Certain viewers are non-plussed by the casting of a musketeer of colour, but surely blind casting is preferable to an historical whitewash
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Howard Charles as Porthos in The Musketeers. Photograph: Larry Horricks/BBC
Studs in leather? Check. Swordplay? Check. Buckled swash? Check. Medieval cleavages? Check. Over-complicated facial hair? Check. Dead-eyed Peter Capaldi as Louis XIII's enforcer Cardinal Richelieu, that 17th-century prototype of Capaldi's Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It? Check.
There's so much diverting stuff in BBC1's current adaptation of The Musketeers that you might have missed perhaps its most intriguing aspect. One Telegraph reader didn't during their below-the-line rant against what they called a "dumbed down romp". "And," they sighed, mid-tirade, "there is the one obligatory part-black character to prove that multiculti [sic] political correctness outweighs historical accuracy."
What's the problem? That in the new adaptation, Porthos, traditionally a fat white comedy turn (think: Oliver Platt in the 1993 comedy The Three Musketeers) is a trim, sexy musketeer of colour played by Howard Charles.
But should Porthos be mixed-race? In one sense, sure, why not? If a black actor such as David Harewood, say, can play the (probably white) English nobleman Sir Harry Hotspur in the National Theatre production of Shakespeare's King Henry IV without critics whining about the historical accuracy (trickier in fact for a white actor to play Othello since the colour of the Moor's skin is inscribed deep in Shakespeare's verse), surely a mixed-race musketeer isn't a stretch.
But that isn't the issue. Rather, the casting of Porthos works as a homage to the parentage and race of Alexandre Dumas père, author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo (and father of Alexandre Dumas fils, who wrote La Dame aux Camélias). Alexandre père's father (or, if you prefer, the père's père), General Alexandre (Alex) Dumas, was black Haitian, the son of an aristocratic French father, Marquis Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie, and a freed slave, Marie-Cesette Dumas. And he was a general in Napoleon's grande armée.
Certainly, Howard Charles is aware of that ancestry. In a recent interview in the Cambridge News the actor said he had been inspired by reading The Black Count, Tom Reiss's recent book on the life of General Alexandre (Alex) Dumas. "He was a general, when I guess there weren't many brown people around in uniform, so I was really attracted to that element," said Charles. Alex's dad sold the boy as a slave to pay for his passage to France (that's remedial parenting classes for you, Marquis de la Pailleterie) before buying his freedom. Later, Alex rose through the ranks of the army to become a general before he was 30. He was so effective that that the Austrians called him Der schwarze Teufel ("the Black Devil"). During the French revolution fought with other black men in a unit called the African Legion.
But does any of this legitimise having a mixed-race Porthos? If it confounds the unwarranted presumption that he was white, then why not? What this casting does, helpfully, is challenge the increasingly implausible myth of a Europe that was altogether white before large-scale 20th-century immigration from former colonies. The "historical accuracy" that some people want from Sunday-night costume dramas may demand that Europe was whitewashed, but that doesn't mean the rest of us have to follow suit.
We've been here before. I once wrote about claims that George III's consort Charlotte had African ancestry. We'd had theories – shattering to white supremacists, intriguing to the rest of us – that Beethoven was black, so why not a black queen of England? What was most striking to me in all this was that the US city named after her (Charlotte, North Carolina) had used these claims to help improve race relations. Perhaps Queen Charlotte's story could, I argued then, do the same over here. It hasn't, as you'll have noticed. That, I suspect, is why it's worth casting a mixed-race actor as Porthos – to shake some Europeans out of their racist delusions.
• This article was amended in 29 January 2014 to correct references to Charles's ethnicity from black to mixed-race
There's so much diverting stuff in BBC1's current adaptation of The Musketeers that you might have missed perhaps its most intriguing aspect. One Telegraph reader didn't during their below-the-line rant against what they called a "dumbed down romp". "And," they sighed, mid-tirade, "there is the one obligatory part-black character to prove that multiculti [sic] political correctness outweighs historical accuracy."
What's the problem? That in the new adaptation, Porthos, traditionally a fat white comedy turn (think: Oliver Platt in the 1993 comedy The Three Musketeers) is a trim, sexy musketeer of colour played by Howard Charles.
But should Porthos be mixed-race? In one sense, sure, why not? If a black actor such as David Harewood, say, can play the (probably white) English nobleman Sir Harry Hotspur in the National Theatre production of Shakespeare's King Henry IV without critics whining about the historical accuracy (trickier in fact for a white actor to play Othello since the colour of the Moor's skin is inscribed deep in Shakespeare's verse), surely a mixed-race musketeer isn't a stretch.
But that isn't the issue. Rather, the casting of Porthos works as a homage to the parentage and race of Alexandre Dumas père, author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo (and father of Alexandre Dumas fils, who wrote La Dame aux Camélias). Alexandre père's father (or, if you prefer, the père's père), General Alexandre (Alex) Dumas, was black Haitian, the son of an aristocratic French father, Marquis Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie, and a freed slave, Marie-Cesette Dumas. And he was a general in Napoleon's grande armée.
Certainly, Howard Charles is aware of that ancestry. In a recent interview in the Cambridge News the actor said he had been inspired by reading The Black Count, Tom Reiss's recent book on the life of General Alexandre (Alex) Dumas. "He was a general, when I guess there weren't many brown people around in uniform, so I was really attracted to that element," said Charles. Alex's dad sold the boy as a slave to pay for his passage to France (that's remedial parenting classes for you, Marquis de la Pailleterie) before buying his freedom. Later, Alex rose through the ranks of the army to become a general before he was 30. He was so effective that that the Austrians called him Der schwarze Teufel ("the Black Devil"). During the French revolution fought with other black men in a unit called the African Legion.
But does any of this legitimise having a mixed-race Porthos? If it confounds the unwarranted presumption that he was white, then why not? What this casting does, helpfully, is challenge the increasingly implausible myth of a Europe that was altogether white before large-scale 20th-century immigration from former colonies. The "historical accuracy" that some people want from Sunday-night costume dramas may demand that Europe was whitewashed, but that doesn't mean the rest of us have to follow suit.
We've been here before. I once wrote about claims that George III's consort Charlotte had African ancestry. We'd had theories – shattering to white supremacists, intriguing to the rest of us – that Beethoven was black, so why not a black queen of England? What was most striking to me in all this was that the US city named after her (Charlotte, North Carolina) had used these claims to help improve race relations. Perhaps Queen Charlotte's story could, I argued then, do the same over here. It hasn't, as you'll have noticed. That, I suspect, is why it's worth casting a mixed-race actor as Porthos – to shake some Europeans out of their racist delusions.
• This article was amended in 29 January 2014 to correct references to Charles's ethnicity from black to mixed-race
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