When three of the world’s most prestigious Shakespeare companies performed “Richard III” this summer, they each took a different approach to casting their cunning title character in a way that illuminates the fraught debate about which actors should play which roles.
At the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, Richard was played by the actor Arthur Hughes, who has radial dysplasia, meaning he has a shorter right arm and a missing thumb. The company said it was the first time it had cast a disabled actor to play the character, who describes himself as “disfigured” in the opening scene. The director of the production, Gregory Doran, who until recently was the artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare, said: The Times of London earlier this year that it would be “probably not acceptable” these days to have actors pretend to be disabled to play “Richard III.”
The Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada, took a different approach: Colm Feore, who is not disabled, cast a Richard with a deformed spine but who is not a hump. And in New York City, Free Shakespeare in the Park of the Public Theater went in yet another direction, casting Danai Gurira, a black woman with no disabilities, as the Duke plotting and murdering his way to the throne of England.
Their differing approaches came at a time when an intense rethinking of cultural norms surrounding identity, representation, diversity, opportunity, imagination and artistic freedom has sparked passionate debates and battles over casting.
It has been decades since white actors played Othello in blackface in major theaters, and after years of criticism, appearances by white actors playing caricatured Asian roles are becoming increasingly rare in theater and film, and are becoming increasingly rare. reconsidered in opera and ballet.
Now there are questions about who should play gay characters (Tom Hanks recently told The New York Times Magazine that today he would rightfully not be cast as a gay lawyer dying of AIDS, as he was in his Academy Award-winning role in the 1993 film “Philadelphia”) or transgender characters (Eddie Redmayne said last year that it had been a “mistake” to play a trans character in 2015’s “The Danish Girl” or characters of different ethnicities and religions. (Bradley Cooper faced criticism this year for using a prosthetic nose to play Jewish conductor Leonard Bernstein in an upcoming biopic.)
While many celebrate the move away from old, sometimes stereotypical portraiture and the new opportunities being given too late to actors from diverse ranges of backgrounds, others worry that the current emphasis on literalness and authenticity may be too limiting. After all, acting is the art of pretending to be someone you’re not.
“The essential nature of art is freedom,” said Oscar-winning actor F. Murray Abraham, whose many credits include Shylock, the Jewish lender of Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice,” although Mr. Abraham is not Jewish. “Once we have some sort of control over it, it’s no longer free.”
And while the recent push for more authentic casting promises greater diversity in some ways, it threatens less in others — as many women and actors of color are given more opportunities to play some of the biggest, meatiest roles in the repertoire, no matter what. also race or gender or background that the playwrights initially envisioned.
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Sometimes such casting is considered “color blind,” in which case the audience is asked to look beyond an actor’s race or ethnicity, or other characteristics. But in recent years there has been a trend toward “color-conscious” casting, where an actor’s race, ethnicity, or identity becomes part of the production and a feature of the character being portrayed.
Some of the different approaches were underlined by this summer’s productions of “Richard III” and the different directions each theater took when choosing an actor to play Richard.
Richard tells the audience in the opening scene that he:
Misshapen, unfinished, sent before my time
In this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lame and out of fashion
That dogs bark at me when I stop at them
The comment by Mr Doran, the director of production for the Royal Shakespeare Company, that it would be “probably not acceptable” these days to have actors pretend to be disabled to play Richard caused a stir in theater circles.
Not only is Mr. Doran a famous Shakespearean, but his husband, Antony Sher, who died last year, was… one of the most memorable Richards of recent decadesusing crutches in a critically acclaimed 1984 production and writing a book about his rendition.
Doran, whose Stratford-upon-Avon production was critically acclaimed, later clarified his views on the casting, explaining that while any actor could be a successful Richard, he believed the role should be reserved for disabled actors until they “now broadened the opportunities across the board to other actors.”
The new Stratford, Ontario staging featuring Mr. Feore featured a “disability counselor” in the credits. His image was inspired by the discovery of Richard’s bones nearly a decade ago – the skeleton suggested a form of scoliosis – and was based on the idea that his physique was “less heavy” medical disability than a social and cultural one,” the company’s spokeswoman, Ann Swerdfager, said in an email. The critic Karen Fricker wrote in The Toronto Star: “While I admired Feore’s performance, it still made me wonder if this will be the last able-bodied actor to star as a disabled character on the Stratford stage, given that crucial conversations currently taking place around the deaf and disabled performance.”
