Actors being cast in opposite sex or different race historical roles

[WeBuiltThisBuffetOnSausageRoll]

Sarah Amankwah, who is female and black, was just on the Jeremy Vine show on Radio 2 (presented by Amol Rajan today) and talking about her role as Henry V at the Globe.

Is this not frowned on as cultural/gender appropriation? Eddie Redmayne was condemned for accepting a role as a transgender person and white Ed Skrein was later pressured to stand down after he'd been cast as an Asian character; yet Maxine Peake was widely praised for her Hamlet. Is it OK when a female takes a male role, but not the other way around, because of the vast discrepancy in available female roles owing to how society was so absolutely male-centric for most of history (and isn't necessarily that much better now)?

I personally see no real issue when it's a fictional character whose race isn't particularly a defining characteristic of the role - I don't understand why it would matter if a non-white actor should play James Bond (although he's a very unambiguously male character) and, as for Dr Who, it's a person who keeps regenerating over centuries, so why on earth wouldn't one of the regenerations be as a female?

But when it comes to an actual historical (or living) person, AIBU to wonder why it would be seen as appropriate to cast somebody to represent them who is very clearly the opposite sex and/or from a completely different racial background? Why would they even think to do it, apart from to provoke a reaction or to score some extra publicity?

Sarah is brilliant at her profession, but I just couldn't take her seriously when she performed the St Crispin's Day speech - the same as I couldn't have taken Benedict Cumberbatch seriously as Queen Elizabeth (whether using his own voice or trying to affect a female voice).

Then again, the whole point of it is ACTING - and nobody complains when, say, a Brit plays an American or a Scot plays an English person - so maybe I am BU. I just fail to find such a big elephant in the room convincing at all, but maybe it's my lack of imagination that's wholly to blame?

Is this just another part of modern life, where biological sex/gender boundaries are now often considered irrelevant and maybe even anachronistic as a concept - and is it boorish to even point it out or query it? I'm very now. AIBU to ask the question? Genuine thoughts on the matter appreciated.

Honestly, I couldn't care less who plays a part as long as they play it well. Acting is meant to be one of the arts, suspension of reality should be par for the course.

If the latest iteration of Henry V happens to have a black woman as the title role and she does it well that's the goal achieved irrespective of her background.

No musician worth their salt plays music identically to another musician unless intentional mimicry because they are offering their interpretation of the music rather than a carbon copy of someone else's ideas. I'd like to think that actors who see their job as a means of artistic expression would do the same.

I think when it’s deliberately experimental it can be interesting. What I find daft is historical dramas that cast ethnic minority actors as real-life white figures (e.g. Gemma Chan as Bess of Hardwick) for no obvious reason, other than to generate a bit of publicity.

What really bugs me is when people mosn about Idris Elba playing Heimdall or Angel Coulby playing Guinevere.

It’s Norse mythology! It’s King Arthur! It’s not real, people.

I find all the role swapping distracting. I haven't seen anything yet where I thought swapping gender/ race has made the production better.

I presume we would all have our limits. Would anyone accept a slavery/plantation drama where some slaves were played by white actors?

waltzingparrot

Obviously not. Black slavery was based on a racial power dynamic between white people and those they deemed inferior to them. Casting a white actor as a slave obfuscates that, and isn’t in any way the same as casting a non-white person in a role traditionally played by a white person.

I haven't seen anything yet where I thought swapping gender/ race has made the production better
Glenda Jackson nailed it as King Lear. It was brilliant. Transferred to NY now.

Obviously not. Black slavery was based on a racial power dynamic between white people and those they deemed inferior to them. Casting a white actor as a slave obfuscates that, and isn’t in any way the same as casting a non-white person in a role traditionally played by a white person.

Presumably casting working class white people as the slaves, and upper class black slaveowners would create the same dynamic?

They're actors. They act. That is, they assume the role they've been ascribed. Gender and/or race is secondary. The suspension of disbelief should be a given. Plenty of reality to be found everywhere else.

presumedinnocence

I don’t think so. I don’t think class difference presents us with the visceral emotional reaction that slavery does. Perhaps it should, but I really don’t think it does.

I think it’s interesting casting and adds a different dimension to the piece

Shakespearean male actors played all roles, regardless of gender.

Very good point indeed - I wonder if that seemed in any way bizarre to audiences back then, or if it was just their 'normal'.

I'm not upset by it at all and I completely accept producers and casting departments' right to interpret plays how they will, but it just sometimes seems to stretch credibility to me.

