The Globe Theater, a reconstruction of Shakespeare's theater, opened in London in 1997. It is located along the South Bank of the Thames in London near the original site of Shakespeare's Globe (constructed in 1599). Its goal is to produce Shakespeare's plays in a setting that is as historically accurate as possible. The project was conceived by the American theater and film director Sam Wanamaker (1919-1993), who died several years before its completion. The Globe Theater is the leading venue for the historically informed production of Shakespeare, and it conducts various experiments in original pronunciation, cross-gender casting, and audience participation. Some of its practices, especially the casting of men in women's roles, have inspired lively conversation and sometimes controversy. As described on its website, "Shakespeare's Globe is a unique international resource dedicated to the exploration of Shakespeare's work and the playhouse for which he wrote, through the connected means of performance and education." The first artistic director was Mark Rylance, who held the position from 1995 to 2005. He remains a member of the company and the star of many Globe productions. The current artistic director is Dominic Dromgoole.
These are some things I would like you to keep in mind as you write your review of the play.
I hope you will also give them some thought as you prepare for discussion of the play in Monday's class.
The Globe Theatre's approach is to use what it describes as "ORIGINAL PRACTICES."
To be honest, it seems to me that the Globe sends mixed messages about what this means.
For instance, Mark Rylance has gone on record to say that he doesn't believe in "authenticity" as a goal for Shakespearean production. This means that according to Rylance, the Globe doesn't believe they could ever make an exact re-creation of Shakespearean theater as it really was in Shakespeare's day (Rylance is quoted directly in the passage from Bulman's book below). There is too much we still don't know, and conditions have changed too much, to really ever recapture the world of the past: such an attempt would be historically naive. Rather, the phrase "original practices" means simply that the theatre-makers at the Globe experiment with the way things were done on Shakespeare's stage to see how they might have worked, to educate the public, to advance scholarship, and even to show that there are alternatives to the way things tend to be done on the modern stage and in film.
On the other hand, the Playbill program we were given at our production of Richard III does make a claim for authenticity, in the note from set designer Jenny Tiramani which is actually called "Striving for Authenticity."
So, as you think about what you saw at the Belasco Theater, rather than accepting as a trueism that the Globe theatre presents "historically accurate" or "authentic" productions of Shakespeare, I would like you to really think about what that means. What is "authenticity"? Why has Mark Rylance shied away from that term to describe what the Globe Theatre does even as the program for the Broadway production of a Globe Theatre play reclaims it? Typically this conversation about what the Globe does with Shakespeare is one about historical authenticity in theatrical production, but you might also want to think about it in terms of our discussions of the history of the Wars of the Roses. Is what Shakespeare does with Richard III historically "authentic"? What does it mean to try to make a theatrical production that is as close to what would have happened in Shakespeare's time as possible, but not to call Shakespeare on his own historical authenticity issues (ie. the "Tudor propaganda" questions opened up by the Ricardians)?
ORIGINAL PRONUNCIATION
One of the "original practices" at the Globe is to try to use original pronunciation, as opposed to what is called "Received Pronunciation." "Received pronunciation" is the kind of "Queen's English" that Shakespeare tends to be performed in at other venues in Britain.
In 2004, the Globe tried its first experiments in "original pronunciation." With assistance from linguists, they pronounced the words of the play in keeping with what we know about how English words were pronounced in the Elizabethan period. If you're interested in learning more about that, the ten minute clip below takes you through some passages of Romeo and Juliet and other plays to show you how the language might have sounded in Shakespeare's time. This video is also helpful for showing you the interior of the Globe Theatre.
ISSUES IN CASTING
More hotly-debated than the use of original pronunciation is the use of all-male casts, which is the most contentious of the Globe's practices.
It is important to note that The Globe does feature women actors in many of its productions, and it has also staged all-female productions.
Some people (including Professor Walsh!) find the all-male casts a problematic element of the Globe Theater's work. The quotes and photographs assembled below will introduce you to some of the issues and arguments related to this practice. In short, the male casts tend to be used to break with the idea of realism in acting and to show the inherent queerness and fluidity of theatrical performance. Both of those things seem like interesting and worthwhile goals. But perhaps both of them could also be achieved by using mixed-gender casts. For instance, in productions where men take women's roles, perhaps women could take men's roles. Or, anyone could play anything, which would be even more fluid than a reversal of roles. If the goal is "original practice," well, that argument doesn't quite hold up either, because the evidence seems to suggest that adult men never played women's parts on the Elizabethan stage. Adolescent boys did.
