No blackface at Royal Opera

White opera singers will no longer wear black face paint when playing black characters at the British Royal Opera House.

The practice of putting black makeup on white performers was used in dress rehearsals for Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera” (A Masked Ball), but the singer portraying the sorceress Ulrica did not use the makeup in Thursday’s opening-night performance, Royal Opera House spokesman Christopher Millard said.

Novelist Philip Hensher noticed it while attending a dress rehearsal and criticized the practice in the Independent newspaper. The Royal Opera House would not discuss the reason for the timing of its new policy, which was announced within a day of Hensher’s article.

“We had tried various means to see if there was a way in which we could resolve the issue of whether a white actor should be ‘blacked up’ and decided we should cut it,” Millard said Monday. “It doesn’t work. It’s racially insensitive.”