Janet Suzman and Khayalethu Anthony in Solomon and Marion at the Baxter Theatre Centre in Cape Town last year. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod

Dame Janet Suzmans remarks that theatre is a white invention, a European invention and white people go to it tell us more about the limits of knowledge hers in particular than anything else. Ive just done a South African play, Suzman added, in comments reported yesterday: My co-star is a young black man from the slums of Cape Town. Totally brilliant actor. I saw one black face in the room, at the Print Room. I rail against that and say, why dont black people come to see a play about one of the most powerful African states?

I recognise in those words the riposte of an exhausted producer who has had enough of low audience turnout. If your idea of build it and they will come does not quite pan out, what better to do than turn on the audience? Its an age-old reaction and can be put down to just that in most circumstances.

But for Suzman, a champion of black rights in apartheid South Africa, and niece of the great anti-apartheid champion Helen Suzman, to have stated that white people go to the theatre, its in their DNA reminds us of the bad old days of eugenics, and worse.

Frustration is no excuse for what is at face value a racist assessment: racist about white people (they have a special theatre DNA?), and above all about black people. It may have been a casual remark, a cliched assessment, but its impact coming from a distinguished actor/director of a distinguished civil rights family is shameful. I hope that Suzman recants what she has said, and takes time out to do what most theatre-makers do when a production is failing to find an audience: check your repertoire. Maybe what youre offering is simply not what the people want.

Theatre does not have one simple definition, of course. People of African and Asian descent have been making it for thousands of years, in open spaces, in temples and on the road.

My direct ancestors African American slaves and freedmen and women made theatre in the European tradition, from early on. For example, the African Grove Theatre, founded by William Henry Brown and James Hewlett, travelled throughout the Caribbean, performing Shakespeare to enslaved people working the tobacco plantations and the murderous sugar cane fields.

The first play written by an African American The Drama of A Stowaway was presented by them, in 1823. It was a success, playing to black and white audiences alike, but mostly black. My instinct is that the play spoke to something the audience knew, in the language they knew, and allowed them to find a human space within their tragic experience.

The African Groves base in New York City was subject to police raids, harassment and white opposition. The company moved to the Lower East Side, within the black community, but harassment forced them to close.

I find this story particularly moving because it reflects what happens to the work of Asian, black, Chinese and First Nations theatre in the west. It is the first to be cut when times are hard; the first to not appear in the canon; the first not to be reviewed when space is limited. In some ways it is boring to recount these travails over and over, but they dont go away. They are always there.

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Janet Suzman says black people arent interested in theatre. How ridiculous