In short, if it may not even be an "original practice," then what justification is there for excluding women? And why is okay to use the fact that there was originally discrimination against women in the theatre to justify a continuing discrimination against women? Whatever is gained from the all-male cast, is it worth the need to participate in an exclusionary hiring practice?
Here below I have gathered some relevant quotes from scholars debating about the meanings that are generated, and the meanings that might be lost, in the practice of all-male casting. Bear in mind that the Globe tends to justify their occasional use of all-male casts by saying that some of their performances do feature women (even some all-female casts). Still, we should ask ourselves, does that make it okay? What is the unit of dramatic time? Most people see one play, not an entire season of a company. Shouldn't all plays aim for diversity and equal opportunity in casting, not just along lines of gender, but also race, sexuality, able-bodiedness, age, etc?. Food for thought! I will be very interested to know how the casting of Richard III shaped your understanding of the characters, the relationship between the characters and the actors who played them, and your sense of this as a "History Play."
In terms of the all-male experiment, you might also want to think about how this matters specifically in the case of a playwright like Shakespeare who is considered the National Bard of England. This is not just a few people putting on a play in their backyard: to produce Shakespeare at the Globe carries the implication that this is England presenting its values to the world. Their decisions in casting will inevitably be influential: they will carry weight and make a statement about the kind of England Shakespeare represents.
What follows is a brief consideration of Mark Rylance's famous performance as Cleopatra by James Bulman. Below that you will find Melissa D. Aaron's comments on the all-female production of Richard III at the Globe in 2003. And finally, I have included Aaron's brief consideration of Janet McTeer's performance as Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew.
Questions of gender in casting tend to get a lot of attention, but of course there are many conversations to be had about justice and equality of opportunity in casting. What do we think of the use of able-bodied actors in roles such as that of Richard III? Richard III is the kind of role that would obviously seem to present a great opportunity to highlight the work of an actor with a disability. Also, what did you think about the way the cast of Richard III included actors of color? What statement was the play making by including actors of color? Did the casting seem like it was done in a token way (ie. setting aside one or two parts for actors of color)? What seemed to be the logic of the casting? Did the presence of actors of color invite a deeper consideration of themes of race and empire in the play and in the production of Shakespeare more generally? Did it make the exclusion of women and actors with disabilities seem more noticeable? Did it project any particular statement about the play or about Shakespeare and the idea of "original practices"? I have included below a link to an 8-minute film called "British Black and Asian Shakespeare" to acquaint you with some of the history that might help you to interpret the Globe's casting of Kurt Egyiawan, a British actor of color, as the Duchess of York and Richmond.
More hotly-debated than the use of original pronunciation is the use of all-male casts, which is the most contentious of the Globe's practices.
It is important to note that The Globe does feature women actors in many of its productions, and it has also staged all-female productions.
Some people (including Professor Walsh!) find the all-male casts a problematic element of the Globe Theater's work. The quotes and photographs assembled below will introduce you to some of the issues and arguments related to this practice. In short, the male casts tend to be used to break with the idea of realism in acting and to show the inherent queerness and fluidity of theatrical performance. Both of those things seem like interesting and worthwhile goals. But perhaps both of them could also be achieved by using mixed-gender casts. For instance, in productions where men take women's roles, perhaps women could take men's roles. Or, anyone could play anything, which would be even more fluid than a reversal of roles. If the goal is "original practice," well, that argument doesn't quite hold up either, because the evidence seems to suggest that adult men never played women's parts on the Elizabethan stage. Adolescent boys did.
In short, if it may not even be an "original practice," then what justification is there for excluding women? And why is okay to use the fact that there was originally discrimination against women in the theatre to justify a continuing discrimination against women? Whatever is gained from the all-male cast, is it worth the need to participate in an exclusionary hiring practice?
