Ethnicity considerations in casting (theatre)

[manicinsomniac]

Do you think it matters if the ethnicity of an actor matches the character they playing or fits in with the era/location of the play?

The human in me says no it doesn't matter at all.
The artist in me says it's very important to be authentic.

At the moment I think the artistic part is winning but I feel like I ought to fight against that for the purposes of equal opportunities.
AIBU

(nb, I'm not talking about school plays or amateur plays, I cast both of these based almost purely on talent and a little on personality but never on appearance. I'm talking about professional theatre - which I certainly don't have any jurisdiction over so it's all hypothetical really!)

I think there is an argument that it matters when ethnicity is part of the story - othello, for example - but otherwise it isn't important at all.

The difficulty is that if you're talking Western plays then there are comparatively few roles for non-Caucasian actors unless you ignore authenticity - so you have to ignore authenticity. You may know that Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest would not have been black, but equally there's no reason why a black actor couldn't play the role.

I think it depends on the play. For example, could you have a white man playing Othello (or Michael Jackson) and if you did, would he have to,black out his face? Would this be controversial?

I think generally speaking, though, ethnicity is not important and some degree of artistic license is allowed. However, you couldn't really have black and White people playing siblings If the story doesn't explain it, but you could have mixed people in the chorus, cast etc. For example, Fagan in Oliver could be black, as I don't think that would detract from the story.

For the most part, I would say ethnicity is unlikely to really matter in casting - some actors just 'fit' and embody certain roles better, regardless of race. However, it could end up significant in terms of artistic direction if the play is one that focuses on race, e.g. Othello. I suppose it depends on what the director deems important enough to include.

Interesting subject though, I'd never really given it much though.

It's an interesting question, I've often wondered about this. Presumably acting jobs don't have to conform to the same equality roles as most other jobs, for eg you would need to specify gender and age for a role. I'm guessing ethnicity would fall into that category, for the sake of the realism.

In a way it shouldn't really matter in the sense of suspending disbelief I suppose, but I guess it would make a difference in something like EastEnders if one member of a family looked completely different to everybody else but they were all supposed to be related, since there are so many soap storylines about people not being who they think they are etc.

On the stage I think it's easier to have different ethnicities, it's not so close up, and you can go with it a bit more, especially in ballet or opera etc.

Actually, I do remember thinking about this when I went to see the 2011 production of 'Frankenstein', where Victor and his father were played by actors of different races. Despite this, it didn't seem to make much of an impact as they both worked entirely convincingly as a father-son relationship.

What is authenticity though? Era/location is not always set - e.g. I have seen Shakespeare's 'Much Ado About Nothing' set in Renaissance Italy (as it was written) but also modern US, 70's Cyprus and modern India (Meera Syal was a smashing Beatrice). In Branagh's version (Renaissance Italy) Don Pedro was Denzel Washington (black) and his brother was Keanu Reeves (white) - how authentic would you consider that to be?

In acting / professional theatre appearance plays a huge part and ethnicity is part of appearance. Even in amatur productions people select on appearance. A talented, but ugly actor is unlikely to get as many opportunities as a good looking actor.

I saw the (RSC?) Julius Caesar production set in modern Africa - worked perfectly. Maybe it's more about what works in the specific production?

I don't think it ought to matter.

I don't think you can be totally authentic anyway, and I think a lot of very period-bound plays look dull. I remember seeing some of the early stuff at the Globe when it was first made, and they were so excited about it being a perfect reproduction they kept going for 'authentic' attempts at clothing and so on, and it just looked a bit, well, dull. We're not Elizabethans anyway: there's no way we can respond to (say) an all-male, mostly white cast in doubles and hose in the way the original audiences did, so how can it be authentic?

Plus it makes other, unavoidable anachronists just look even more jarring.

These days theatre seems to operate on the principle that actors of any ethnicity can play characters originally written as white, but characters written as a specific non-white ethnicity are cast with actors of that ethnicity. I can see the reasons for this though it is inconsistent!

Film tends to be much more 'realist', no black/white sibling pairings eg.

Add this year, the RSC in Stratford-upon-Avon are staging Othello, where Iago is also black.

