Edinburgh Fringe in yellow face row as play branded ‘publicly licensed racism’
The Edinburgh Fringe is facing calls to introduce “guidelines” for next year’s festival after a yellow face row in which Asians claimed to have been subjected to “publicly licensed racism on stage”. The campaign group British East and South East Asians working in the Theatre and Screen industry (BEATS) took issue with Tea Ceremony, a play in which a white male actor, Marios Ioannou, appears as a geisha, a Japanese hostess trained to entertain men. The group claimed that the show, which sees Ioannou wear white face paint, deployed “unashamed yellow face” which it described as “extremely triggering and traumatic” to those who “bear historical weight” of historical abuses.