On April 14, 1936, a 10,000-strong crowd gathered outside the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem. Inside the building, history was about to be made. More than 100 black actors, nearly all of whom had never acted before, were about to take to the stage in a new production of Macbeth, relocated to Haiti and directed by a young Orson Welles, already a huge star because of his radio broadcasts.
Some were there to protest but, in the event, the show was a rapturous success, playing to sold-out audiences, transferring to Broadway, eventually touring America and establishing Welles as a visionary director like no other.
