travelled on stage and screen, from the overt racial discrimination of the 19th Century, via the thinly veiled slurs that persisted through the first 70 years of the 20th, to today’s more equal society.

Interviewing playwrights, actors, directors and filmmakers – including about Raising the Bar: a century of Black Uk Theatre and Screen Mustapha Matura, Roy Williams, Lolita Chakrabarti, Michael Buffong, Horace Ové and Steve McQueen – he tells the story of dark drama as well as the influential performers who have formed it over the past hundred years.

You start with the breakthrough arrival of Kwame Kwei-Armah’s celebrated tragedy Elmina’s Kitchen to the West End, he continues on to examine the changing depiction of Afro-Caribbeans on Television from Like Thy Neighbour to Desmond’s; explores the complicated stage history of Othello; focuses on how Caribbean migration has been reflected on stage and display screen; and journeys back again to the 1960s and 70s to explore the heart of protest that welled up with the development of the Black Power movement.

Furthermore, he looks at the burgeoning black theatre companies from the 1970s and 80s; graphs the breakthrough of a bunch of powerful new voices in the 90s; scrutinizes behaviour towards homosexuality; investigates the existing blossoming of new theatrical voices with origins in Africa and concludes with a look at future potential clients and possibilities for black British talent.