Disguises at the Globe

December 13, 2018

     While in London in September I greatly enjoyed a Shakespeare comedy at the Globe Theatre on the River Thames. But I found the alternative casting to be confusing and mildly annoying. Maybe I need to be more open-minded. 

     Twelfth Night is a play I know well. I had two small parts in a local  production in California in 1996, playing both the Sea Captain and the Priest. Like many of Shakespeare’s comedies, it’s a play about love and mistaken identities and illusions. As such, the fluid nature of our identities is an entirely appropriate subject for actors and directors to explore, especially since in Shakespeare’s day all the actors were male, and boys and young men played female roles. 

     So why shouldn’t women play men’s roles, and vice versa? And what about non-white actors playing 17th century Europeans? In theory I have no problem with it, but in this production (and in some other plays and movies) I found it difficult to suspend my disbelief. In this Twelfth Night, Count Orsino, Sebastian, and Sir Andrew were played by women, Viola was played by a man, and Olivia was played by a black woman. I just couldn’t buy it. I have this old-fashioned idea that casting should be believable; that it’s preferable to have male actors portray male roles, and that a Renaissance countess is best played by a white woman. 

     Interestingly, in our local version of Twelfth Night, Countess Olivia was also played by woman of African descent, and she was excellent. Maybe I found her more believable than her London counterpart because she was light skinned, or because I liked her personally, or because she was a better actress. 

     I do think that Shakespeare plays are so important to Western civilization that all actors should have the opportunity to be in his dramas, comedies, and histories. But Hamlet Prince of Denmark played by a Pakistani man? Othello portrayed by a white woman? King Lear as a Samoan woman? Maybe it would work if everyone in the cast were, say, Nigerian. I found the diverse cast of Hamilton to be believable even though the black and brown actors were portraying white historical characters, probably because most of the actors weren’t white, so my brain didn’t even try to believe in their ethnicity. Go figure. 

     It has occurred to me than by insisting on believability in casting, I may be thinking as rigidly as Malvolio, the puritanical follower of rules in Twelfth Night and the butt of a major prank in the play. As Stephen Greenblatt, one of my Shakespeare professors at Berkeley once said of this play, “Shakespeare correctly assumes that the audience will get into the spirit of the production and pretend that Sebastian and Viola are identical twins – he didn’t feel obligated to scour the countryside for twins.” I guess that I just need to pretend harder. 

     In the meantime, I’ll just have to learn to live with mixed feelings about alternative casting. As Viola says in Twelfth Night:

     O time! Thou must untangle this, not I; 
     It is too hard a knot for me to untie.