Queer production of As You Like It at Shakespeare’s Globe

[PotteringPondering]

Spent the evening at Shakespeare’s Globe, at what turned out to be a queer production of As You Like It.

Almost all the actors were cast as characters of the opposite sex, and several appeared to be trans actors. In the play, some characters have to disguise themselves as the opposite sex, so it was impossible to follow who’s who (‘Hang on, so that woman with a beard is meant to be a male character, who then is disguised as a woman; no, wait a minute…’). There were a few good individual performances, but artistically it was a complete dog’s dinner.

It was shot through with sexualised queer stylings and dances, and ended with a speech (that definitely wasn’t written by Shakespeare) about how we’re all part of a big queer family, whether or not we wear nail varnish.

Lots of kids were in the audience.

It felt a little like finding yourself in a recruitment party for a transgressive sex cult, when what you really wanted was Shakespeare.

Oh, I missed that one! DD was just too little. I think I remember you going, though I don't remember you mentioning that casting. Did you think it worked there, too?

Yes it did work. They were quite delicate and subtle with their gender swapped casting. The same company did an absolutely stonking and charismatic female Henry V.

That sounds fabulous!

Shakespeare wasn't playing at cross dressing - he was fulfilling a no female mandate. Not the same energy at all.

I have no issues with this in the arts which we know, when we watch, is make believe. The problem is the erosion of actual women in the real world when we are asked to close our eyes to evidence and accept a fallacy as the truth.

I don't think this is true at all. I realise we can't be absolutely certain what he thought, but if he wasn't playing at cross-dressing, why would he write so many plays where it is central to the plot?

Couldn't figure out who was who because each actor randomly male or female seemed to be playing two or three characters wearing similar/ same costumes.

We saw Macbeth at globe this summer they'd swapped some roles to female - and some cast playing multiple parts but it was easy to follow had little real impact on play and was really well done generally - so costume people must have thought it all through they there were in modern stuff.

My children - two of how thanks to GCSE English Lit thought they hated Shakespeare - and one possibly doing that play this year loved it much to their surprise.

I'm really glad we saw that one and not the one PotteringPondering went to which sounds like it would have put them off.

I'm a Shakespearean actor (though I've never been invited to the Globe, sadly, possibly because I'm a boringly straight, white, middle-aged woman!) and a few years ago I played Banquo in Macbeth, but they had me play him as a woman.

It was a really interesting way to do it, because all we changed was the pronouns. So she was still a tough, brave, protective soldier - just a female one.

Cross-casting can absolutely work - and it's great for older actresses as it levels the playing field a bit, as there are so many brilliant older male roles in Shakespeare and not many older female ones.

I love that!

I saw Measure for Measure at the Sam Wanamaker (indoor Globe) a year or two ago with a female Duke and that was fascinating - really changed some of the dynamics in an interesting way, without muddying the clarity of the plotting.

I also like the trend of changing some of the minor characters to women- usually makes zero difference to the plot, or actually makes it easier to follow, as I always get the minor characters muddled up.

Agree with everyone though that it needs to be done well and thoughtfully.

The point is that as it was the Globe I was expecting something simpler. It's hard to appreciate a "fresh take" until you have seen the originals for context.

This "everyday gay person" thinks it's massively tiresome, for sure

I think you may be out of luck with seeing the originals!

(I know what you mean but you made me grin.)

I guess what I'm getting at is that we all have an impression in our heads of what 'proper' Shakespeare is. And for you, that's togas and cloaks, because there was a fashion in the not so distant past for doing Shakespeare's history plays as if they were films set in the time of the play, with full historical accuracy.

But that's not actually what Shakespeare's lot did, so far as we know; it's not particularly more 'faithful' to the text than any other approach, including fannying about with cross-dressing.

Quick response from me. No, not thrown by it being a queer production. And I have no problem with experimental Shakespeare. My two question marks were:

1. It didn't mention it being a queer production in any of the publicity I saw. Given the trigger warnings everywhere today, for even the most trivial of issues, an evening of full immersion in gender politics and strongly sexualised queer performances should have been flagged up in some way.

2. It wasn't subtly or artfully done. The clunky non-Shakespeare speech added at the end about how 'we're all part of a big queer family, whether or not we wear nail-varnish'(!), the unsubtle non-Shakespeare messages above the audience, etc. It felt as if propaganda suffocated art.

Oh, fair enough - it does sound clumsy. I agree with you that it ought to be possible to find out beforehand if a production is going to be child-friendly.

Is nail varnish now a defining characteristic? 😵‍💫

What if you have it on your toes but not your fingernails?! 😵‍💫🙄🤷🏼‍♀️

That's true of course but everyone therefore knew that all the actors where men or boys and no-one was saying any different. The boys did not have beards whilst trying to pass themselves of as women. So this is all very different to what the OP is talking about.

I saw Twelfth Night with the all male cast which was fine - again, no-one was pretending that that the cast were not men playing women. Again all different to 'queering' the whole thing which is the OP is talking about.

To be honest almost all theatre now is so political that is you are not fully committed to gender identity/ BLM / ideas of white fragility / hate the Tories then it is not worth going. What with that and the likes of Benedict Cumberbatch lecturing the audience after the play is over I despair. I can't be the only one to be waiting for this preachy 'I know best' and 'agree with us or you're a fascist' phase to pass before spending money on going to the theatre again.

It is shame that the themes of Arthur Miller's The Crucible seem to have passed them by.

The boys did not have beards whilst trying to pass themselves of as women.