And in New York, Ms. Gurira, who starred in “Black Panther” and the television series “The Walking Dead,” tried to investigate the underlying reasons for Richard’s behavior. “There is a psychological reason for what he becomes,” she said in an interview. “He looks at the rules in front of him and he feels he is the most capable, but the rules prevent him from manifesting his full capabilities.”
The director of the production, Robert O’Hara, said they made Richard’s difference key to the interpretation. “Richard’s differentness becomes a big reason for his behavior,” he said in an interview. “He feels like he now has to play a role that people have projected onto him.”
The rest of the cast for the production, which ended earlier this month, was remarkably diverse and featured several actors with disabilities in roles not normally cast that way. Ali Stroker, a Tony-winning actress who uses a wheelchair, played Lady Anne; Monique Holt, who is deaf, played Richard’s mother, the two communicating on stage mostly through American Sign Language.
“I wanted to open the conversation of ‘Why isn’t Richard played by a disabled actor?’ to ‘Why isn’t every role supposed to be played by a disabled actor?’” said Mr O’Hara.
Ayanna Thompson, a professor of English at Arizona State University and a Shakespearean scholar in residence at the Public Theater who consulted on his “Richard III,” argued that the growing embrace of color-conscious casting reflected contemporary understanding of how different attributes shape both actors’ identities and audience perceptions. to influence.
“All our bodies carry meaning on stage, whether we want to acknowledge it or not. And that’s going to affect storytelling,” Ms. Thompson said.
She pointed to an example from another play: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, friends of Hamlet, who often mistake other characters for each other. “When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are played by black actors and the Hamlet family is all white,” she said, “the inability to distinguish has a whole host of different meanings.”
Many productions convert traditional casting to interrogate classics. Women played every part in a trilogy of acclaimed Shakespeare productions directed by Phyllida Lloyd at London’s Donmar Warehouse, shown in New York at St. Ann’s Warehouse. A “Julius Caesardirected by mr. Doran resets the scene from ancient Rome to modern Africa. Even Hollywood has reinvented some blockbusters, such as the gender-swapped 2016 “Ghostbusters”.
But since there’s a push for greater casting freedom in some areas, there’s an argument for more literality in others, especially from actors from certain backgrounds who don’t have opportunities.
Some disabled actors are upset when they see Richard III, one of the juiciest disabled characters in the canon, go to someone else. “We all want a level playing field where everyone can play against everyone,” said Mat Fraser, an English actor who is disabled and who played Richard, “but I’ve had almost no one to play my entire career.”
In 2016, while accepting an Emmy for his turn as a transgender character in “Transparent,” Jeffrey Tambor said he hoped to be “the last cisgender man to play a transgender woman.” With a “transparent” musical being made in Los Angeles, its creator, Joey Soloway, swore in an interview, “No trans person should be played by a cis person. Zero tolerance.”
The conversation about casting has been evolving in recent years.
“In the old days, part of measuring greatness was your ability to transform yourself,” says Isaac Butler, the author of “The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act,” A New History of Method Acting. “Is versatility still the hallmark of good acting? And how do you handle it when there are certain lines of identity that you are not allowed to cross? And what are those identity lines?”
Gregg Mozgala, an actor with cerebral palsy, has played roles not traditionally portrayed as disabled, as he did as two monarchs in New York’s “Richard III” and sometimes plays characters written as cerebral palsy, as he will this fall. do in a Broadway production of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play ‘Cost of Living’.
“I’ve spent years trying to pretend my disability didn’t exist in life and on stage, which is ridiculous because it does,” said Mr. mozgala.
“Every character I ever play is going to get cerebral palsy – there’s nothing I can do about that,” he added. “I have to bring my full humanity into every character I play.”
Some still hold out hope for a day when identity will disappear into the conversation.
“Should I hope in a hundred years that white actors can play Othello?” said Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director of the Public Theater. “Of course, because it would mean that racism wasn’t the explosive problem it is today.”