If you're going for laughs, like Norbit or White Chicks - obviously fictional characters (guaranteed mirth by no means whatsoever a foregone conclusion), then I get it - but would anybody really feel moved and challenged by a serious, poignant production of Little Orphan Annie with Brian Blessed in the starring role?

I know it was a film, and not really the same thing at all, but I still got irrationally annoyed at the time at the attempted 'update' of or 'homage' to 'The Italian Job', when they kept the same title (some might suggest to capitalise on the enduring popularity of the original), even though it had very little in common apart from the general standard heist theme and it was mainly set in Los Angeles.

I guess I find it more honest where producers are brave enough to write something new, maybe building on or paying tribute to existing production, but freely making it plain that it isn't supposed to be the known play of Henry V. Possibly a royal drama set around the time of Henry V but with whichever characters or historical figures they wish to focus on.

I feel the same about authors who write new adventures of established characters devised and made famous by acclaimed now-deceased authors. I realise that, in some cases, they have actually been approached by the family/estate of the original author (maybe with more of an eye on profits than credibility, it could be wondered), but it just seems so lazy and cashing-in to me.

If you want a female Peruvian detective, construct a proper background and storyline based on her character, personality and actions rather than just trying to shoehorn her into 'a new interpretation of Hercule Poirot' (although even HP could have been accused of CA, considering that Peter Ustinov, Albert Finney and David Suchet were/are not Belgian )

But weren't all the female parts in Shakespeare originally played by men?!

Shakespearean male actors played all roles, regardless of gender.

Because women weren’t allowed on the stage.

I haven't seen anything yet where I thought swapping gender/ race has made the production better

I've seen a production of Othello where both Othello and Iago were played by black actors and it added a fascinating level of tension to their relationship. I loved it.

I wonder if that seemed in any way bizarre to audiences back then, or if it was just their 'normal'.

As a pp said, women weren't allowed on stage in Elizabethan and Jacobean productions, so it wouldn't have seemed in the slightest bit bizarre for all the roles to be played by men and boys.

What are your thoughts on Hamilton?

I've not actually seen it yet, or read the book - although it's been recommended by a number of friends.

Is it intended to be historically accurate or a parody very loosely based on it? I see from Wikipedia that they deliberately selected an all-non-white cast and the inclusion of pop, R&B, soul and hip-hop songs that I read about suggest that it's not necessarily supposed to be a 100% true historical representation

Having said that, though, I can see what point a writer/producer might be trying to make, considering that the USA, like a number of other countries, seemed to have been 'discovered' by white people long after a lot of very much non-white people had, erm, 'pre-discovered' it and had been happily living there in harmony for a very long time until the white people arrived. Incidentally, I did see a fascinating film a few years ago called Utopia, about the situation in Australia and the appalling treatment and betrayal of the Aborigine people.

I'll definitely have to watch Hamilton soon - the subject matter sounds very interesting and I am now intrigued!

Shakespeare himself gives the answer to all this in the prologue, spoken by Chorus, to Henry V: shakespeare.mit.edu/henryv/henryv.1.0.html

Very well read by a non straight white bloke, Derek Jacobi, in Ken Branagh’s film.

By the way, for many centuries including Shakespeare's time, white Europeans were taken as slaves by Barbary pirates, in quite shocking numbers, so does that count for oppression licence?

By the way, for many centuries including Shakespeare's time, white Europeans were taken as slaves by Barbary pirates, in quite shocking numbers, so does that count for oppression licence

Just after Shakespeare's time England enslaved and deported 300 000 plus Irish.
The Irish Slave Trade.
www.irishcentral.com/roots/ancestry/irish-roots-in-the-caribbean-run-deep

Shakespeare might have been more than aware of the creeping English oppression of the Irish, and despite using stories from all round the world and many different nationalities, he steered clear of alluding to Ireland in his plays?

Shakespeare's girlfriend may have been black? Dark lady poems etc.

Multicultural Elizabethan London must have dazzled and inspired a working class self educated Warwickshire lad.

Totally up for it when it comes to plays as it's hard to pretend you're anywhere else except for the theatre. If you have to pretend and use imagination so obviously then there's no difference with an actor pretending to be a dog and a man playing queen Elizabeth and a black person playing Tommy Robinson.... (if anyone would actually want to!). Films it's different as the whole imagination part is outsourced to a massive film crew who can bring us into space and deep under the sea. In this case it's hard to imagine Tom cruise playing a navajo Indian and denzil Washington playing the Queen...

