David Badiel thinks jewish people are the group that has been neglected in considering diversity. Hmm, i think he may have forgotten women

[JustcameoutGC]

I dont yet know where i stand on the principle that only gay / trans / NB / jewish etc people should play characters that are the same. The question for me instantly flips the other way, so if you are gay you shouldn't play straight characters? I also put my faith in the training and skill of actors. But there is still much to do to open up the entertainment industry to minorities.

But read some of these passages.

Casting is about respect. There is something disrespectful about casting an able bodied person in a disabled part. A deaf actor coined it when she said "deaf is not a costume"
The deep truth of any marginalised identiy is only available to those who live that identity. The deep truth of any marginalised identity is only available to those who live that identity. Casting a non-minority actor to mimic that identity feels, to the progressive eye, like impersonation, and impersonation may carry with it an element of mockery – or at least seem reductive, reducing the complexity of that experience by channelling it through an actor who hasn’t lived it.

Yet, Eddie Izzard can choose to be in girl mode, or boy mode, and we are supposed to celebrate that.

Drag queens are essentially woman face, and now they are reading stories to early years kids in libraries.

Really made me quite grumpy this morning

Kenny-

Obv a crap actor is a crap actor.

You haven't given any examples. You clearly have some in mind, why not share them?

One of these maybe-

'Broadway show only for one of the main characters be played by someone who got the part because he ticked boxes rather than his acting ability'.

I assume reviews were damning?

Broadway casting people they know can't act in lead roles, knowing they are risking the huge amount of money that is investigated in those productions.

Your view is that Broadway show producers are happy to throw their money away, have reputation negatively impacted etc over tick box? That's really interesting.

That example/s v important to illustrate your point.

You focus on crap actors who you see as only cast due to ticking a box. Have you ever been disappointed by non tickbox actors that you've seen? Feels unlikely. Why do you think they got the roles?

Every time I hear/read David Baddiel’s name all I can think about is when he regularly put on black face to mock Jason Lee the footballer on prime time television. Which led to horrendous abuse for Jason Lee which still affects him to this day. I cannot take DB seriously.

I would not look for bad reviews for productions with a lot of tokenistic casting, not at the moment. That's one of the unfortunate drivers of the whole thing.

I don't really buy that something like Fiddler on the Roof is a problem. It's a mainstream, famous show, almost every adult has seen it or heard songs from it, it's very much entered the culture as a whole. If people laughing at it when the actors are Jewish is ok, at this point I think we would be pretty silly to think that to laugh at it when the actors aren't Jewish, or when we don't know if they are Jewish or not, is ok.

Will the background of someone like a director or actors sometimes add some verisimilitude? Sure. Just like it will in a play about Italian-Americans, or Newfoundlanders, or Russians. Occasionally a production might fall a little flat if it doesn't seem to quite wok.

That's ok, though. It's not a moral or ethical issue, and I don't think it's even a respect issue. I can go see a musical set in Newfoundland in NYC or London, and maybe notice they haven't quite got it right as that culture is very familiar to me. It's still ok that they put on the play, it's been put out there by the writers to be seen. And it's ok if other people enjoy what I might consider to be a slightly imperfect production.

ah - should say "is not ok" above.

@mrschocolatte

Every time I hear/read David Baddiel’s name all I can think about is when he regularly put on black face to mock Jason Lee the footballer on prime time television. Which led to horrendous abuse for Jason Lee which still affects him to this day. I cannot take DB seriously.

You've put me right off him. I saw him on a programme about his dad who was suffering from dementia and I thought he seemed a nice man. Maybe not.

David Baddiel has responded to this a lot. Unsurprisingly.

I think this makes the point best: www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/20/david-baddiel-hits-back

Basically, whatever you think of what he did (and he's apologised), that doesn't mean that antisemitism is somehow OK.

This thread isn't really about Baddiel as a person (which is pretty irrelevant). It's about the points he discusses. And the OP's points.

You can't argue that David Baddiel is an awful person because he wore blackface 25 years ago, and yet argue that anyone should be able to play a Jewish person on stage or screen now.

Either blackface and Jewface (or, as the OP points out), womanface, are wrong. Or they're not.

Where do you stand on this, @SantaClawsServiette or @ancientgran?

@SantaClawsServiette - did I miss the Newfoundlers being persecuted over millenia, leading to a recent Holocaust of Newfoundlanders?

Or is your comparison just really crap?

I don't agree with blackface but on the other hand I don't care what colour an actor is. I don't care if we have a black James Bond, I wasn't bothered about a black Anne Boleyn and although I've only seen the film of Fiddler on the Roof it wouldn't bother me to see someone who wasn't Jewish (black or white) playing Tevye as long as they had the voice and the presence to carry it off. I do think Topol is a hard act to follow for anyone.

