ABSTRACT
In the period between the two global wars, despite the massive, though at the time under-recorded, influence of the East on Western theatre, the Asian contribution to British theatre was generally much less than that of the African American and the Caribbean. The story of a young Indian 'untouchable' woman whose love for a white English tutor brings down political and religious wrath, it began and ended with votive tableaux and acknowledged none of the European conventional rules. Records suggested few black actors, perhaps only two, had been allowed to play the Moor in Britain since Aldridge in the 1860s, and none was known to have done so in the current century. Robeson had explored the idea, as had the League of Coloured Peoples at Adams's suggestion, but nothing came of it until Adams revived the notion during the war.
