Page 4 | Queer production of As You Like It at Shakespeare’s Globe

PotteringPondering · 2023-08-27T22:50:09+00:00

Spent the evening at Shakespeare’s Globe, at what turned out to be a queer production of As You Like It. Almost all the actors were cast as characters of the opposite sex, and several appeared to be trans actors. In the play, some characters have to disguise themselves as the opposite sex, so it was impossible to follow who’s who (‘Hang on, so that woman with a beard is meant to be a male character, who then is disguised as a woman; no, wait a minute…’). There were a few good individual performances, but artistically it was a complete dog’s dinner. It was shot through with sexualised queer stylings and dances, and ended with a speech (that definitely wasn’t written by Shakespeare) about how we’re all part of a big queer family, whether or not we wear nail varnish. Lots of kids were in the audience. It felt a little like finding yourself in a recruitment party for a transgressive sex cult, when what you really wanted was Shakespeare.

GCAcademic · 28/08/2023 10:30

You just know it will get a five star review from the Guardian, though.

The RSC recently had an age-blind production of this play which was at least a more original approach to ‘blind’ casting.

MyLadyDisdainlsYetLiving · 28/08/2023 10:28

PotteringPondering · 28/08/2023 10:12

Love your erudite contributions to this thread, and your username.

I now plan to identify as a pretentious wanker groundling in a hat who laughs at jokes no one else does.

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You are very kind, but “erudite” makes me smile. I bloody hated Shakespeare at school, couldn’t see the point or relevance of thirty bored teenagers reading language that was so obscure the opposite page was full of explanatory notes.

i got dragged to a matinee at The Globe not long after it opened as it was only a fiver. To say it was a revelation would not be an understatement. Seeing the plays in an approximation of how they would have been staged originally suddenly made sense to me - and now I’ve seen many plays in many of different places but I hold the Globe in great affection for being that place that turned it on for me. To see them forgetting their original mandate to use the space to explore the plays in ways you couldn’t do in a modern theatre makes me very sad.

Grammarnut · 28/08/2023 10:23

PotteringPondering · 28/08/2023 10:00

I was very British about it all, and whispered to the American tourist next to me: 'I'm pretty sure Shakespeare didn't write "We're all part of a big queer family".'

I'm now regretting not going full authentic Globe.

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Shakespeare wrote no such thing and we are not. 'Queering' is dangerous, intending the breaking down of boundaries as if this were always a good thing. Paedophilia is acceptable to Queer theory.

Grammarnut · 28/08/2023 10:20

RhannionKPSS · 28/08/2023 00:06

FFS!! So we had a non binary Joan of Arc and now this shit. How much more ridiculous can The Globe become…?

I stopped watching A Midsummer Night's Dream when I realised Helena had been recast as a gay man (that really does not work in the play as the couples are attracted to each other, e.g. Lysander intends to marry Hermione). Then a trans fairy turned up, a large man in a pale blue tutu and wings. I gave up at this point - it was on TV so I could!

FrancescaContini · 28/08/2023 10:16

PotteringPondering · 28/08/2023 10:05

A putrid Globe artichoke. Now that would have a poetic appropriateness to it.

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😂

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PotteringPondering · 28/08/2023 10:12

MyLadyDisdainlsYetLiving · 28/08/2023 01:08

Plays like As You Like It and Twelfth Night are already full of nods and winks about boys playing girls playing boys and the ridiculousness of gender stuff (from a 16th century perspective). As it’s written. Nothing else is needed text wise.

I really don’t mind different settings of the plays as there’s always a new perspective that I get from them. Plus it emphasises the universality of the human experience in that you can get them to work either via the original practices that The Globe did in Mark Rylance’s early days as AD, or by modern settings (the Adrian Lester Henry V was set in modern times and coincided with the invasion of Iraq and was very thought provoking). I can happily tolerate a bit of editing of the text to chop out some of the more problematic parts that modern audiences wouldn’t find acceptable (bits of anti semitism for example). I’ve enjoyed gender blind casting at The Globe eg Kathryn Hunter as Richard III or Vanessa Redgrave as Prospero. But when you start writing new speeches or messing around with casting decisions just to be edgy or different, it takes away from the integrity of the play and it just becomes a production “based on” Shakespeare.