Here below I have gathered some relevant quotes from scholars debating about the meanings that are generated, and the meanings that might be lost, in the practice of all-male casting. Bear in mind that the Globe tends to justify their occasional use of all-male casts by saying that some of their performances do feature women (even some all-female casts). Still, we should ask ourselves, does that make it okay? What is the unit of dramatic time? Most people see one play, not an entire season of a company. Shouldn't all plays aim for diversity and equal opportunity in casting, not just along lines of gender, but also race, sexuality, able-bodiedness, age, etc?. Food for thought! I will be very interested to know how the casting of Richard III shaped your understanding of the characters, the relationship between the characters and the actors who played them, and your sense of this as a "History Play."
In terms of the all-male experiment, you might also want to think about how this matters specifically in the case of a playwright like Shakespeare who is considered the National Bard of England. This is not just a few people putting on a play in their backyard: to produce Shakespeare at the Globe carries the implication that this is England presenting its values to the world. Their decisions in casting will inevitably be influential: they will carry weight and make a statement about the kind of England Shakespeare represents.
What follows is a brief consideration of Mark Rylance's famous performance as Cleopatra by James Bulman. Below that you will find Melissa D. Aaron's comments on the all-female production of Richard III at the Globe in 2003. And finally, I have included Aaron's brief consideration of Janet McTeer's performance as Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew.
Questions of gender in casting tend to get a lot of attention, but of course there are many conversations to be had about justice and equality of opportunity in casting. What do we think of the use of able-bodied actors in roles such as that of Richard III? Richard III is the kind of role that would obviously seem to present a great opportunity to highlight the work of an actor with a disability. Also, what did you think about the way the cast of Richard III included actors of color? What statement was the play making by including actors of color? Did the casting seem like it was done in a token way (ie. setting aside one or two parts for actors of color)? What seemed to be the logic of the casting? Did the presence of actors of color invite a deeper consideration of themes of race and empire in the play and in the production of Shakespeare more generally? Did it make the exclusion of women and actors with disabilities seem more noticeable? Did it project any particular statement about the play or about Shakespeare and the idea of "original practices"? I have included below a link to an 8-minute film called "British Black and Asian Shakespeare" to acquaint you with some of the history that might help you to interpret the Globe's casting of Kurt Egyiawan, a British actor of color, as the Duchess of York and Richmond.
Mark Rylance as Cleopatra in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra.
Bulman, James C. "Unsex me Here: Male Cross-Dressing at the New Globe," in Shakespeare Re-dressed: Cross Gender Casting in Contemporary Performance. James C. Bulman, ed. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2008.
When Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre decided to cast a male as Cleopatra in 1999, it took a risk. The Globe, after all, was a popular tourist venue whose audiences could not be counted on to respond appreciatively to the archaic convention of casting males in female roles…. Surprisingly, the Globe’s Antony and Cleopatra became both a popular and a critical success because of Mark Rylance’s performance as Cleopatra…. Rylance, because he was not a woman, was praised for the spontaneity with which he which he exhibited the same exaggerated femininity [that female actors like Vanessa Redgrave and Helen Mirren had been criticized for emphasizing in their recent performances as Cleopatra]. “By showing an actor shadowing, or paralleling, the role rather than identifying with it,” wrote Robert Smallwood, he demonstrated “the extent to which Cleopatra is constantly performing…never identifiable as herself” (p. 231).
The success of a male Cleopatra should not have come as a surprise. By 1999, the idea that gender is performative rather than innate had circulated widely, and audiences were proving receptive to the idea that gender might be a cultural construct, and sexual desire dependent on forces other than biological difference (p. 232).
What began at the Globe as an experiment with two productions in the late 1990s—an all-male Henry V (1997) preceded by Antony and Cleopatra—attracted enough attention that within a short time same-sex casting had had become company policy, yielding at the extreme, in 2003, a division of the actors into two separate companies, one male, the other female. The Globe’s use of all-male casts is consistent with its claims to strive for Elizabethan authenticity in staging, music, props, and costumes; as such, it has renewed speculation about how boy actors would have “read” on the Elizabethan stage. The Globe’s all-male productions have therefore become imbricated in critical debates over the sexually transgressive nature of cross-dressing…. (p. 232).