On the other hand I would struggle more with someone of the wrong colour/ethnicity playing someone where their colour/ethnicity was at the heart of the plot so I'd struggle with a klu klux klan member being played by someone black but I'm a Catholic and they were (are) anti Catholic and I'm not sure if I'd worry about a Catholic in the role so I'm not sure how I'm processing that one. In a similar way I don't think a white actor would be appropriate as Mandela.

Should Dustin Hoffman only play Jewish roles and if so is it OK for him to play non Jewish roles? I do remember him getting alot of criticism for playing Shylock, again a complicated situation.

One story I can tell you is when my DD was at playgroup her best friend was Jewish, for some reason the playgroup decided it was inappropriate for non Christian children to be in the nativity and they did a different performance after the nativity. DD's friend was upset, her mum was upset, I said it was ridiculous as they had obviously misunderstood something about diversity and respect etc. My DH told the little girls mother she should to go in and say she felt they had got things wrong, her daughter had to have the part of Mary. She was a young Jewish virgin, Mary was a young Jewish virgin so clearly it would be inappropriate to give the part to anyone else. The mum didn't do it but she had a good laugh about it.

So I suppose at the end of the day I'm not very clear about it and I'm not sure how far it should go. Can a woman whose never had a child play a mother, can a man whose never done military service play a soldier, could an only child play one of the Bennett sisters. I don't know and after reading the thread I'm no clearer on what I think but it is an interesting discussion.

[quote xxyzz]@SantaClawsServiette - did I miss the Newfoundlers being persecuted over millenia, leading to a recent Holocaust of Newfoundlanders?

Or is your comparison just really crap?[/quote]
Well the gypsies would fit the bill.

@ancientgran

I don't agree with blackface but on the other hand I don't care what colour an actor is.

That doesn't make sense. If you don't care what colour an actor is, then what is wrong with blackface?

The whole point Baddiel (and others, including the OP, and most on this board) are making is that you can't identify in to an oppressed minority group without being inherently disrespectful.

And that applies if the oppressed group is women, Jews or black people.

@ancientgran

One story I can tell you is when my DD was at playgroup her best friend was Jewish, for some reason the playgroup decided it was inappropriate for non Christian children to be in the nativity and they did a different performance after the nativity.

Wow - to tell a story that is literally about a Jewish family, in a Jewish country and ban the only Jewish child from taking part!

It would be funny if it wasn't really, really racist. :(

[quote xxyzz]@SantaClawsServiette - did I miss the Newfoundlers being persecuted over millenia, leading to a recent Holocaust of Newfoundlanders?

Or is your comparison just really crap?[/quote]
Well, two things here.

The first being that actually, in Canada Newfoundlanders are often the butt of jokes, depicted as being dim rubes, and also as a bunch of have not fishermen sitting around on the dole.

The second is that I don't believe in this pseudo-marxist hierarchy of oppression thing that says you somehow it's ok to, for example, have a Hispanic or Jewish or any other person play a white role, or a deaf person a hearing role, but not vice versa. Acting is acting.

And the third is that if you have a musical as big and as much part of the modern theater as FOTR, it is going to involve people in the production and the audience who are not members of the target community. The other viable option is to keep that kind of story only for consumption within the community. If the things depicted and said in the story are not in themselves offensive or racist they don't suddenly become so because the person who says them changes - and for that matter audiences may well know nothing about the ethnicity or religion of the people who have produced it. Nor should they feel obligated to ask before attending.

The Nativity play example is really the same thinking though - it's a fundamentally Christian story, so of course it would only have Christian cast members, according to a certain logic. Presumably if they were doing Ben-Hur it would be all Jews, and so on for stories related to other religious groups.

Wrongheaded, but logical in a rather narrow way.

An interesting way to think about it is to think of a setting where an actor can change appearance perfectly, so something like motion-capture. So we can have Ray Winestone, a middle aged man tending to fat, play young, buff Beowulf and it's as believable as if he was depicted as having his own body. So could you have, in that case, Forest Whitaker as Winston Churchill and Gary Oldman as Mandela, and no one who didn't know them would necessarily have any idea what the actors looked like or their backgrounds. Which could be rather nice for the actors.

@SantaClawsServiette

If you seriously think the Holocaust was just about people saying some slightly mean things about the Jews, I think you need to go and revise your history.

And no-one at all (apart from you with your strawman above) are suggesting that every single actor in FOTR needs to be Jewish. But that's very different to the London production of Falsettos I also referred to, where literally no-one involved with the production, none of the actors, the director, no-one was Jewish. Can you imagine an American play about a group of black New York friends talking about their African-American culture being performed in London, entirely by white people? Would you be defending that? However convincing their blackface was?

