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.

I was at the final matinee of The Playboy of the Western World at the National Theatre today. I understand that there aren’t enough roles for people of colour but the idea of two black women in the backwaters of rural Ireland in 1907 just didn’t work. They were great in their roles … but it just didn’t make sense.

Lady Macbeth is such an extraordinary character that, the more I think about it, any differences from what one might be expecting probably enhance the production. Having said that, I find that it takes about 5 minutes to click understanding into place, and work out whether or not the colour / sex of the actor is relevant or not, almost invariably it isn’t, and then off you go.

It must have been quite something to see Ralph Fiennes outshone.

No I just misspelled.. my iPad kept changing it because of predictive text and though I kept changing it back I obviously didn’t succeed when I posted it.

Agree with all of this

Yet there probably were black people in rural Ireland at that time, descendants of slaves and sailors. Not many, most Irish people would never have met a black person. They tend to get written out of history when it’s told from a majority white perspective.

I saw Death of a Salesman where the family were all black. It was amazing. Their being black was both irrelevant and fitting. But had the casting been ‘colourblind’, with some family members black and some white, or some such mixture, it would have been jarring and at odds with the story.

Seeing Lucian Msamati play Iago was amazing and really opened up new interpretations of the play for me.

Lucian Msamati was one of the best Iagos I’ve ever seen (much better than Mark Rylance in my opinion.) Having both Othello and Iago played by black actors brought a new dimension to the play.
However best performance in that play ever was Adrian Lester’s Othello which broke my heart.

If so then my point stands even more – whenever that production comes round you can't move for the publicity about it!

I was going to say, of course Othello needs to be black for the play to work, but a black Iago is a fascinating idea (sadly I haven't seen this one). Iago is insecure and feels inferior, and obviously being black in 16th-C Venice, and not even having the status that Othello has through his rank, makes sense with that.
There's something uncomfortable and thrilling about the idea of a black man undermining another when they're both in the minority, too.

Absolutely. And the idea that the racist insults and bitterness he directs at Othello is actually directed at himself as he has been indoctrinated with societal racism and believes he is seen as inferior by the white Venetians. It also helps explain his willingness to destroy Desdemona and Emilia.

How interesting - I wish I'd seen this production! But it clearly wasn't colour blind, was it - the physical ethnicity of the main characters was still enormously important in how the production was directed and received.

There are theatrical productions by the hundreds every evening in London alone. I go several times every week. If you can’t find something traditional, white and (apparently) straight, you aren’t trying very hard. Personally, I like a bit of variety, so occasionally I choose thoroughly old school drama done without any particular artistic, social or political choices, but more often I go for stuff that reflects greater diversity of creativity, class and culture. But then, I don’t have a bunch of prejudices to accommodate.

I agree, it’s ridiculous. Vote with your feet and don’t go.

If it was a panto it’s actually traditional that the leading man is played by a woman, and not really any different to the dame being a man. When I did amateur dramatics we always did it that way ( although this may have been partly because the female lead was generally given to a teenage girl, we had no teenage boys in our group and a grown man opposite her would’ve been questionable even then).

I went to see starlight express recently and there were humans playing all the parts of the trains! Total cultural appropriation there!

Or we can accept that theatre isn't meant to be photo realistic and people of all colours and sexualties have the potential to be good in a role.

I agree . It's something I've noticed too . Why aren't all the othe ethnic minorities represented .

Are you from a minority group that generally is underrepresented? If you were you might feel differently.

Last time I went to see Macbeth one of the weird sisters was a brother - it’s ridiculous

As you will see if you read the thread, there isn't one answer about what theatre is 'meant to' do. Some viewers find some degree of contextual realism to be important. Others are more able to suspend disbelief. Overall, most have agreed that we want the show/film/play/concert to be internally coherent, which it won't be if social engineering and politics are lionized above art.

See I loved her in that. I thought she was exactly as Emma was supposed to be. Awkward. Snarky. Judgmental. She nailed it.

especially compared to Anne Hathaways version which was awful!

I think that's fine actually, dramatically anyway; men were sometimes accused of witchcraft too, although not in anything like the same numbers as women.
If it was a man playing the part and you were supposed to believe/accept that it was a woman, though, like Dylan M in Six, that's different.

And it also depends imo on the size of the company - if it’s one of the travelling troupes of small numbers of multi talented individuals then it might be fine.

Hence why I don't often go to theatres now.
I was reading 'What's On' at a museum the other day & 'Queer' things were advertised - THEIR term, NOT mine. They do know what year it is, right? No shock value any more, it's boring, get over it.

I was going to say the same about Ballet Shoes. It was great but I couldn't understand why they had to cast men in women's roles - including several of the supporting cast. Surely a production like that is a fantastic and rare opportunity to have a majority female cast? Why put men in heels and tutus when it adds nothing at all to the show or the story?

Blonde, blue-eyed Pauline was played by a non-white actress, but she was fantastic and it took nothing away from the play. I can well believe she was the best for the role.
But, as someone else has pointed out, she is blonde and blue-eyed for a reason. Palatable or not, she's attractive in a way that was desirable at the time, so she has advantages when it comes to getting auditions/work. And for the Alice role specifically, they want her because she looks like Tenniel's version of Alice.
A production that actually brought out and interrogated those issues might be very interesting. But if you're expected to just accept that she's getting the Alice role because of her looks, and they're talking about how she looks like Alice, but she's Black, or Indian, or Chinese (I don't know who the actress in question was), that's quite hard to buy into.