Outside, the low skies of a Sunday afternoon incipient with mist seem little higher than the International Anthony Burgess Foundation‘s exposed brickwork, while inside the audience appears blown together like leaf drifts, wrapped in the colours of autumn and the layers of winter.  

As proceedings commence with an introduction by writer and academic Okechukwu Nzelu, fleeces are unzipped, scarfs unravelled, tea put aside. Ekow Eshun, writer, broadcaster and curator of the Hayward Gallery’s 2022 exhibition In The Black Fantastic, has hit the north to talk about The Strangers, his fictionalised history of five black men whose lives were both of their times and outside them.  

Our entry point is Ira Aldridge, the New York-born actor, who, having made his home in London in 1824, became the first black actor to take the lead in Othello, a play first performed more than two centuries before. Reading from the Burgess Foundation’s pulpit-like lectern, in a sustained act of imaginative empathy founded on his research into the records of the period, Eshun takes the audience into Aldridge’s thoughts on his opening night in the role.

Aptly enough, the effect is not unlike the process of method acting, so that, in getting beneath Aldridge’s skin, Eshun seems to channel something of the actor’s gifts. Putting himself in Aldridge’s place, he evokes the human being that somehow found it within himself to bear reviews barbed by the brutishness of racist tropes. The sting must have been all the greater in recognising that the aspersions had been weaponised by those who favoured the retention in the Empire’s colonies of a slavery that had been abolished in Britain for more than a decade. The spotlights of a London stage less cosmopolitan than today’s must have felt, at times, a lonely place.  

It is this quality of being set apart and singled out, this, as Eshun reminds us, “being made other”, that his subjects share, and to this experience that he compassionately attends. On more than one occasion he assures the audience that he had no intention of writing hagiographies, of sanctifying his subjects’ suffering, and reducing them in the process to holy martyrs. Instead, he captures very human souls, not redeemed by their traumas, but informed by them.  

Seen in this light, the wanderlust of Matthew Henson, the rediscovered explorer only lately given recognition for being the first to reach the North Pole, can be understood as an orphaned black man’s search for a place in a world in which he was shunted continually into the sidings. In the shadow of the man to whom he was ostensibly valet, the reportedly vainglorious Robert Peary, Henson came to feel more at home among the Inuit than in a United States where, to venture south, was to encounter segregation and worse.  

Although postcards of Aldridge are for sale in Manchester Art Gallery, neither he, Henson, nor the psychiatrist Frantz Fanon are household names. More familiar is Malcolm X, who Eshun describes following his break from the Nation of Islam and under threat of assassination. Closer to home, it’s Justin Fashanu’s story that most clearly follows the lineaments of tragedy.

A prodigiously gifted young footballer, Fashanu was subjected to the racist taunts typically rife among crowds in the 1970s and 80s, only to be dismissed in the dressing room by his own manager, Brian Clough, as “a bloody poof”. Coerced into coming out by the tabloid press, he was castigated in The Voice which described him in an editorial as “an affront to the black community”. It’s hard to think of anyone more lonely in their spotlight than the fostered child who suffered ostracism for being the first top-tier male British footballer to acknowledge their homosexuality.  

At the outset, Eshun declares his intention to do his subjects proud. In conveying their singular lives with such clear-eyed empathy, he does something more. He opens their hearts to our own. 

By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent 

 

The Strangers: Five Extraordinary Black Men and the Worlds That Made Them