I shall have to wait until I’m dead before someone reads this essay and agrees with me.
Seeing Glenda Jackson in King Lear (previewing in New York City presently) was an enormous pleasure. She is an amazing actress and an amazing woman. At 82 to take command of this role in the way that she did — it was awe inspiring!
I agree with non-traditional casting in general — and by this I mean that characters should be played by actors of any colour or gender — except in cases when such casting changes the meaning of the play in ways that are not intended.
This is what happens in Sam Gold’s production of King Lear.
Here is the first thing you will not agree with in this essay: Shakespeare was a feminist. ‘But,’ you say, ‘what about the fact that the leading characters in most of his plays are men — and his characters often say such awful things about women?’ True. But I would suggest that all Shakespeare’s tragic heroes suffer a crisis of masculinity — one that nearly destroys the patriarchy and kingship. Macbeth and Hamlet both find it difficult to act in manly fashion, and both Antony and Othello are brought down by their love of women. Lear is absolved of masculine privilege and his kingdom to boot — and ends up naked on the heath cursing thunder. Shakespeare is suggesting that Lear’s experience is a good one for a sexist, patriarchal male king.
Glenda Jackson is fully capable of presenting all the subtlety, strength, intelligence and hurt that is Lear’s. (At one point when she is wheeled forward slumped in a wheelchair, and she looks so much like Stephen Hawking — it will break your heart. And the ‘butterflies in a cage’ speech — it’s worth waiting for!). But Glenda Jackson is not a man. Part of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy is to bring a man with a male body and a penis under his clothes to centre stage and then humiliate him. The point is to decimate the male. This humiliation must be real or there is no drama. It is pointless to humiliate a woman in such a fashion. In fact doing so short circuits the feminist message. Are we to infer that women are just as bad as men? That they are responsible for the same sins as men?
One thing we can say for certain is that there is a patriarchy and male leadership is responsible for much of what is wrong with the world; this is what Shakespeare is saying. That message is undermined by putting a woman in the role; the play then becomes a less feminist play.
This is the problem with many stagings which attempt to correct the sexism of these old plays; it is done with no real understanding of the message of the play, or the message that non-traditional casting sends.
With Jayne Houdyshell’s brilliant portrayal of Gloucester in the the same production I have no casting problem. The character of Gloucester is not principally about the poisonous patriarchy; it is principally about blindness — it is about perception and reality. Thus, it makes no difference if a man or woman plays the role.
Years ago, I asked an artistic director of colour (who I won’t hold responsible for her remarks here) what her opinion was of what was then called ‘colour blind’ casting. She said: “As long as the play is not a contemporary political one, where it would unintentionally change the meaning of the play, it’s an important thing to do.”
Because Shakespeare is, phenomenally, still ‘our contemporary’ — I must say, I agree.