As several critics have protested, however, such claims to authenticity are bogus, raising expectations of historical verisimilitude only to satisfy them with an amusement-park version of Elizabethan culture. How could one expect to replicate the experience of an Elizabethan audience when cultural contexts have changed so radically? The material conditions of performance are not the same today as they were in 1660: the structure of the new Globe itself makes concessions to modernity, actors are differently trained, and rehearsal processes are more subject to a director’s vision. Furthermore, audiences bring vastly different assumptions with them about family, courtship, and social class as well as gender, erotic desire, and homosexuality. More to the point, adult male actors on the new Globe’s stage are fundamentally different—in physical appearance, maturity, voice, professional training, and social empowerment—from the boy apprentices who performed at the original Globe, and their playing roles written for boys casts doubt upon any claim the new Globe might make to replicate the experience an Elizabethan audience would have had (p. 233).
In response to such criticism, the Globe’s artistic director Mark Rylance has attempted to clarify that authenticity, which he considers a “confusing and arrogant” term, was never a goal of his company. Rather, the company uses what he calls “original practices” to test whether Elizabethan methods of staging may still be theatrically viable and to help “recover the original way of making art,” thereby unearthing “layers of meaning that modern practice obscures.” This all sounds innocent enough. But I shall argue that calling the use of an all-male cast an “original practice” is in fact a tactical ruse by which Rylance coaxes audiences to divest themselves of essentialized notions of gender and sexuality and, if only for the duration of the play, to entertain queer thoughts. In other words, the Globe’s “original practices” productions advance a culturally transgressive agenda rendered safe by the distancing device of historical recuperation. They offer up a subversive sexual politics which, under the conservative guise of doing archeological work, are made palatable as popular entertainment (p. 233).
Melissa D. Aaron. “'A Queen in a Beard': A Study of All-Female Shakespeare Companies,” in Shakespeare Re-dressed: Cross Gender Casting in Contemporary Performance. James C. Bulman, ed. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2008.
I shall retreat out of pippin-pelting range before stating hypothesis two: that all-male Shakespeare tends to be conservative. It isn’t all conservative, of course, but often all-male Shakespeare tries to have it both ways, toying with homoerotic frisson while making it safe for tourists because it’s “historically authentic”—even if it’s not historically authentic. The most famous examples are probably Mark Rylance’s Cleopatra and Olivia [in Twelfth Night], as recent evidence has increasingly suggested that female roles were not played by adult males, but by adolescents who “graduated” to the male roles. All-male productions may be many things, but they are not nearly as revolutionary and groundbreaking as they are often made out to be.
Further, all-male productions come at a cost: the cost of not hiring women. This is a very serious issue for actors, production staff, and directors—almost anyone except for costume designers, who do tend to be women (p. 151).
When Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre decided to cast a male as Cleopatra in 1999, it took a risk. The Globe, after all, was a popular tourist venue whose audiences could not be counted on to respond appreciatively to the archaic convention of casting males in female roles…. Surprisingly, the Globe’s Antony and Cleopatra became both a popular and a critical success because of Mark Rylance’s performance as Cleopatra…. Rylance, because he was not a woman, was praised for the spontaneity with which he which he exhibited the same exaggerated femininity [that female actors like Vanessa Redgrave and Helen Mirren had been criticized for emphasizing in their recent performances as Cleopatra]. “By showing an actor shadowing, or paralleling, the role rather than identifying with it,” wrote Robert Smallwood, he demonstrated “the extent to which Cleopatra is constantly performing…never identifiable as herself” (p. 231).
The success of a male Cleopatra should not have come as a surprise. By 1999, the idea that gender is performative rather than innate had circulated widely, and audiences were proving receptive to the idea that gender might be a cultural construct, and sexual desire dependent on forces other than biological difference (p. 232).
What began at the Globe as an experiment with two productions in the late 1990s—an all-male Henry V (1997) preceded by Antony and Cleopatra—attracted enough attention that within a short time same-sex casting had had become company policy, yielding at the extreme, in 2003, a division of the actors into two separate companies, one male, the other female. The Globe’s use of all-male casts is consistent with its claims to strive for Elizabethan authenticity in staging, music, props, and costumes; as such, it has renewed speculation about how boy actors would have “read” on the Elizabethan stage. The Globe’s all-male productions have therefore become imbricated in critical debates over the sexually transgressive nature of cross-dressing…. (p. 232).
