Angelique Rockas

Angelique Rockas: The Woman Who Fought for the Casting

Told what Angelique Rockas was doing with her theatre company, the prominent London casting director Irene Lamb reportedly reacted with a single question: "WHY IS SHE DOING THIS?" What she was doing was putting an Afro-Caribbean actress into the lead of Genet's *The Balcony* and a veteran Parsi actor into Brecht's *Mother Courage*, in a British theatre that in 1981 did not cast non-white actors in European classics. Four decades on it is unremarkable practice. In her own words: "Today this type of casting is commonplace, BUT IT HAD TO BE FOUGHT FOR."

Boksburg, and Two Nannies

Rockas was born and raised in Boksburg, South Africa, to Greek immigrant parents — a father from a poor family in Kakouri, in Arcadia, and a mother from wealthy Kalamata landowners. She is disarmingly frank about the privilege that came with it: "I remember having two nannies... I was a spoilt and imperius little miss." She was educated at St Dominic's Catholic School for Girls, took a bachelor's degree in English literature with a philosophy major at the University of the Witwatersrand followed by an honours degree, and trained as an actor at the University of Cape Town's drama school under Robert Mohr. She speaks English, Greek, Afrikaans, French and Italian.

"Bladdy Grieks"

Her politics were formed by a double exposure. The convent school education showed her institutionalised racism from the inside; simultaneously, the Greek immigrant community was itself held socially inferior by Afrikaners and British settlers alike, and told so — *Bladdy Grieks*. A photograph of Rockas at a protest ran in a newspaper, and a local MP telephoned her family with an unmistakable warning: "I didn't know that your daughter was communist!" She took part in Greek War of Independence celebrations alongside the anti-apartheid advocate George Bizos, who nicknamed her *l'enfant terrible*. After university she left, having concluded that apartheid South Africa had no room for either her politics or her profession.

London, and Theatro Technis

In Britain she worked with Theatro Technis, the Greek Cypriot company that made sociopolitical theatre, including dual-language productions about the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. There in 1982 she played Medea, and *The Times* wrote of "the wrath of Medea spurned erupting in the dangerous passions"; another account called her a volcanic barefooted Anna Magnani. Her other stage roles included Io in *Prometheus Bound*, set in the Greece of the 1970s military junta — she has called it the most profound drama ever written — and Lady Macbeth at the Woolwich Tramshed.

The Company She Built Alone

Rockas founded Internationalist Theatre single-handedly, originally as New Internationalist Theatre; sources date the founding to September 1980, though her own record gives April 1981. It received charity status in 1986. The declared policy, reported in *The Stage* in April 1981, was an internationalist approach to the choice of plays and a multiracial drama policy with an even mix of performers from different cultural backgrounds. The productions were not minor: *The Balcony* by Genet (July 1981), *The Camp* by the Argentine dramatist Griselda Gambaro (October 1981), Brecht's *Mother Courage and Her Children* (May 1982) directed by the former RSC director Peter Stevenson, Pirandello's *Liolà* (July 1982), the London premiere of Tennessee Williams's *In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel* (1983), Strindberg's *Miss Julie* (1984) and Gorky's *Enemies* (March 1985). Her earliest effort, a 1981 *'Tis Pity She's a Whore*, she describes as tentative — it also gave early work to Declan Donnellan.

The timing was pointed. *The Balcony*, about escape from an intolerable reality, opened during the Brixton riots; *Enemies*, about the exploitation of Russian serfs, played while British miners fought pit closures. She played Carmen in *The Balcony*, Emma in *The Camp*, Yvette in *Mother Courage*, Tatiana in *Enemies*, Miriam in the Williams premiere, and the title role in *Miss Julie*, deliberately declining to play the part as an ethnic type and going after the character's inner turmoil instead.

The Critics Who Didn't Get It

Resistance was open and printed. *Time Out*, reviewing *Mother Courage*, asked what on earth an American sergeant was doing in seventeenth-century Europe. The *Financial Times* complained of *Liolà*'s peculiar medley of Italian accents. When Renu Setna played the Chaplain, a critic demanded to know why a Pakistani actor was taking the role — misidentifying the nationality of a Parsi actor in the course of objecting to him, which rather made Rockas's point. Yet Lindsay Anderson, Nicolas Roeg, Cameron Mackintosh, John Barton and Mary Selway all came to see the work.

Screen, and the Archive

On film Rockas played the Maintenance Woman opposite Sean Connery in Peter Hyams's *Outland*, Nereida in Costas Ferris's Silver Bear-winning *Oh Babylon!*, and Henrietta in Nicolas Roeg's *The Witches*; on Greek television she led as Ms Ortiki in the ERT series *Emmones Idees*. She refused roles she judged demeaning, including a Russian air hostess in a BBC series, and refused to anglicise herself as so many minority actors had: "My surname was Rockas, and Rockas it had remained." Her papers are held by the British Library, the British Film Institute — including correspondence with Elia Kazan and Derek Jarman — the National Archives and the National Library of South Africa; she is in the National Portrait Gallery's collection. An Orthodox Christian, she now makes fabric artworks held at the Benaki Museum in Athens.

Why Angelique Is Called a Genius

The claim does not rest on acting technique or intellect but on a rarer thing: institutional foresight, plus the stubbornness to act on it alone. Rockas identified a structural exclusion that almost everyone in British theatre either did not see or found convenient, and rather than argue about it she built a company to disprove it empirically — staging Genet, Brecht, Pirandello, Strindberg, Gorky and Williams with multiracial and multinational casts and letting the productions make the case. She did this with no institutional backing, in the face of named opposition from critics and casting directors, in a country where she was herself a foreigner. The insight was correct and the practice she was mocked for is now orthodox. That is a real claim, and her own framing of it — it had to be fought for — is accurate.

The counter-case is substantial and should be stated plainly. No source consulted here calls Rockas a genius. Internationalist Theatre was a small fringe operation with a working life of roughly five years and seven principal productions; it did not survive, and the change in British casting practice that followed had many causes, from the Black theatre movement to funding policy, which makes sole attribution untenable. Her screen career, while it includes Roeg and Connery, is a record of supporting parts rather than of a major performer. And a good deal of the surviving account is her own, given in interviews and in archives she assembled, which is a legitimate way for an unfairly overlooked artist to secure her record but is not the same as independent assessment. The honest verdict is a pioneer with sound judgment and exceptional nerve — an important figure, on a small scale, who was right early.

Legacy

The archives are the point. British Library, BFI, National Portrait Gallery, National Library of South Africa: Rockas made sure the evidence of what Internationalist Theatre did, and of what was said about it at the time, would outlast the reviews. Anyone who now wants to know whether colour-blind casting in the European classics was resisted in Britain, and by whom, can look it up.

Achievements

• Notable work: Medea
• Notable work: Miss Julie
• Notable work: In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel
• Notable work: The Witches
• Worked as film actor, stage actor and television actor