We don't know that (indeed, we don't know at what age 'boys' stopped playing women's roles and whether adult men ever played female roles too). Given jokes about beards, my suspicion is that on occasion you might have ended up with a Rosalind with a five o'clock shadow.

Ah yes I saw a poster for that and I assumed the worst. But hey, it’s in Southwark, which is pretty all-things-rainbow…

I passed the old medieval Crossbones graveyard near the globe (paupers and prostitutes) ‘for the outcast dead’ It looks interesting and I’ve never managed to have a look around so I went to check opening times.

I’ve seen ribbons on the side wall and little memorials (look more like art student projects since the graveyard closed on 1935 and there is no ‘famous’ person buried there).

On the notice board there is a piece about a memorial on the grounds… for trans murder victims. How many women, children and murdered every week? How many of the people buried in this graveyard were murdered? Is there nowhere this ideology doesn’t insert itself into?

*1835 it closed.

I suspect that, having been handed the "lemons" of a ban on females, Shakespeare made the "lemonade" of using the fact that boys would be playing girls/women. Rather than it just being him having fun with cross-dressing. A boy playing a female character who dresses up as a boy would be very convincing to the other characters and to the audience, obviously, and it would also be funny to the audience, because he was a boy and they all knew it. I can't think of a Shakespeare play in which a male character successfully passes himself off as female - not so as to convince any of the other characters unless they are drunk/drugged/under a spell? My knowledge of the Bard is rudimentary, admittedly. But if he was just having fun with cross-dressing, then you would expect just as many male characters dressing up as women/girl characters.

We don't know, of course, but perhaps boys were preferred to act the girls' parts. After all in stage makeup and under 16th century lighting, a boy would pass as a girl/woman if he was really talented and good at mimicking the female gait. Whereas a grown man, perhaps doing a falsetto... I always think of the middle-aged actor with coconut shell breasts in Upstart Crow (thanks, Ben Elton) whenever I imagine men taking women's/girls' parts in Shakespeare plays 500 years ago. It seems ridiculous but I suppose theatre-goers might just have got used to it, the way we accept all sorts of daftness in opera and action movies.

But he wasn't 'handed a ban'. It was a long-standing convention - it doesn't seem likely to me he would have thought 'damn, women on stage are banned, how can I deal with this?!'

Before Shakespeare, there's a really long tradition of people writing plays that have fun with the idea that all the actors are men so there will be men acting as women. There are hundreds of examples. It's not like he was doing it one his own.

Taming of the Shrew and Merry Wives both feature men cross-dressing as women, FWIW.

And yes, we do know: boys were preferred to act women's parts. There is actually quite a lot of research on all of this.

You seem to think that verisimilitude has to be the be-all and end-all. Why should it be? Who cares if you can tell the actor is a boy (or a man)?

Why would the length of the ban be relevant? It's still an obvious avenue for humour if that's what your theater environment gives you.

In any case, this idea that there is no straight approach to these kinds of plays is, I think, untrue. And it doesn't need to mean doing some kind of attempt at historic presentation, necessarily, nor does it preclude modern clothing etc.

It just means presenting the play in a fairly straightforward way, rather than some attempt at deconstruction. As the actual postmodernists knew, you can't deconstruct a tradition you don't know. And when you are trying to subvert something, or flip it, etc, it only works if you are already familiar with the convention.

Some elements are truly changeable by time, and what you are used to just depends on when you live, but unless we want to go whole hog and saw the play isn't really even a thing, (in which case what are they doing up there?) there are real elements that were meant to convey a particular story. If you are looking at, for example, a case of a production with an age reversal, the interest in that comes from the different dynamic it introduces, and what can sometimes seem to be odd contrasts or paradoxes. But that depends on knowing that there is a deliberate reversal, and not just some kind of weird casting error.

Why would the length of the ban be relevant? It's still an obvious avenue for humour if that's what your theater environment gives you.

Only in that it wouldn't have come across as a 'ban'. It wasn't something recently enforced - it went back years, so most people wouldn't even think about women being on stage. And, because it was standard for women not to be onstage, there was a whole context to jokes about men playing men.

How could you ever establish what would be a 'straightforward' presentation of a play? As you say, of course you need to know the play inside out, and the historical context - but there are plenty of people who do have that knowledge. There are masses of scholars and theatre professionals who work on historical Shakespeare, and close readings of texts ... and sometimes queer theory. They may even be familiar with postmodernism. Right?

I'd love to know why you imply that cross-gender casting couldn't be a straightforward reading of Shakespeare?

As this thread indicates, very often, people assume that 'straight' Shakespeare is broadly what was traditional when they were young. So if you grew up with Julius Caesar in togas and Macbeth in kilts, you think that's 'proper Shakespeare'. But if you were an upper-class Victorian, you'd likely think 'real' Shakespeare was poetry on the page. If you were in the late seventeenth/ eighteenth century you'd probably imagine it was all a hack job that could be bettered by adding in more romance and women's parts. And so on and so on.

There is no 'straightforward' version of Shakespeare. It's pure arrogance to think that what we find 'straightforward' is anything but a concession to our particular time and place. Ok, fine: if you're teaching school, pick a version where the actors stick close to the script. But don't kid yourself that this is somehow more straightforward than anything else.

It was my teenager who wants to see togas for Julius Caesar, not me being nostalgic. She has said same about a few plays, that generally she doesn't like when they wear the wrong costume for the period. So that was why I thought Globe would appeal to her, because I assumed historical accuracy would be important to them.