absolutely fed up with theatre casting wokery for the sake of it

[grumpyandiknowit]

I'm so fed up with every single theatre company and production house straining to make theatre that forces into everything DEI, LGBTQI, race and left wing politics.

Casting now disproportionately represents all minorities out of all comparison with the population. As an example, feels like every single play will have a least one transgender member of the cast and one who is using 'they' pronouns and one person with a visible disability. This feels like forced tick-box quotas to me even in the acting world.

I just saw that Jonathan Groff who I've seen on stage many times and I think is fantastic is going to be in the new RSC season so eagerly went to look and it turns out he is playing a female character Rosalind in an all male production of As You Like It. I really don't want to see that and I was so disappointed. I know that this was how productions were traditionally performed but that's not what this is about it is it? It's about being seen to be promoting DEI constantly without actually looking for the best actors for the role. I think the fact this is so noticeable speaks for itself. If you went to the theatre and all the actors were brilliant and there was no casting that jarred with the meaning of the play, you'd never notice.

I just want to go and see some normal classic theatre where constantly men aren't being played by women, women aren't being played by men and where the real themes aren't being over ridden by politics forced into the play by casting decisions taken not because of talent or ability but because someone wants to demonstrate how modern and woke their production is. All too often the impact on the story and the real themes of a classic drama isn't thought through.

Maybe I'm alone but I'm fed up with it.

Generally, I agree with this with regards to theatre - unless you're doing strict realism there are always so many anomalies, and if it's being done well (big assumption!) the production should be making the story clear regardless.
Film & TV, which are usually striving for realism and accuracy, are a different matter.

Yes it evolved in the first post. It's clear what the wokery is that bothers some.

I remember going on an RSC tour and being told very confidently that “people will come if they can see themselves on stage”. And I remember thinking at the time that I paid money to see good actors rather than middle aged women with no acting talent!

I think the gender swap theme was very effective when it was genuinely something different - but now it’s become de rigeur and, frankly, a bit tedious. I remember how groundbreaking Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake was when it first appeared; it genuinely broke the mould. I took my DD to see it and she just rolled her eyes thinking “not another one”:

On a more prosaic level, I think it makes Shakespeare much less accessible to younger/wider audiences as it is now virtually impossible to see a production “as writ” and it makes it really confusing for young people, many of whom are getting to grips with these plays, to “get” that Don Joanne is actually Don John in the text, or that the Duchess was actually a Duke etc etc.

I think we have at least two of us on this thread who are PoC and still think representation should be better handled sometimes.

I work for a large arts organisation (visual arts mainly) and we have funding and show opportunities for artists. I'm not personally involved in the decision making processes as to who gets what but I'm often in the room when decisions are made and I do see artists eliminated just because they are white British and not trans or from a more diverse background. Even being working class or gay isn't really enough these days or it only works if you can tack it on to being trans or not white.

It is difficult because on one hand it is good to see groups who have been overlooked or marginalised in the past get these opportunities but its also difficult when you know the deciding factor in getting eliminated isn't your work but that fact you are white. Its the white artists from a working class back ground I think who have it hardest as often organisations like ours are their only route to a career but they just aren't flavour of the month, year, decade so a whole generation of artists from that background are being disadvantaged if they happen to be white.

Yes, this is our experience with DS as a (white, male, British) actor. He is actually technically disabled due to a learning disability (e.g. dyslexia) and has been told to 'big this up' to stand a chance of getting cast, and put him on a level playing field with actors with other DEI characteristics. He's really uncomfortable doing this as it's not something he wants to highlight or make party of his 'identity'.

Lots of actors in the final year of drama school suddenly identify as non-binary strangely!

Oh no you didn't !! 😃

On a more prosaic level, I think it makes Shakespeare much less accessible to younger/wider audiences as it is now virtually impossible to see a production “as writ” and it makes it really confusing for young people, many of whom are getting to grips with these plays, to “get” that Don Joanne is actually Don John in the text, or that the Duchess was actually a Duke etc etc.

Yes, this is a genuine concern. My SIL is an English teacher in a big secondary school and they now have to 'vet' Shakespeare productions before school trips to find out how much they have deviated from the original play, and to assess whether they are likely to help or just confuse students studying a Shakespeare play at GCSE. In fact she says that more often than not these days they are likely to default to a viewing of a video of a production done 10-15 years ago, as it's more likely to be faithful to the text.
Result - more lost ticket revenue for theatres. School trips used to be a big income source for some theatres!

Has anyone mentioned Dylan Mulvaney being cast as Anne Boleyn in the supposedly ‘all female’ production of Six - and apparently doing a pretty poor job?

I completely agree and have found anything by the RSC basically unwatchable in recent years. They have been so overtaken by people who are into DEI that the people who actually understand Shakespeare have disappeared. I now watch provincial theatre for a sophisticated representation of the play.

