Queer production of As You Like It at Shakespeare’s Globe

Oh, absolutely.

And I think there's a place for different kinds of Shakespeare. If I were taking a group of GCSE students to see their set text, I wouldn't be likely to choose the Globe's version - I'd want something less cluttered up with interpretation.

But there is a ton of Shakespeare being performed. It's not as if, if you missed this version of As You Like It, you'd never have the chance to see it again, done differently.

I can see the value in trying different approaches that might bring in new audiences, or might attract people to Shakespeare who'd not liked the plays before.

Anyway as I said below mixing up genders in casting can work fine, as it has done in many productions I have seen. But I don’t really know why you’re being sceptical about it obscuring the meaning in other productions, and some plays are trickier than others in this respect.
The gender of the actors is only one of the many things that can obscure or communicate the story (I’m sure we’ve all seen those productions where they’re all in identical military uniforms and you can’t follow differences of family or status) but in some plays it can have a big impact, and if you’re new to the play it has more of an effect than if you know it like the back of your hand.

I am totally in favour of taking kids to Shakespeare but they get different things out of it to adults ime. A 6 year old is going to be better than an adult at enjoying it without being able to follow it fully.

My six-year-old was.

You weren’t seeing it for the first time though were you?!

I'm sure you'd need to think carefully when you cast your play. But, FWIW, I saw MND last night with a cast of four, who were all playing whatever gender came handy, and it was fine. And that's another play with gender as a theme, though to a lesser degree.

I don't honestly believe someone who can follow Shakespeare in general would be totally thrown by this sort of cross-gender casting. I can believe they might be thrown simply because the play was a bit rubbish; that's fair. But I don't believe it's inherently too complicated to do it this way.

I think it would absolutely make it harder to follow if you’re having to remember who is a character who is a woman dressed as a man and who is meant to be an actual man but is being played by a woman. Especially if the woman dressed as a man is being played by a man. It’s probably easier to do without confusion in plays where gender isn’t already a main theme.

I think the speech about queer families sounds naff and preachy.

The rest sounds fun. Why on earth not have some fun with Shakespeare? You really struggled to follow a play because of some cross-dressing? Really?

It's pretty clear Shakespeare was having fun with cross-dressing. It's absurd to think that people were politely 'suspending their disbelief' and watching boys got up to look as much like women as possible. For one thing, Shakespearean stage makeup is pretty stylised - it's not realistic - and for another: why the fuck would there be constant jokes about cross-dressing if it wasn't meant to be funny?!

In the 80s, anyone who suggested that makeup, long hair & frills made a man into a woman or that short hair & a suit made a woman into a man would have been seen as talking regressive bollocks.

Someone has probably already pointed out that Shakespeare's female parts were played by BOYS, not by MEN. Beardless youths with unbroken voices, in fact.

As a digression, consider Lady Macbeth's first appearance in the play: Shakespeare supported the young teen actor by giving him a letter to read aloud. If he could make his legs carry him out on to the stage, he had a crib for his first few lines. Any nervous trembling or a wobbly voice would be put down to good acting of strong emotions.

We ever so slightly older people need to be educated cause we wouldn't otherwise know how to challenge stereotypes

I mean, it's not as if those of us dinosaurs who grew up in the 60s and 70s saw any stereotypes challenged at all, is it?

I've developed the impression that theatres have given up on attracting new audiences who haven't already seen all the most popular Shakespeare plays multiple times. So now the focus is on staging the plays in a fresh way for audiences of jaded people who know As You Like It by heart.

it's the preachiness that's so irritating. We ever so slightly older people need to be educated cause we wouldn't otherwise know how to challenge stereotypes - a bit like that recent episode of Casualty where the trans woman ( i.e. a biological male) is first really really gracious about not going on the march because it's for women ( as if) and then saves the day by jumping in and rescuing said women from nasty types....

This Lesbian is also dead sick of it too.
I have zero interest in the TQ+

I'm convinced people are going to hate us for all this crap.

They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays ALL the parts

At this point I would genuinely prefer pro-agricultural propaganda. Give me the-harvest-needs-You ads over Costa mastectomy cartoons any day.

Sorry to sound flippant. It's really dreadful if you think too hard about it.

A bearded adult male claiming to be a princess, no way

I'm sure it's all meant to be brave and transgressive and boundary pushing and make us think but the only thing it makes me think is 'Grow the fuck up.'

I saw a similar production of Henry V a few years ago. Loved seeing women playing the monarch and other leaders — that looked realistic and inspiring.

But it was ruined for me by seeing the princess played by a bearded man. That was just nonsense, and pointless. Theatre is meant to create a world you lose yourself in, even while it may challenge your preconceptions. Women as war leaders, fine. A bearded adult male claiming to be a princess, no way.

The never ending arrogance of those who believe they're enlightened enough to 'correct' everyone and everything, even those who died centuries ago, because obviously they know so much better and have come along to fix things.

Bores.

Every generation really does think it has invented sex.

There's a Charles Paris mystery which takes the mickey out of a 'progressive' director doing something like this to the play and that's years old.

Iirc the twist there is that both the male and female roles end up played by one egotistical man.

Nowt new under the sun.

😁
and all the penis-people and womb-havers merely players ….

I don't like gender blind casting at the best of times. Even when it's clear who the actor is supposed to be, I keep thinking, "woman pretending to be a bloke/man pretending to be a woman," and it's a real distraction.

Possibly I have seen it where that didn't twig for me, and I am ok with that. I am entirely happy with actors playing any cross sex, cross race, or cross species role, with or without the aid of theater tools like make-up and prosthetics, so long as I find it convincing, which is to say I am not constantly aware of the subterfuge. But it is not an easy task in most cases to accomplish. Men dressed as giraffes always seem to look like men dressed as giraffes, unless you are going for an extremely abstract kind of production.

I sometimes feel like we are in a period like some mid 20th century film and television, where it was normal to rewrite classics to make them more palatable for the masses, making Sherlock Holmes a romantic lead or whatever. It was pretty shit productions then, and it is now too.