I guess I find it more honest where producers are brave enough to write something new, maybe building on or paying tribute to existing production, but freely making it plain that it isn't supposed to be the known play of Henry V. Possibly a royal drama set around the time of Henry V but with whichever characters or historical figures they wish to focus on.

But surely the whole point of Shakespeare is the language, him being a genius and all, not the (non existent) historically accurate setting.

On a related note, are you also bothered by versions of Shakespeare in modern or non-Tudor settings?

Hamilton isn’t a parody, no. There are two songs that could be viewed as parody but the rest is serious and fairly historically accurate. There is perhaps a bias towards Alexander Hamilton himself, crediting him with doing more in terms of the abolition of slavery than he actually did and avoiding the fact that is own wife Eliza’s family, the Schuylers were slave holders but Lin Manuel Miranda did aim to be as historically accurate as possible when he wrote and researched the show. The cast are not all non-white, but the central characters namely the founding fathers of the USA are almost always played by non-white actors whilst white performers are often, but not always, in more minor roles depending on cast changes.

One of the main things that Hamilton aims to do is look at America and how it was founded, the principles that guided the Constitution, the way the country was governed, its financial system etc and it looks back on that history through the lens of today. One of the actors in the original Broadway cast made a comment along the lines of it being about the America of the past, in its early formation being played by the Americans of today.

So it’s not really about making a statement about Native Americans or making a parody of it all through traditionally African American music. It’s much more than that. And yes, non-white actors are very much seriously portraying real historical white figures. And I do not have a single problem with that. I don’t think gender or skin colour mean that a person can or cannot portray the characteristics and qualities that make up another human being.

I don’t pay to see the person who most looks like the historical figure, it’s not a biopic. I want to see someone who convincingly captures the emotional journey of the person who they are playing and who makes me think.

I have absolutely no problem with the casting of the play in your OP either, in fact it would make me go and see a play which I had previously had no desire to see again. This type of casting, especially in Shakespeare is extremely common now and dare I say, necessary. I think it’s important that as many people as possible are able to access Shakespeare’s canon, I’m evangelical about it. This casting is exciting and people are talking about it. It’s not meant to be a true historically accurate representation because that’s not what it was written to be. There is a bias for a start given who Shakespeare was writing for and about, not to mention the lack of any credible sources that Shakespeare would have had access to at the time.

We’ve had Maxine Peake as Hamlet, Glenda Jackson as King Lear, Mark Rylance as Olivia etc etc and no one really bats an eyelid. No one was outraged when blonde haired blue eyed Kim Catrall played Cleopatra or when Larry Olivier blacked up to play Othello. But a black woman as Henry V? That’s apparently a step too far for some people? Why?

Another point (slightly side-tracking here) is that dividing people into black/white/Asian as if those were somehow natural and timeless categories is a bit odd as:

a) they were not categories used much before the 18th century- an ancient Greek writer for instance would not have understood why an Ethiopian was supposed to be more different from him or less akin to him than e.g. a Gaul. Even Shakespeare would not have had any idea of a supposedly superior "white race".

b) modern DNA studies seem to suggest as far as biology goes, there is not one black race or one white race, but that it's far more complex than that, and that skin colour is relatively unimportant in terms of racial closeness.

Casting Sophie Okonedo as Margaret of Anjou in the BBC Hollow Crown Shakespeare series was brilliant. Not only is a she fine actor who delivers both blank verse and prose beautifully, but it highlighted her 'otherness' in the text - historically because Margaret was female and French and a powerful leader with a weak husband, and thus in the prevailing discourse of English Kingship she disrupted what was considered the natural order of things. Casting across racial lines emphasized her otherness amongst all those white thesps, and added something very powerful to an already superb series. I loved it.

Back in the day, it was very common for operas to include a male character that was intended to be played by a female singer. This was called a "trouser role" or "breeches part". The role of Cherubino in "The Marriage of Figaro" by Mozart is one example.

As a PP pointed out, in Shakespearean times, all actors were male - and yet there were many female roles. In Japanese Kabuki theater, all performers are male, but sometimes they play female roles.

Not to mention that in early theater productions, it was standard to have Peter Pan played by a female performer. Walt Disney actually broke new ground when he had the character voiced by a male for the film.

Hardly a new thing for people to play roles that are the opposite sex/racer than themselves.

There obviously is the potential for this sort of thing to break immersion as you watch the drama.

But I am sure a lot of the time it does not.