This is fine with me. Shakespeare plays around with sex and gender in the language all the time and the effect will hit differently depending on (among other things) whether the cast is all male (as it would have been for him), all female, matched to role or anything else. I can't think of a writer who more obviously said LOOK WHAT I CAN DO WITH OUR IDEAS ABOUT MEN AND WOMEN THROUGH LANGUAGE and that seems to me a licence to carry on the game.

Added to that, part of the joy of theatre is that it's not permanent- productions come and go (something else Shakespeare made use of). So you can do unusual things and some of them will work (be enjoyable or provide insight) and some of them won't, and that's fine. I would really love to see a production fully done as in Shakespeare's time- not just in casting but in performance style. I wonder whether we would just find it unwatchable now.

I think taxpayers' funding should be withdrawn from organisations with a social justice agenda. It completely distorts the focus away from quality and means the arts are not actually being funded for their own sake, but as a form of social work.

This is an archive copy of the article someone mentioned upthread - as reported in the industry magazine, Deadline:
https://archive.ph/BlzrG

There are companies who do this. They put on all-male productions in Shakespearean dress - basically as close to how the plays would originally have been staged as possible. It's fantastic and although a male Ophelia feels really weird at first, you soon get the hang of it and the plays make a lot more sense because a lot of the word play and jokes relate to the original context.

I went to see The History Boys not too long ago. It was effectively The History Boys + 1 Girl 🙄

The playing with sex and gender is ok if it's done well. The problem is that it's usually done poorly, with the same interpretation repeatedly re-hashed and often shoehorning in an adequate actor just because she fits the bill in terms of gender/ethnicity etc.

10 years ago I watched the fabulous Janet McTeer play Petruchio in an all female version of The Taming of the Shrew.

Harriet Walter is doing similar.

https://www.ilkleygazette.co.uk/news/national/25890465.dame-harriet-walter-star-all-female-production-julius-caesar-rsc/

I really want to see this! I love HW.

Me too! I suspect this is a logical follow on from her recent book She Speaks!: What Shakespeare's Women Might Have Said .
I saw her on stage doing excerpts from it - she was brilliant!

I haven't seen this production. If they brought it into the present day, I think the ethnicity of the actors is no issue. For me though, a huge part of the book is the 1930s setting, so it's jarring if the play is set in the 1930s but the casting bears no resemblance to what Londoners looked like then. I also think Pauline's look is an essential part of the character: she's stereotypically attractive for the time, which contributes to her success in auditions. The reason she gets the part of Alice in Wonderland is because she looks like the Tenniel drawings.

I am a boring purist about adaptations of my favourite books though...!

Yes, I will be on the look out for tickets to see this. I'd watch Harriet Walter in anything really!

I think the DEI casting as you call it is fine. For hundreds of years rich white boys were the only ones allowed careers in the arts and anyway the last play I saw featured a haystack playing a violin as it wakes across the stage so I don't think ideas about "traditionally white roles" or any other kind of role has any place in theatre. However, some plays are just crap or ill-thought through and I think that's what you're seeing. I also hate the trend of casting celebrities in plays for the sake of it and then not trying to make the play any good because you know it'll sell. Even the NT is doing it now.

Like others I don't think an all male cast is wokery. The problem is the majority of famous fiction in the UK features primarily white characters. This immediately excludes people of colour from so many roles, so to me it makes sense that they should be modernised for our world and I really don't care if Anne Boleyn is played by a black woman. It really makes no difference to the story. I do think that it helps if characters playing close relatives are the same race (unless adopted etc) to keep it broadly believable or it does get confusing. It's might be important for race to be kept accurate for real people who lived in the last 150 years, or if someone was famous for being a particular race, but if they lived 500 years ago (or they're fictional) who gives a damn. I've noticed that you rarely see a lead who isn't white at the theatre and I do think that's a shame.

I've asked this already, but is it the same all-female Julius Caesar that Phyllida Lloyd and the Donmar did years ago? HW starred in it, and also in their Tempest and Henry IV. She was brilliant. The whole thing was terrific.

I think this matters because I can’t actually engage with the play if there’s a lot of discordance between what the play is asking us to believe about the context and what I’m being shown. If you’re talking about a real historical period and we’re being asked to believe the characters are behaving in a way that makes sense for the context, you start thinking ‘isn’t anyone going to mention that Anne Boleyn is black? Surely this would be a big deal at this time’. It’s actually a complete culture-killer.

There are loads of amazing stories that naturally feature people of different ethnicities but theatre companies want the big name play so don’t produce them. It’s cynical - DEI production of a big name play means you get the arts funding plus the audience. Mind you Im not sure if audiences are still buying it.