Is The King and I racist? There has been a great deal of ink spilt in Australian journals, blogs and websites over the last few weeks suggesting that there is something rotten in the state of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s fifth musical. The story, adapted from the famously unreliable memoirs of Anna Leonowens, governess to the children of King Mongkut in the 1860s, on the surface deals with cultural clash, but crucially is about other things, many of which transcend issues of ethnicity. However, I’m informed that I will be shirking my duty as reviewer if I don’t tackle the race thing so apologies to those hoping to get straight to the ‘is it any good?’ stage.

I don’t believe for a moment that there was a racist bone in the body of either Oscar Hammerstein II or Richard Rodgers, just as I don’t believe there was a racist bone in the body of George Gershwin, the composer of Porgy and Bess, that other work nowadays regularly cited as being “racist”. These writers were white, middle-class, liberal intellectuals (much as the commentators of the last few weeks have been white, middle-class liberals), pushing reformist agendas if anything. I myself am a...