A quick note on colour-blind casting
I rarely post personal, off-the-cuff blogs here. But my review of The Glass Menagerie was published last week and unfortunately, one paragraph on colour-blind casting has been cut for space. So I thought I’d add it here. In Ellen Mcdougall’s production, Eric Kofi Abrefa plays Jim, originally a low-caste, ‘Irish’ role. In her Guardian review, Clare Brennan argues takes issue with this as colour-blind casting gone too far, which surprised me. As I put it in my original copy:
Eric Kofi Abrefa too is captivating as Jim, the longed-for suitor. There’s been much talk of ‘colour-blind’ casting recently, and here, it works both ways. To anyone who wants to read it there, the casting of a black suitor can add resonance to this white Southern family’s social desperation, but in McDougall’s anti-naturalistic production, it’s not like we need to take anything at face value.’
Seeing a black actor on stage in a deeply Southern play reminded me of the racial context, rather than seeming to efface it. That might not work for everybody: theatre, we don’t need Peter Brook tell us, is all projection (imaginative, not video), and maybe other people’s minds work differently from mine.
As Lisa M. Anderson has argued, ‘We are not blind to race (color); it is one of the ways in which we categorize our lives’. In other words, there’s no such thing as ‘blind’ anything in theatre, but proponents of what is known as ‘colour-blind’ casting have never really claimed that there is.
Ayanna Thompson categorised the major variations of the practice as “colorblind” (meritocratic: the best actor for the role); “societal” which casts “actors of color” in “roles originally conceived as being white if people of color perform these roles in society as a whole;” “conceptual” which casts roles in ways meant to “enhance the play’s social resonance;” and “cross- cultural casting” which uses a specific setting to transport the play “to a different culture and location”. Jami Rogers’ The Shakespearean Glass Ceiling, which introduced me to Thompson, remains the go-to-article on recent practices.
From Trevor Nunn’s all-white cast for Henry VI (and his defence: ‘the audience need to see who’s related to each other’) to Viola Davis’ stirring speech at the Emmys, diversity on stage has been in the air this month. Nunn’s arguments are obviously fatuous. If you really want a dynastic-focused War of the Roses, it’s not difficult to cast at least one black family – and as for ‘historical inaccuracy’, it’s a false god in theatre. As audience members, we lack an early modern imagination, so it’s hardly likely we’ll ever see Hamlet as Shakespeare’s contemporaries did. (Remember the ghosts, each wearing white sheets, in Mark Rylance’s original-practices Richard III? Impossible to take seriously, in a post-Scooby Doo era).
But it’s far, far more complicated than a quick one-draft blog note dashed off in a snatched ten minutes can do justice to, and Tanya Moodie, who recently played Constance in the Globe’s King John, is far, far better qualified speak on this than I. So here are her thoughts on ‘colour-blind’ casting:
‘I think we need to dismantle it, I think it needs to become defunct, because I think it’s unfair to ask anyone, any audience or any cast member, to be blind. Because what it denotes is, ‘Look, I’m other, I’m different to the other people in the cast. My race is in terms of numbers, is a minority in this country. And I want you to ignore that fact, I want you to pretend like I don’t exist, or that you don’t even see me. What I’m asking you to do is add some extra layer of psychic functioning which makes me disappear’.
I agree that Joe Papp’s first vision of colour-blind casting, which Thompson calls ‘meritocratic’, is disingenuous. No actor in any play has ever been cast as ‘the best actor for the role’, devoid of appearance, voice, type. Coming to terms with your ‘casting type’ is one of the first lessons of any drama school. But in productions as abstract as McDougall’s that can matter less. And Eric Kofi Abrefa isn’t asking anyone to be ‘blind’ on stage. He’s simply enriching the story.
Update: 13th October
Over in New York, this week’s controversy is over a production of The Mikado, which NYU seems, inexplicably, to have thought acceptable to stage in “yellow face”. It should be screamingly obvious why this is a different matter from, say, a black actor playing Shakespeare’s Joan of Arc, but for those whom it isn’t, the portrayal of non-white characters by white actors in make-up has a history so steeped in racist stereotype that it’s almost impossible to divorce the context. When we enter a theatre, we carry with us the memory of actor we’ve ever seen. Every white man playing Othello carries within his performance the ticks, tropes, traditions of the black minstrel shows some of us still, shamefully, recall from half-glimpsed childhood TV.
I’ve just come back from Neil D’Souza’s beguiling new play, Coming Up, set in Mumbai with an all-Asian casts (to use UK terminology). In it, Clara Indrani and Mitesh Soni play screeching, ignorant bullies in pre-Partition India, in a way that I worried skirts primitive stereotype. But if they do, they do so on their own terms, as characters dreamt up by a British-Indian writer. So it’s probably not my call to make. Someone this week even asked me whether all-minority shows flout equal opportunity laws. When non-white actors get even half the casting calls available to the white colleagues, perhaps we can start to worry about that.
