The Bard in Colour – Pride Magazine

How RSC gives Shakespeare a beautiful black transformation

Stepping into the production of RSC meant being greeted by a parade of perfectly declared uniform faces, citing Shakespeare with a hard rough with a hard upper lip. Theatre, which meant “diversity,” meant that someone from Oxford was cast in place of someone from Cambridge. But the times are changing. Over the past decade, the Royal Shakespeare company has created one of the most meaningful pivots in British theatres. It embraced the power, existence and perspective of people of color, allowing Shakespeare’s words to resonate with new meanings, fresh rhythms, and modern truths. And it works and Fatham is the latest and exciting production along this journey.

Let’s be clear. Shakespeare’s plays are a lot: poetic, political, messy, funny, dark. But most of all, they are elastic. His words have been bent for centuries. So when you put a black actor in one of these roles, it doesn’t just change who is on stage. It changes what is possible. Open space for fresh interpretations. It raises questions about race, class, gender and inheritance, which they now feel urgent, even if they didn’t exist.

RSC has been on this trip for a while. Create Julius Caesar, a landmark of 2012, sets modern Africa and describes the company as a political thriller. Directed by Gregory Dolan, he starred Patterson Joseph as Brutus. This was not a Shakespeare play with black actors, but a play that was transformed by its context. The text remained, but the world it lived in was charged with new heat, tension and political weight. Shakespeare has become something completely different. Something electric.

Then in 2016, Hamlet returned with the lead over Paa Pasa Sea Do. This is a young black man who stands up to his sadness, anger and identity in a kingdom that has never been built for him. His performances were magnetic, sharp, layered and emotionally raw. When he said, “I have recently, but I’ve lost all my miracles because I don’t know,” it didn’t sound like existential anxiety. It felt like a quiet heartbreak of someone trying to survive in a world that didn’t see them.

Now, in 2025, RSC is not Elsinore, but a co-produced fat ham, a Pulitzer Prize-winning play by James Ejam, who rethinks Hamlet at a black family barbecue in the American South. It’s not a traditional adaptation, it’s completely new. Our Hamlet is juicy, a strange black man visited by ghosts, who has a lot of talent, taking in family drama and generational trauma. But instead of revenge, he plans a way of life. How to laugh. How to find joy.

And here’s it: Fatham is funny. It’s really interesting. It certainly plays with Shakespeare’s themes, but with a wink and a smirk. While throwing the killer into one liner, it’s theatres that enjoy masculinity. Playing like listening to the audience hearing howling, Gen Z hums to trap beats between scenes. It is joyful, theatrical, acquiesced black, and the RSC doesn’t just present it. They defend it.

Because we don’t cast black people in Shakespeare. It’s about taking up space. It’s about changing the story. That’s what to show to a young black girl who can become Juliet, not just nurses. They can be made Othello, or juicy, remixing Shakespeare in their own voice, with their own stolen items.

Therefore, he wears a hat on his RSC. This evolution will last a long time. The work of a bard is not static. It’s alive. And in the hands of black artists, it is becoming even more powerful.