I think it depends on the play. For example, could you have a white man playing Othello (or Michael Jackson) and if you did, would he have to,black out his face? Would this be controversial?

Interesting that Othello has come up so much. Laurence Olivier was one of the most famous Othellos and I do think it was weird. His teeth were practically dayglow in his blacked up face and he still didn't look like a 'moor' really.

Sometimes, racial considerations have stopped me from staging shows (though, as I said above, I wouldn't not cast someone). I wanted to put on Hairspray at school but it really is quite fundamental to the plot that several of the key characters are black and we only have 6 black children in the senior part of the school - of whom only 2 enjoy drama and only 1 is any good at it. So I ruled it out! Maybe that was wrong though, I don't know.

I take the part about it not mattering in many roles.

I was thinking about it tonight because I went to see Shakespeare in Love in the West End last night which had a black actress playing the Nurse. There are a few lines in the script about Thomas Kent being her nephew and, because that actress was white, they were turned into jokes. It did work but then I found I became distracted because the nurse was played very much as a racially stereotyped black nursemaid from the Southern States and I couldn't help thinking 'but a rich young woman in Tudor times wouldn't have a black woman as her personal nurse.' Maybe if the director hadn't made a feature of her race in the script or made her quite such a stereotype it wouldn't have regisetred.

There's a really interesting book by Antony Sher about doing Titus Andronicus in South Africa, and doing the casting for that, which was obviously incredibly racially tense. I don't remember everything he said, but remember that he cast the queen's two grown-up sons as mixed race, which makes the fact her lover is black and she's white (which is a big point in the play) slightly different. I like that idea of using race as something to make an actual point with, rather than just for the look of the thing.

If ethnicity or race is a 'thing' in the play then yes, authenticity might be preferable. I saw 'view from a bridge' the other night and the characters looked like Italians and Italian Americans. Or say, taste of honey.
However if the plays not about that - say Macbeth or the importance of being earnest, then I wouldn't think it matters at all.

Cross post.

Am I right the RSC won't run Othello without a black lead actor? I have a vague feeling this is so.

john - but won't you then get into a situation where, in the UK/US, race is most often a 'thing' in plays when it's non-white or non-WASP, so you'd end up with a situation where you're exacerbating the idea that race is only visible then?

Whereyouleftit - I think moving the era and location of Shakespeare can work brilliantly or it can be painful. I've seen and performed in examples of both. But a director can still create authenticity within what he's chosen - eg if he wants to set Macbeth in WWII then the marker of authenticity becomes 1940s Germany not 1500s Italy.

I won't condemn it without seeing it but I am a little dubious of a black Iago, to be honest.

I think it's very much an 'it depends' situation.

Lea Salonga is of Filipina origin and has performed Miss Saigon and Norm Lewis has played Javert. I saw Norm Lewis on Broadway when he played the Phantom and he was amazing. I certainly didn't sit there thinking 'oh he's black', it made no difference to the performance. Talent is talent, regardless of race. I think, in stage performances at least, that not as much of a consideration, although of course there are roles such as Kim and the Engineer in Miss Saigon who are obviously of Asian origin, whereas Chris (the American GI) could be any race.

but a rich young woman in Tudor times wouldn't have a black woman as her personal nurse - would she necessarily not? It wouldn't have the same connotations as in the US South, but I don't see why she wouldn't have a black woman nurse.

But Shakespeare's nurse wouldn't even have been played by a woman, so I don't think thinking about Tudor stage 'authenticity' gets us very far, does it? The convention then was that boys played female roles, the convention now is that casting is race blind.

I don't think anyone these days would run Othello with a non-black Othello.

I like the extra depth given by clever casting of ethnic minority actors too. Though when family members are cast as different races (white parents and black child, eg) I get distracted thinking of possible back stories, which I appreciate is missing the point rather.

Surely if a play is not about race, casting is easier in that you'd just try to get the best mix of actors you could?

Yeah, you can only really do it if you're confident people already know the story/it will very obviously not be a plot point.

Sorry, cross posted.

john - what I mean is, you can end up with a situation where 'about race' becomes code for 'about people who aren't white'.