As several critics have protested, however, such claims to authenticity are bogus, raising expectations of historical verisimilitude only to satisfy them with an amusement-park version of Elizabethan culture. How could one expect to replicate the experience of an Elizabethan audience when cultural contexts have changed so radically? The material conditions of performance are not the same today as they were in 1660: the structure of the new Globe itself makes concessions to modernity, actors are differently trained, and rehearsal processes are more subject to a director’s vision. Furthermore, audiences bring vastly different assumptions with them about family, courtship, and social class as well as gender, erotic desire, and homosexuality. More to the point, adult male actors on the new Globe’s stage are fundamentally different—in physical appearance, maturity, voice, professional training, and social empowerment—from the boy apprentices who performed at the original Globe, and their playing roles written for boys casts doubt upon any claim the new Globe might make to replicate the experience an Elizabethan audience would have had (p. 233).
In response to such criticism, the Globe’s artistic director Mark Rylance has attempted to clarify that authenticity, which he considers a “confusing and arrogant” term, was never a goal of his company. Rather, the company uses what he calls “original practices” to test whether Elizabethan methods of staging may still be theatrically viable and to help “recover the original way of making art,” thereby unearthing “layers of meaning that modern practice obscures.” This all sounds innocent enough. But I shall argue that calling the use of an all-male cast an “original practice” is in fact a tactical ruse by which Rylance coaxes audiences to divest themselves of essentialized notions of gender and sexuality and, if only for the duration of the play, to entertain queer thoughts. In other words, the Globe’s “original practices” productions advance a culturally transgressive agenda rendered safe by the distancing device of historical recuperation. They offer up a subversive sexual politics which, under the conservative guise of doing archeological work, are made palatable as popular entertainment (p. 233).
Melissa D. Aaron. “'A Queen in a Beard': A Study of All-Female Shakespeare Companies,” in Shakespeare Re-dressed: Cross Gender Casting in Contemporary Performance. James C. Bulman, ed. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2008.
I shall retreat out of pippin-pelting range before stating hypothesis two: that all-male Shakespeare tends to be conservative. It isn’t all conservative, of course, but often all-male Shakespeare tries to have it both ways, toying with homoerotic frisson while making it safe for tourists because it’s “historically authentic”—even if it’s not historically authentic. The most famous examples are probably Mark Rylance’s Cleopatra and Olivia [in Twelfth Night], as recent evidence has increasingly suggested that female roles were not played by adult males, but by adolescents who “graduated” to the male roles. All-male productions may be many things, but they are not nearly as revolutionary and groundbreaking as they are often made out to be.
Further, all-male productions come at a cost: the cost of not hiring women. This is a very serious issue for actors, production staff, and directors—almost anyone except for costume designers, who do tend to be women (p. 151).
Kathryn Hunter as Richard III in The Globe's 2003 all-female production.
Melissa D. Aaron's comments on Kathryn Hunter's performance in the role of Richard III in 2003.
Hunter's performance showed that Richard found masculinity problematic and difficult to achieve; in order to counter the limitations of his crippled and stunted body, he was constantly striving to perform the part of a swaggering, cocky, sexually successful man.....Hunter used her body to simultaneously cite both femininity-- through her slight stature and her undisguised face and hair-- and masculinity-- through her gestures and cocky, aggressive characterization-- to denaturalize gender. She also revealed a powerfully challenging reading of the character. The audience, with whom Hunter cultivated an active relationship from the very beginning of the production, were privy to Richard's strenuous attempts at conveying masculinity....After successfully seducing Anne, for instance, Richard turned to the audience to exclaim, "Upon my life she finds, although I cannot, / Myself to be a marv'lous proper man" (1.2.240-1). The way that Hunter played these lines indicated both the character and the actress: as Richard, she conveyed delight at achieving a manly sexual conquest...." (p. 177-178).
Hunter's performance showed that Richard found masculinity problematic and difficult to achieve; in order to counter the limitations of his crippled and stunted body, he was constantly striving to perform the part of a swaggering, cocky, sexually successful man.....Hunter used her body to simultaneously cite both femininity-- through her slight stature and her undisguised face and hair-- and masculinity-- through her gestures and cocky, aggressive characterization-- to denaturalize gender. She also revealed a powerfully challenging reading of the character. The audience, with whom Hunter cultivated an active relationship from the very beginning of the production, were privy to Richard's strenuous attempts at conveying masculinity....After successfully seducing Anne, for instance, Richard turned to the audience to exclaim, "Upon my life she finds, although I cannot, / Myself to be a marv'lous proper man" (1.2.240-1). The way that Hunter played these lines indicated both the character and the actress: as Richard, she conveyed delight at achieving a manly sexual conquest...." (p. 177-178).