And now I sound like one of those pretentious wanker groundlings in hats who laugh at jokes no one else does because they only work in Elizabethan English. Sorry, I’m not that precious about Shakespeare, but after all he did say “the play’s the thing”.

Edited

Love your erudite contributions to this thread, and your username.

I now plan to identify as a pretentious wanker groundling in a hat who laughs at jokes no one else does.

OP posts:

EmpressaurusOfCats · 28/08/2023 10:06

TheDogthatDug · 28/08/2023 06:04

Why does everything have to be "queered"? I would love to know what normal everyday gay people* think of this.

people who crack on with their lives and don't make their sexuality the only facet of their personality.

I’m sick of it, personally.

And ‘queerness’ and gender have sod all to do with LGB rights.

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PotteringPondering · 28/08/2023 10:05

FrancescaContini · 28/08/2023 10:01

Take some rotten tomatoes next time

A putrid Globe artichoke. Now that would have a poetic appropriateness to it.

OP posts:

FrancescaContini · 28/08/2023 10:01

Take some rotten tomatoes next time

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PotteringPondering · 28/08/2023 10:00

CouldNotResist · 28/08/2023 09:49

There would have been a lot of jeering, heckling and drunken misbehaviour at the real Globe if the lower class ‘groundlings’ in the audience thought the performance was shite. I’m sure it would be entirely in keeping with the ‘authenticity’ of The Globe experience if the audience today made their feelings known in a similar fashion. Though I’d hazard a guess that you’d be asked to leave if you so much as rolled your eyes.

I was very British about it all, and whispered to the American tourist next to me: 'I'm pretty sure Shakespeare didn't write "We're all part of a big queer family".'

I'm now regretting not going full authentic Globe.

OP posts:

Mummy08m · 28/08/2023 09:51

CouldNotResist · 28/08/2023 09:49

There would have been a lot of jeering, heckling and drunken misbehaviour at the real Globe if the lower class ‘groundlings’ in the audience thought the performance was shite. I’m sure it would be entirely in keeping with the ‘authenticity’ of The Globe experience if the audience today made their feelings known in a similar fashion. Though I’d hazard a guess that you’d be asked to leave if you so much as rolled your eyes.

Good point! Very democratic review system, who needs a column in the Times when you've got some rotten veg haha

CouldNotResist · 28/08/2023 09:49

There would have been a lot of jeering, heckling and drunken misbehaviour at the real Globe if the lower class ‘groundlings’ in the audience thought the performance was shite. I’m sure it would be entirely in keeping with the ‘authenticity’ of The Globe experience if the audience today made their feelings known in a similar fashion. Though I’d hazard a guess that you’d be asked to leave if you so much as rolled your eyes.

RoyalCorgi · 28/08/2023 08:52

It sounds immensely tedious.

One of the things that is so irritating about this is that on the one hand, we have this free-for-all "ooh look aren't we daring and transgressive" approach, alongside an authoritarian view that apparently says straight actors can't play gay characters and "cis" actors can't play trans characters. They should at least aim for some consistency.

FrancescaContini · 28/08/2023 08:49

Sounds totally tedious

AncientBallerina · 28/08/2023 08:23

Mummy08m · 28/08/2023 07:57

But the ones playing female parts didn't have full on beards. They'd be made up so that you could suspend your disbelief and pretend they were women. Like trouser roles in opera - alto voice women singing as young men - they'd be convincingly masculine for the show.

It sounds like the actors on stage in op's show had deliberately confusing gender presentation as a kind of gotcha for the audience - challenging their preconceived ideas about whether women can have beards. The confusion, of whether the actor was supposed to be playing a man or a woman, was a feature not a bug.

My goodness I'd rather do pretty much anything with my evening

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This is what pisses me off about this whole movement so much that they think they are somehow ‘challenging/educating’ us with this oh so daring gender/ queer /whatever stuff like the 80s/90s never happened… and all the other times in history when e.g. men wore make up and heels.
PP right about the GenZs though - it will end. They have had enough.

