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!)

PPs have mentioned The Importance of Being Ernest as being colour blind. In fact there is a line where Gwendolen comments on Ernest's blue eyes which raised quite a laugh at the staging I went to with an all black cast. There was another line which caused the mainly black audience to laugh even more loudly...

I saw a professional production of Romeo and Juliet some years ago where Juliet was of Chinese/Japanese heritage, her father was Indian, her mother white and Romeo was Afro-Caribbean/white. The only incongruity came when Juliet's mother claimed to be the same age as Juliet was now when she gave birth to her. You could almost hear the audience thinking, "There is no way you are 14 years old.

I'd hope not! Colour blind casting works 95% of time but when colour is key to plot then extra care has to be taken.

Agree with most that it's an 'it depends' situation.

As you say - in Hairspray, a big part of the storyline is the aparthaid and segregation of the black kids from the white kids, so it is important that it is clear who is who from the casting.
Same as something like 'East is East' where the whole point of the play is that it is about the experiences of a family growing up with conflicting expectations of White Mum (It's ages since I've seen it - was she Irish?), and Asian Dad (Again, I'm wanting to say Pakistani but am not 100% sure from memory - I want to watch the film again now ) - it is necessary, IMO, to cast people from the right ethnic groups.

Other thoughts are that you could put a slightly different slant on it as people do so often with stories .... think how many different versions of The Good Samaritan you've seen in assemblies over the years .... but I then think that would probably cause issues with copyright.

I don't think it needs to have actors of the same ethnicity as a famous film version, where it's not part of the storyline though - so, for example, many schools do 'Grease' and it wouldn't matter what the leads looked like as far as I'm concerned, even though everybody would know what John Travolta and Olivia Newton John look like, it's not crucial to the plot.

LadyGregory - true for a production of Romeo and Juliet. In Shakeapeare in Love the nurse is an actualy nurse to a wealthy lady though, not the character who is nurse to Juliet. It's a play within a play. Interesting point re gender in general though - has anybody ever seen an all male cast for Shakespeare with young boys playing the girls parts (outside of an all boys school that it)? I haven't. I imagine it would be - interesting ...

Jeanne - I don't think it would have happened. I could be wrong though, I don't know the history intimately enough to say.

Irene - no, you're probably right. But I wonder if that is less due to authenticity worries and more due to the fact that it's probably the most famous stage role ever written for a black actor and, given how few of those parts there are, it seems really discriminatory to give it to a non-Black actor.

Oh, I'm with you john. I'd been thinking along different lines.

manic - well, black people lived and worked in Tudor England, and some of them were servants. It'd be highly unusual, but not impossible.

Dunno about Italy, but then I guess it's a moot point whether Shakespeare's really thinking about Italy or England.

I think it depends - for example Fagin in Oliver is Jewish, but you wouldn't have to particularly look typically Jewish to play him.

I think I'd find it very strange if, say, Kim in Miss Saigon was played by a black actress. Same with South Pacific - in a story where racism or 'otherness' is a key point I think it would be a lot harder to pull off with a cast of multiple ethnicities.

Opera definitely doesn't matter so much in my opinion - if I'm supposed to believe a clearly middle aged year old women is a seventeen year old I can cope with her being a different ethnicity too

"has anybody ever seen an all male cast for Shakespeare with young boys playing the girls parts"
Didn't Mark Rylance do Twelfth Night at The Globe with an all-male cast? All adults, though, no boys.

Yes, BackforGood - agree that with a show like Grease it doesn't matter. I've actually just done Grease with a mixed race Sandy and, although that was just a school show, don't think it would matter in the slightest in a professional show either. Though why we think it wouldn't matter is intruiging - 1950s US - children of different races wouldn't be in the same school in many areas of the country! Not sure where exactly Grease is supposed to be set.

I think probably it comes down to the fact that too many plays are set in times and places where people were very mono cultural and therefore we simply can't do that where it doesn't relate specifically to the plot without severely limiting the chances of non-White actors. So you just have to sacrifice realism for equality.

Sorry, loads of x-posts, will go back and read them!

Jeanne - ok, I stand corrected. That removes any problem with that particular play then.

WhereYouLeftIt - ooh, thanks. I'll to look at some of the reviews on that.

I don't think it's a great sacrifice at all- it's that three second re-jig of expectation- ah so she looks like that- that you get with any interpretation and then if they're a good actor it will work.

There's a really bizarre quotation I studied at A Level, the source of which I can't now remember, where some critic in (IIRC) nineteenth-century England claimed that it was ok for Othello to be 'tan' but not darker than that, because if he were darker, we'd just have no sympathy with him. It's horrible but quite revealing too, I think? That they must have felt for authenticity that he needs to be obviously other than white, but he can't be too dark. Disturbing.

I guess the age thing has the opposite problem for us - I think it'd be hard to watch some things with boy and men actors without feeling it was either parodic or a bit uncomfortable.

manic - sorry, it was totally by the bye, I was just thinking it through as you posted.

Jeanne - no worries, at all, your posts are interesting and informative. I knew there were black women in Tudor England but didn't imagine they'd be allowed anywhere near the young ladies of white families (shock horror! [eyeroll] )

And yes, that 19th century attitude is frightening and fascinating.

I'm not absolutely sure - I'm looking at the people of colour projects online. I do know not that much later it was really fashionable for white families to have black slaves before slavery in the UK was banned, so I think so. Pretty horrible.

I would really like to know what Shakespeare knew about different races/cultures to write his characters, though. Because I assume there were sufficiently few people of colour in Elizabethan England, even if there was (say) one family living near where he was writing, for lots of his audience that would be 'the' way people of colour looked/acted/etc. Not I suppose that different from isolated villages now really.

I saw Billy Elliot in the West end several years ago. Billy was played by a black boy but both of his parents were played by white actors. it was a little strange but didn't take away from the fact that the show was amazing.

Mark Rylance did lots of men-only Shakespeare when he was at the Globe - I saw him as Olivia. But those were adult actors, not boys. Truly, with puberty hitting considerably earlier than in Tudor times, you're not going to find pre-pubescent boys able to take on roles like Juliet or Viola, even if current theatrical convention accepted it.

A more pressing problem for me is how white and middle class theatre audiences remain in general. I seem to have been at several productions recently, in very ethnically-diverse places, where there were more non-whites onstage than in the audience.

(Sorry, but last post on this side of things - manic, I just remembered what I've seen recently. Catherine of Aragon had a black woman servant.)

lady, I find it amazing that there were 16/17 year olds who could do it, too!

Yes, very true Lady - and I wouldn't how to go about unpicking that - is it to do with money, interest, upbringing, discrimination ... or what?

I went to see some feminist thing at the National Theatre ages ago (think it was called Blurred Lines) and quite a large part of that was about tokenism of black women - I did look around the audience and couldn't see a single non white face - on South Bank in London! For a play partly talking about issues faced by black women in London!

Jeanne - fascinating! (genuinely - not sarcastically!)

Patrick Stewart did a "photo negative" (white Othello, rest of cast Black) version of Othello in the USA a while ago. Never heard of this in the UK (whereas it's not unheard of to get gender reverse versions of Taming of the Shrew for example).

Re Miss Saigon, wasn't Jonathan Pryce refused a work permit to play the Engineer on Broadway, on the grounds that there were Asian performers available to do the part?