Janet McTeer as Petruchio in the Globe production of The Taming of the Shrew.
Melissa D. Aaron's comments on Janet McTeer's performance as Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew:
Where Hunter’s performance as Richard showed how masculinity was difficult for him to perform, McTeer embodied Petruchio’s masculinity [in The Taming of the Shrew] with admirable ease. Her first entrance in act I, scene 2 was deliberately sensational. McTeer emerged through the trap in the center of the stage floor, breeches unbuttoned, shirt unlaced, vest hanging off by one sleeve, kissing and fondling a heavily pregnant wench. As she spoke her first speech…she fastened her disarranged clothing, drained a glass of wine, and kissed and flirted with the Widow…. This was an unambiguously macho Petruchio: he swaggered, blustered, and even urinated during this scene….Everyone who came in contact with her Petruchio…was clearly awed by his masculine presence. McTeer, at six foot one, easily dominated every other actress onstage physically, and along with her deep, commanding voice, she embodied the standard of manliness that governed the world of the play (p. 179-180).
Where Hunter’s performance as Richard showed how masculinity was difficult for him to perform, McTeer embodied Petruchio’s masculinity [in The Taming of the Shrew] with admirable ease. Her first entrance in act I, scene 2 was deliberately sensational. McTeer emerged through the trap in the center of the stage floor, breeches unbuttoned, shirt unlaced, vest hanging off by one sleeve, kissing and fondling a heavily pregnant wench. As she spoke her first speech…she fastened her disarranged clothing, drained a glass of wine, and kissed and flirted with the Widow…. This was an unambiguously macho Petruchio: he swaggered, blustered, and even urinated during this scene….Everyone who came in contact with her Petruchio…was clearly awed by his masculine presence. McTeer, at six foot one, easily dominated every other actress onstage physically, and along with her deep, commanding voice, she embodied the standard of manliness that governed the world of the play (p. 179-180).
Kevin Spacey as Richard III in 2011.
DISABILITY AND PERFORMANCE
The field of Disability Studies has much to offer in terms of ways to think about Richard's body. Think about Richard's description of his own body and his relationship to it, and the way that he deploys his body in his various transactions. In terms of the performance we saw, I am thinking in particular about the moment when Richard offered his "withered" arm to one of his new subjects to kiss. But there were many moments when Rylance used his body in ways that spoke to the idea that disability involves a kind of performance.
Here is a brief summary of one of some of the most important assumptions underlying the field, taken from a review of the book Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance. Here, the reviewer Michael M. Chemers suggests what Theater Studies and Disability Studies have to offer each other as ways of looking at the world. The book he is discussing is by Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander and was published in 2005 by the University of Michigan Press.
It is the post-1970s social model which recognizes "disability" as a hermeneutically derived identity, rather than as an essential one. As the hermeneutics of race, gender, and other socially-constructed identities came under productive analysis in the aftermath of the Civil Rights movement, so disability is currently understood not as some ontological category but as a set of assumptions that, taken together, condition how a given individual's body is collectively understood within a given social matrix.
In the parlance of Theatre Studies, we might quite reasonably say that disability is performative. There is a script for disability as there is for race and gender, but, like all such roles, disability can be played tactically, employing a wide variety of strategies ranging from the propagandistic to the subversive to recondition its reception (p. 91-92).
Clearly there is much to say about how one plays a character with a disability onstage. This is also, of course, an issue of casting. Should actors without disabilities be given the roles of disabled characters? Why do we so often reward able-bodied actors playing the roles of characters with disabilities with awards and acclaim? Think of performances like Daniel Day Lewis's in My Left Foot and Dustin Hoffman's in Midnight Cowboy and Rain Man.
There are organizations dedicated to the promotion of the careers of actors with disabilities. One British actor with an interesting career is Warwick Davis. He came to fame by playing the Ewok Wicket in Star Wars, and recently starred in the BBC comedy series Life's Too Short (also featuring Ricky Gervais, and very funny!) He plays himself, an actor with a disability trying to make it in the British entertainment industry. In real life, Warwick Davis runs an agency called Willow Management that promotes the careers of actors under five feet tall. Davis's career, like that of many other activists for actors with disabilities, has drawn attention to the exclusions and injustices of much ordinary casting practice.
