The last few decades have seen personal identity play an increasing role in theatre casting. As a result, we no longer see white actors play Othello and we see a lot more women playing Hamlet. But has it gone too far? Is identity politics in the theatre a good thing or is it 'political correctness gone mad'?
Augusto Boal said in Theatre Of The Oppressed, "all theatre is necessarily political, because all the activities of man are political and theatre is one of them." Some people might prefer to keep theatre divorced from politics, but who gets to write for, and appear on, the stage is closely related to who has a voice offstage as well. As Boal goes on to say, "those who try to separate theatre from politics try to lead us into error—and this is a political attitude."
Theatre is a workplace, as well as an artform. Gender, ethnicity, religion and disability are all protected characteristics under the 2010 Equality Act, so personal identity is political whether you think it should be or not.
European history is overwhelmingly patriarchal, and the history of European theatre reflects that. As a result, the white male body was the default, universal stage signifier for over 2,000 years. Women didn’t play female roles in England until the 17th century because men could play them, and black actors rarely played black characters before the 20th century because white actors could do that too. Actors with disabilities couldn’t get cast as anything, let alone disabled characters, until recently either. Instead, a succession of white, able-bodied men devised different ways of presenting what they saw as the otherness of women, ethnic minorities and disability.
Shakespeare wrote for an all-male, all-white, able-bodied acting company which reflected an Elizabethan society in which women had no rights, the slave trade was thriving and disability was a mark of sin. If you presented Shakespeare now in the way in which his plays were originally performed, then you run the risk, intentionally or otherwise, of perpetuating those social divisions. About twenty years ago, Shakespeare’s Globe staged a series of all-male (and pretty much all-white) ‘original practice’ productions which did exactly that. Edward Hall’s Propeller Theatre Company based their whole artistic vision on the same principle, but Propeller lost its Arts Council funding in 2014 and, to the best of my knowledge, it’s been a while since the Globe staged an all-male production.
The issue of who gets to play what on stage came up earlier this year when the artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe in London, Michelle Terry, played the lead role in Richard III. When her casting was announced, various disability rights campaigners raised objections, which Philip Fisher discussed in a BTG feature. Michelle Terry dismissed the objections as misogyny, and the production went on to be generally well reviewed, so were the protesters wrong? Playing Richard put her at an intersection between gender and disability, so was it progressive because she’s a woman, or regressive because she is not disabled?
Terry defended her casting by saying she wasn’t going to mimic Richard’s disability, she would play him as able-bodied. Removing references to Richard’s disability, she argued, would free the company to explore other themes in the play such as "tyranny, abuse of power and toxic masculinity". She is not the first person to do this. Adjoa Andoh played an able-bodied Richard in 2023 and Sophie Russell did it in 2019. In all three productions, Richard’s outsider status was treated as a metaphor and casting able-bodied women in the role relocated Richard’s otherness from disability to gender-based and racial discrimination.
This outraged disability campaigners. It’s bad enough have an able-bodied actor mimic what they think disability looks like, but to simply erase it altogether is even worse. As Jenny Sealey, the artistic director of Graeae Theatre Company, said, “you would never in a million years go, ‘I’m going to play Othello as a white woman—and take the issue of race out of the agenda.’ You would not do it”.
The ‘difference as metaphor’ argument is a throwback to the 1980s. Jonathan Miller justified casting Anthony Hopkins as Othello in the 1981 BBC TV production by saying too much focus on Othello’s ethnicity diminishes the play’s universality. This kind of argument generally holds up better amongst people who don’t share a particular attribute in real life than those who do. In John Barton’s 1982 BBC TV series Playing Shakespeare, Patrick Stewart, who is not Jewish, insisted to David Suchet, who is, that Shylock in The Merchant Of Venice is an outsider who happens to be a Jew, not because he is a Jew. As you can imagine, David Suchet was not impressed: it’s still on YouTube if you want to check it out yourself.
I think it’s about the direction of travel. If your casting is helping to improve the representation of marginalised groups then you’re probably on the right track, but if you are pushing them back into their corner, then you might want to rethink your approach. Maxine Peake playing Hamlet is not the same thing as Mark Rylance playing Olivia in Twelfth Night, just as Paapa Essiedu playing Hamlet is not the same thing as Anthony Hopkins playing Othello. Phyllida Lloyd’s all-female Shakespeare trilogy at the Donmar Warehouse and Greg Doran’s all-black Julius Caesar at the RSC challenged the marginalised status of women and ethnic minorities—and gave paid work to a lot of women and black actors, too—but all-male, 'original practice' productions and Trevor Nunn’s all-white Wars Of The Roses at The Rose Theatre, Kingston in 2015 reinforced it.
You might see identity politics as denying great actors the opportunity to play great roles. We will never see the current generation of Shakespeare heavyweights like Mark Rylance, Simon Russell Beale or Ralph Fiennes play Othello, but in return we have seen some amazing Hamlets from Maxine Peake, Ruth Negga and Michelle Terry, not to mention all the actors with disabilities who have had a chance to play Richard III, including Matt Fraser, Tom Mothersdale and Arthur Hughes.
There’s never going to be a consensus because the political landscape is always changing, but flux is fine, debate is good. To quote Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain, "there is nothing that is not political. Everything is politics."