Indigenous Imaginings, 1895 (Theatre Royal)

In 1895, the Theatre Royal staged a production of a play entitled The Black Hawks, written by a man claiming to be called Arizona Joe, and featuring an all-white English cast in make-up performing tableaux of Native American scenes.

Arizona Joe appeared in the show – his real name was Colonel Joe Bruce. The production is described –

‘The production might be termed a pot-pourri as it embodies a smattering of incidents called from melodrama, the circus and that kind of entertainment usually associated with Buffalo Bill…a rush of Red Indians, dogs, torsos and ghosts, mingled in hopeless confusion, start the bewildered spectator; a continuous crack of pistols and guns, steadily maintained throughout the action of the play…Arizona Joe as the hero, liberates a prisoner from the clutches of the Hawks…’

The theatre was located here and the large building, which included an attached hotel, also took up the space now occupied by the Theatre Royal Car Park. The theatre was demolished in 1937 to make way for a cinema.

Plymouth has a history of staging plays with Native American themes, but never featuring Indigenous North Americans. Hiawatha, the 1855 pseudo-Native American poem by HW Longfellow turned into a more-pseudo-Native American musical by black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor in 1897 was performed in Plymouth several times in the twentieth century.