In the past, casting must have been a doddle, whether you were planning to put on a show in a black box above a pub or at the London Palladium. The director and possibly a casting expert would work out a budget and then set up auditions.
In those days, it would have been standard to select the performers who were best suited to the roles, looking and sounding right and having the necessary skill sets to optimise the presentation of any play.
How things have changed. Now, there are two overriding factors that must be taken into consideration, at least for a high-profile West End production.
Blindness has become a necessity for anyone attempting to draft actors into any production. It is not so long ago that some theatregoers struggled with accent-blind casting, which allowed performers to use their native accents rather than those that were appropriate to their roles. Now, we have become inured to casting that ignores gender, colour, ability and disability and even on occasion size, although that currently seems to be less of an issue.
On the plus side, this means that there is far less discrimination in the theatre, allowing those from relatively disadvantaged backgrounds to have greater opportunity. As a consequence, some theatrical presentations can contain elements that are distracting to some audience members and, on occasion, inadvertently change the meaning of a piece.
Complementing the “-blindness”, there are now also severe restrictions placed on those responsible for casting since, if there is a minority, groups are not depicted from within the group, criticism or worse can follow, as happened recently to Michelle Terry when it was announced that she is to play Richard III.
However, there is now a new phenomenon that seems to be overwhelming our larger stages but is finally receiving a fully justified backlash.
Award-winning American playwright Jeremy O Harris has recorded his displeasure at the casting of yet another Game of Thrones actor, this time Kit Harington, in the UK première of Slave Play, an ensemble piece if ever there was one.
Harris has quickly established himself as an important playwright but also one with strong views. This comes through strongly in his work but also around the edges. Harris’s response to the star casting as quoted in The Guardian is both eloquent and powerful.
“There’s a lot of people making theatre now who think commercial theatre can only be made if you have someone who’s on the biggest TV show or the biggest movie ever, with the marquee name as the reason for you to buy the ticket. I don’t believe in that.
“It’s something that takes away from great theatre because people treat it like a Disney World attraction, where the play is background to the amusement of seeing their favourite celebrity in front of them.”
Harris’s criticism is well-founded. Over the last few years, the West End has suffered from a predominance of star casting, sacrificing stage skills honed by experts to favour popular TV and film figures who might bring in large audiences paying exorbitant sums for tickets.
In the good old days, this went on to a small degree, primarily in pantomimes where talentless sports stars, TV actors and comedians would ham it up to the delight of largely unsophisticated audiences.
There seems every chance that Jeremy O Harris’s plea for a return to normality will fall on deaf ears, given the current economic malaise afflicting theatres in this country and beyond. In the fullness of time, it would be nice to think that the best actors will get the best roles again, leading to productions of optimal quality.
This column was originally going to be dedicated exclusively to issues around casting. However, the Prime Minister no less stepped in to criticise Black Out performances, as part of his party’s desperate culture wars vendetta against, inter alia, the arts.
Harris may well be the initiator of the Black Out phenomenon, where the intention is that the theatre will only be open to an “all-Black-identifying audience”, who can enjoy plays “free from the white gaze”.
Selecting two performances out of the long run of Slave Play, at which the playwright would ideally like an exclusively Black audience does not seem wholly unreasonable and is very clearly nothing to do with politicians, who should be rescuing the economy—that is unless they can think of no other way to win a general election.