What do you think? Should Richard III be played by an able-bodied actor? Is it okay to "ham up" the disability? Is it okay for Mark Rylance, the star of the Globe Theatre, to emphasize his endless mutability as an actor by playing every role, or should casting at the Globe strive to include a broader range of people? In a sense, the Globe Theatre exists to challenge the idea that you have to "play what you are," and that's good. It's good to challenge essentialism in casting and show that anyone can play anything. But why, at the end of the day, does the Globe cast mostly white guys, and mostly Rylance himself, in all the juiciest parts? Wouldn't an actor like Warwick Davis have something potentially unique to contribute to a role like that of Richard III?
One episode of Life's Too Short featured a cameo from Johnny Depp, who came to Warwick Davis for a consultation on "how to play a dwarf" in his next movie. The episode used comedy to draw attention to a problematic casting practice.
The field of Disability Studies has much to offer in terms of ways to think about Richard's body. Think about Richard's description of his own body and his relationship to it, and the way that he deploys his body in his various transactions. In terms of the performance we saw, I am thinking in particular about the moment when Richard offered his "withered" arm to one of his new subjects to kiss. But there were many moments when Rylance used his body in ways that spoke to the idea that disability involves a kind of performance.
Here is a brief summary of one of some of the most important assumptions underlying the field, taken from a review of the book Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance. Here, the reviewer Michael M. Chemers suggests what Theater Studies and Disability Studies have to offer each other as ways of looking at the world. The book he is discussing is by Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander and was published in 2005 by the University of Michigan Press.
It is the post-1970s social model which recognizes "disability" as a hermeneutically derived identity, rather than as an essential one. As the hermeneutics of race, gender, and other socially-constructed identities came under productive analysis in the aftermath of the Civil Rights movement, so disability is currently understood not as some ontological category but as a set of assumptions that, taken together, condition how a given individual's body is collectively understood within a given social matrix.
In the parlance of Theatre Studies, we might quite reasonably say that disability is performative. There is a script for disability as there is for race and gender, but, like all such roles, disability can be played tactically, employing a wide variety of strategies ranging from the propagandistic to the subversive to recondition its reception (p. 91-92).
Clearly there is much to say about how one plays a character with a disability onstage. This is also, of course, an issue of casting. Should actors without disabilities be given the roles of disabled characters? Why do we so often reward able-bodied actors playing the roles of characters with disabilities with awards and acclaim? Think of performances like Daniel Day Lewis's in My Left Foot and Dustin Hoffman's in Midnight Cowboy and Rain Man.
There are organizations dedicated to the promotion of the careers of actors with disabilities. One British actor with an interesting career is Warwick Davis. He came to fame by playing the Ewok Wicket in Star Wars, and recently starred in the BBC comedy series Life's Too Short (also featuring Ricky Gervais, and very funny!) He plays himself, an actor with a disability trying to make it in the British entertainment industry. In real life, Warwick Davis runs an agency called Willow Management that promotes the careers of actors under five feet tall. Davis's career, like that of many other activists for actors with disabilities, has drawn attention to the exclusions and injustices of much ordinary casting practice.
What do you think? Should Richard III be played by an able-bodied actor? Is it okay to "ham up" the disability? Is it okay for Mark Rylance, the star of the Globe Theatre, to emphasize his endless mutability as an actor by playing every role, or should casting at the Globe strive to include a broader range of people? In a sense, the Globe Theatre exists to challenge the idea that you have to "play what you are," and that's good. It's good to challenge essentialism in casting and show that anyone can play anything. But why, at the end of the day, does the Globe cast mostly white guys, and mostly Rylance himself, in all the juiciest parts? Wouldn't an actor like Warwick Davis have something potentially unique to contribute to a role like that of Richard III?
One episode of Life's Too Short featured a cameo from Johnny Depp, who came to Warwick Davis for a consultation on "how to play a dwarf" in his next movie. The episode used comedy to draw attention to a problematic casting practice.
Warwick Davis and Johnny Depp in the BBC comedy Life's Too Short.
