Red Velvet uses imagined experiences based on the often-forgotten, but true, story of Ira Aldridge, an African-American actor who, in the nineteenth century, built an incredible reputation on the stages of London and Europe.

This Student Edition, with an introduction and notes by Lydia Valentine, considers the way Alridge used theatre and Shakespeare as spaces of racial activism; how white actors were viewed as superior Shakespearean actors by virtue of their race; the legacy of Ira Aldridge and his influences today; and the performance history of the play and how it has impacted the way we talk about Black performance histories.

It includes an original interview with the playwright Lolita Chakrabarti and the original director, Indhu Rubasingham.

Red Velvet, it turns out, isn’t a celebration of an artistic trailblazer. It’s a tragedy of intolerance. * Washington Post *

Lolita Chakrabarti OBE works as an actor, writer, dramaturg and producer. Her writing for the stage includes Red Velvet (2012) and Hymn (2021) and adaptations of Invisible Cities (2019), Life of Pi (2019) and Hamnet (2023). Red Velvet won Chakrabarti the Charles Wintour Award for Most Promising Playwright at the 2012 Evening Standard Theatre Awards and, the following year, she won the award for Most Promising Playwright at the Critics' Circle Awards and received the AWA Award for Arts and Culture.

Lydia Valentine was awarded her PhD by King’s College London and Shakespeare’s Globe as part of LAHP’S Collaborative Doctoral Award programme. She is currently the blog editor for the Early Modern Scholars of Colour Network (EMSOC) and one of the organisers of ‘The Abstract’ research seminar series at KCL. Her research examines the relationship between race, kinship and embodiment in early modern drama.