And yet here you are saying Jewface is just fine.

I also wonder what you're doing on the feminism board if you don't believe in this 'this pseudo-marxist hierarchy of oppression thing', ie that women are oppressed by virtue of being female?

[quote xxyzz]@ancientgran

One story I can tell you is when my DD was at playgroup her best friend was Jewish, for some reason the playgroup decided it was inappropriate for non Christian children to be in the nativity and they did a different performance after the nativity.

Wow - to tell a story that is literally about a Jewish family, in a Jewish country and ban the only Jewish child from taking part!

It would be funny if it wasn't really, really racist. :([/quote]
It was bizarre, they'd been on some course and I assumed they'd had some talk about respecting other cultures and in their heads they thought it was insensitive to have non Christian children in it but they got it so wrong.

I think my husband was so annoyed and he was really disappointed that the mother didn't take his advice. Then again he is the Catholic who decided he didn't want to be a Catholic any more when our daughter was born as he didn't want to be in a church that wouldn't let her be Pope.

In contrast my one son went to school where there was one Muslim child in his class and her parents said she couldn't be in the nativity. The Head went to see them, he said the nativity was the story of Isa an Mariam and there would be no reference to anything that would offend Islamic beliefs. The little girl was so happy that she got to be in the play with her friends.

So sometimes sensitivity works.

[quote xxyzz]@ancientgran

I don't agree with blackface but on the other hand I don't care what colour an actor is.

That doesn't make sense. If you don't care what colour an actor is, then what is wrong with blackface?

The whole point Baddiel (and others, including the OP, and most on this board) are making is that you can't identify in to an oppressed minority group without being inherently disrespectful.

And that applies if the oppressed group is women, Jews or black people.[/quote]
Maybe I don't understand blackface. I assumed it was when an actor would literally wear dark make up to try to look black not where a white actor appears as white but playing a black character. So I'm not worried if Tom Cruise plays Malcolm X but I think it would be very inappropriate if he put black make up on and an Affro wig. Actually that isn't a good example because being black is central to Malcolm X but I'm tired and I can't think of a good example.

I can't think of a black film as an example but with a different ethnicity Robert Donat (white American actor) playing a Chinese Mandarin in the film The Inn of the Sixth Happiness with make up to change the shape of his eyes and his colour isn't appropriate. Mind you it was a mixed up film with Swedish Ingrid Bergman playing English Gladys Aylwood and German/Austrian Curt Jurgens playing the Dutch/Chinese army officer. I loved it 60 years ago but I imagine it would seem very questionable now. Actually even then the Robert Donat part seemed ridiculous but I remember Bergman and Jurgens as being very good, who knows what I'd think now maybe I should get a copy and see.

I hope that makes sense, I'm tired and can't sleep so it might not.

@xxyzz

David Baddiel has responded to this a lot. Unsurprisingly.

I think this makes the point best: www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/20/david-baddiel-hits-back

Basically, whatever you think of what he did (and he's apologised), that doesn't mean that antisemitism is somehow OK.

This thread isn't really about Baddiel as a person (which is pretty irrelevant). It's about the points he discusses. And the OP's points.

You can't argue that David Baddiel is an awful person because he wore blackface 25 years ago, and yet argue that anyone should be able to play a Jewish person on stage or screen now.

Either blackface and Jewface (or, as the OP points out), womanface, are wrong. Or they're not.

Where do you stand on this, @SantaClawsServiette or @ancientgran?

I wasn’t arguing he was an awful person. I just stated a fact about him and that I didn’t like him.

For what it’s worth he’s never apologised directly to Jason Lee.

But this is beside the point and not the point of this thread so apologies for derailing.

[quote xxyzz]@ancientgran

I don't agree with blackface but on the other hand I don't care what colour an actor is.

That doesn't make sense. If you don't care what colour an actor is, then what is wrong with blackface?

The whole point Baddiel (and others, including the OP, and most on this board) are making is that you can't identify in to an oppressed minority group without being inherently disrespectful.

And that applies if the oppressed group is women, Jews or black people.[/quote]
I actually don't think that is the point Baddiel is making.

I think he's saying that if you use that particular logic (that only people with a certain characteristic can play a character with that characteristic) then you have to be consistent with your application of it. And that it appears that the application isn't consistent because nobody seems to apply it to Jews.

I may have misunderstood but I don't think he explicitly says whether he actually prescribes to that logic himself. He seems to acknowledge it's actually quite complicated.

I may have misunderstood but I don't think he explicitly says whether he actually prescribes to that logic himself. He seems to acknowledge it's actually quite complicated. It is complicated isn't it, I mean it is in general and I think if we are honest about it then it gets even more so.

@Winederlust - agree, your summary of what he says is better than mine. :)