The browning version

Bruce Norris, the author of the play Clybourne Park, has refused to allow his play to be staged in Berlin after he discovered that one of the African-American characters would be played by a white performer in blackface. Meanwhile, the Royal Shakespeare Company has come under fire when it emerged that the Chinese play The Orphan of Zhao would be performed by a mostly Caucasian cast.

Meanwhile, a glance at the credits for Baz Luhrmann’s much delayed movie version of The Great Gatsby reveals that the corrupt Jewish businessman Meyer Wolfsheim will be played by Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan. But he doesn’t white up. So that’s OK.

PS: Accusations levelled at Cloud Atlas as well. Such larks.

PPS: Tom Sutcliffe covers similar ground in The Independent

Hanbury Street: who nose?

Not entirely sure what to make of this. An LA graffiti artist, Mear One, has painted a mural in Hanbury Street, east London, which, according to how you choose to interpret it is either an attack on global capitalism or a collision of several different bonkers conspiracy theory tropes with a distinct stench of anti-semitism. “Oh, but those big-nosed guys on the Monopoly board aren’t meant to be Jewish,” say the picture’s defenders. “They’re just, y'know, capitalists. With big noses.” The fact that the mural appeared in a predominantly Muslim area has escaped nobody’s attention.

Without wanting to descend to a pointless game of whataboutery, maybe those Danish cartoons were just pictures of some bloke. With a turban. Oh, and while we’re there, check out Amazon’s Dachau jigsaw; and, from a free speech perspective, William Saletan at Salon. My view? None of these things should be banned; but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s sensible to do them either.

Meanwhile, on a cheerier note: over here, I write an entire blog post about one footnote.

PS: Panic over. The mural’s going. But not before it becomes the victim of another moment of impromptu street art.

Duran Duran and the Olympic gig: white boys always shine

I’ve never been a big fan of positive discrimination, mainly because it doesn’t work; inevitably it’s easier to base quotas on empirical criteria such as race or gender or disability, rather than things that are harder to quantify but no less real, such as socio-economic status class, there, I said it. But I couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow at the choice of acts for the gig marking the beginning of the Olympics. Leave aside for the moment the galumphing tedium of all the performers on the bill; Duran Duran were moderately amusing for a couple of albums in the early 80s, while the others (Paolo Nutini, the Stereophonics, Snow Patrol) have never even aspired to such lofty standards. That said, do we really think that London in 2012 is best represented by a dozen or so white men in their 30s, 40s and 50s, many of them playing guitars?

Obviously nobody wants blatant tokenism: I’m old enough to remember the line-up for the Band Aid single, with a few members of Shalamar and Kool & the Gang hovering around the edges. But for an event that aims to show off 21st-century Britain to the world, this is a bit embarrassing.

PS: In the Telegraph, Lucy Jones fumes.