Bassett's distance makes some white actresses of her generation look foolish, overwrought, and plain, partly because what will always make black female performers startling onscreen is their physical difference from white women.
The ensuing hypocrisy and attempts at a cover-up will be familiar to all of us who follow the news, and the proximity of audience and performers lent startling immediacy to the drama.
Zoe Coombs Marr by Ellis Parrinder Photograph: /Belvoir Oedipus Schmoedipus, playing this month at Belvoir, has a startling opening sequence in which performers Zoë Coombs Marr and Mish Grigor kill themselves and each other in increasingly violent and bloody ways for a full five minutes.
As if working as a starving actor isn't hard enough, performers now have a startling new competition: robots.
He's a consistently startling producer and a hardworking, high-concept performer.
If this half-episode felt essentially like a smaller slice of the original three, without live performers, Episode 5 was a more startling departure.
He was not the only poor performer at Old Trafford but his contribution was startling enough to be highlighted by Alan Shearer and Ian Wright on Match of the Day and it was exasperation in their voices.
As Anthony, Daniel Boys (a contestant in Andrew Lloyd Webber's Any Dream Will Do) was simply a black hole where a performer should have been, a charisma-free zone of startling proportions.
And Ms. Brown accents this shaded, nuanced dance landscape with startling moments of contact with the fabric, like small collisions, when performers poke through or duck under the billowing, gathering white swathes.
While stillness and silent transmission of thought are the most important parts of small-screen acting, a performer also needs to be able to shatter the mask for startling contrast.