TheCountessofFitzdotterel · 28/08/2023 08:17

WimpoleHat · 28/08/2023 07:55

They do this all the time now. It’s basically every production is an attempt to highlight how “right on” they are and so it completely loses its impact (and makes it potentially very difficult for a student approaching it for the first time actually to understand what’s going on). I went a few weeks ago and was struck by what a high percentage of the audience were clearly tourists. That’s where they’re heading: to be the London Eye of theatre and not a serious venue.

Presumably it would go down even worse with tourists than with local audiences!

Ugh I hate the making of things incomprehensible, it shows such a disrespect for one’s audience.

TheCountessofFitzdotterel · 28/08/2023 08:03

The Globe is shit now and is obsessed by gender. I have heard the same re several of their recent productions.

I have nothing against gender blind casting or indeed queer themed Shakespeare when it is done well which it often is. Mixing up genders can be interesting or it can simply be a way to get the best actor into a part. I recently saw a touring Tempest done with 4 actors including a female Prospero and male Miranda. It was great. But I am hearing time and again that the Globe castings are obscuring the story and putting actors into parts they can’t carry.

Allthegoodnamesarechosen · 28/08/2023 08:03

Maddy70 · 28/08/2023 01:19

All female parts were played by men in Shakespeare originally

Yes, and the streets ran with open sewers, people had amputations without anaesthesia, about a third of women succumbed to complications of pregnancy.

Women on the stage would have been seen as the equivalent of prostitutes.
Shall we reinstate these conditions as well?

Mummy08m · 28/08/2023 07:59

TodayInahurry · 28/08/2023 07:57

I hope that all the woke nonsense alienates most people so much that they won’t pay to watch it, so it dies a death and normal life can resume. I don’t go to theatres any more for this reason

They'll then blame the low revenues on pretty much anything but bad art.

Low tourism post brexit or post pandemic.
Cost of living.
Reduced government/LA subsidies.

No one will think "actually maybe my show was just a bit crappie"

TodayInahurry · 28/08/2023 07:57

I hope that all the woke nonsense alienates most people so much that they won’t pay to watch it, so it dies a death and normal life can resume. I don’t go to theatres any more for this reason

Mummy08m · 28/08/2023 07:57

Maddy70 · 28/08/2023 01:19

All female parts were played by men in Shakespeare originally

But the ones playing female parts didn't have full on beards. They'd be made up so that you could suspend your disbelief and pretend they were women. Like trouser roles in opera - alto voice women singing as young men - they'd be convincingly masculine for the show.

It sounds like the actors on stage in op's show had deliberately confusing gender presentation as a kind of gotcha for the audience - challenging their preconceived ideas about whether women can have beards. The confusion, of whether the actor was supposed to be playing a man or a woman, was a feature not a bug.

My goodness I'd rather do pretty much anything with my evening

WimpoleHat · 28/08/2023 07:55

They do this all the time now. It’s basically every production is an attempt to highlight how “right on” they are and so it completely loses its impact (and makes it potentially very difficult for a student approaching it for the first time actually to understand what’s going on). I went a few weeks ago and was struck by what a high percentage of the audience were clearly tourists. That’s where they’re heading: to be the London Eye of theatre and not a serious venue.

Dissidente · 28/08/2023 07:50

Saw a Globe on tour production of Julius Caesar last year. Couldn't figure out who was who because each actor randomly male or female seemed to be playing two or three characters wearing similar/ same costumes. There was some additional drama as a member of the audience fell over and had to be stretchered off by members of the cast using a prop... The cast began their scene again.
We got the impression they hadn't had someone watch it and tell them honestly how hard it was to follow. There were good bits, it's a shame this gender woo messes everything up.

Highandlows · 28/08/2023 07:23

Do not worry too much. Even the Gen Z teenagers I KNOW are rolling eyes 🙄

PermanentTemporary · 28/08/2023 06:28

I will forgive directors of Shakespeare practically anything tbh and might try and see this (though presumably sold out). It does sound a bit tedious though.

I went to a production of the Comedy of Errors about 40 years ago that added a couple of nonscripted jokes so it's clearly something people feel able to do (not sure how).