Wednesday, 26 May 2010

On casting, and on meaning on stage

Steinstermeier's Deutsche Betonanstalt production of Tarell Alvin McCraney's Wig Out!*













Still, she bravely chunters on:




Who. Looks. Nothing. Like. The. Character.































Stefan Pucher’s production at Schauspielhaus, Hamburg


and lastly Jan Bosse at the Burgtheater
































































* (Re: photo) Not really.


Ian Shuttleworth said...

This long piece is perhaps a good occasion to begin to interrogate an assumption which has underlain a lot of your internationalist thought and writing for a while now: namely that with regard to realism Anglophone theatre is - broadly - of one type and European, especially German, theatre of another.

Your sense of, and use of the term, "mainstream" is problematic here. For what we think of - and what we see, with hardly any exceptions - as European theatre is specifically subsidised European theatre, or at least now theatre which has grown to maturity in a culture of subsidy. These countries' "mainstream" - in the sense of commercial, West-End-analogue - theatre presentations and audiences remain as tied to the conventions in question as any.

Your national-cultural distinction in this respect, then, is to a large extent fallacious; the fallacy is analogous to that of, say, comparing other countries' literary novels to British chick-lit as if each were characteristic of the entire novel form in their respective lands.

It's not by any means an uncommon fallacy; indeed, it's really only by watching you begin to grapple with the issues that I've become aware that it had also long informed my own thinking. And there's a lot of room for considering what constitutes "dominant", "characteristic" [or whatever] theatrical values and conventions within countries and across them. But I think we do need to be aware that, if we don't do that, then our thoughts on comparative issues simply aren't resting on even ground.

As you no doubt know, your arguments aren't equally valid across the various categories you've used, either. Accent, for instance, remains in play more strongly in countries whose borders and regionalism have been more fluid than the UK's and which may well have a number of official or common languages in use.

(One instance of precisely the kind of comic use of accent: what I think may be Berlin's longest-running show, the comedy-Western-musical Der Schuh des Manitu gets a yok out of characters coming from the Wild West, i.e. the south-western states of America, by using south-western German, i.e. Bavarian, accents for them.)

And to argue my own corner specifically on the race question, I still think you're over-simplifying a number of positions.

My point about the use of black actors in Dea Loher's play was precisely not about dramatic/social authenticity, but rather about the myopic attitude that believes that can be considered in isolation from other matters. As I made explicit when I wrote later about the use of golliwog masks in the Schaubühne's "The Marriage Of Maria Braun", the racial dimension of such choices does not just represent characters onstage, it also implicitly presents attitudes in the wider offstage society which inform the casting/staging decision.

My point about the Loher play was not, ultimately, that it would have been wrong (either morally or because false in terms of realism) to cast non-black actors in the parts, but rather that it would have said something about where Britain in general and the production in particular stand at present about the matter of rightness or wrongness in that regard, and that that - what it said - might have been inaccurate, unhelpful, retrogressive, whatever.

I think you flatter Loher: I don't think she's choosing to foreground the arbitrariness of her portrayal of such characters, I think she's trying to get away with not caring that much about it.

Hope that makes some kind of sense.

Andrew Haydon said...

Re: this “Your sense of, and use of the term, “mainstream” is problematic here. For what we think of - and what we see, with hardly any exceptions - as European theatre is specifically subsidised European theatre, or at least now theatre which has grown to maturity in a culture of subsidy. These countries’ “mainstream” - in the sense of commercial, West-End-analogue - theatre presentations and audiences remain as tied to the conventions in question as any.”

Hmm. I wonder if you’re making “mainstream” more problematic than it needs to be. I’d be the first to concede that I’m no expert on theatre in any other country (hell, I’d be shy of saying I was an “expert” on British theatre, although I must know *something* by now) – I’m only a Libby Purves when it comes to Germany, as ‘twere :-)

But. Most of the examples I’ve used regarding British casting come from the subsidised sector as well. True, I’ve mentioned the West End, but I reckon I only see one or two shows there a year which didn’t originate in the subsidised sector (off the top of my head: The Misanthrope, Speaking in Tongues, God of Carnage, Under the Lintel, As You Like It with Sienna Miller, Lord of the Rings, and that classic of international theatre Peter Pan – El Musical!). And I reckon that’s it.

Now, what’s interesting about this, is that, to the best of my understanding, in Germany (and other northern/eastern European countries, about which my knowledge is even more limited), their critics also only go to the subsidised theatre. Or rather, the German Theatre Critic is not expected to watch or review “commercial theatre” or “musicals”, so in that sense, their “mainstream” *isn’t* the commercial, West-End analogue.

Correspondingly, that’s not especially the sense in which I’ve used it in regard to Britain either. Annoyingly, I realise that the sense in which I *have* used it is: “British theatre which fits my description of “being mainstream”.”

But within that, I was thinking of lots of stuff at the NT, lots of stuff at the RSC, lots and lots of stuff at the Donmar and Old Vic (and possibly Almeida – theatres which I don’t get to nearly enough – although in the case of the Old Vic, thank God, frankly, I’m still getting over Cloaca and Complicit).

“Your national-cultural distinction in this respect, then, is to a large extent fallacious; the fallacy is analogous to that of, say, comparing other countries’ literary novels to British chick-lit as if each were characteristic of the entire novel form in their respective lands.”

Nah. See above. I was being fairer than you give me credit for. I guess “mainstream” was clumsy give that I wandered all over the (British) shop, but I guess in my mind I was drawing a direct equivalence between the main stage of Deutsches Theater and the National Theatre (I know they’re not on many levels, but...) and tend to think that the Schaubühne is a rough equivalent of the Royal Court (at least insofar as it produces a lot of their plays :-). Lord knows what the British equivalent of the Volksbühne would be. I guess Headlong taking over the Young Vic and the Old Vic and putting Chris Goode in charge of the studio spaces would be a start, but you see what I mean...
Sorry. I’m now imagining Headlong taking over the Young and Old Vic and putting Chris Goode in charge of the studios. How do we make that happen, please?

Andrew Haydon said...

(gah, I'm limited by characters to commenting on my own blog, FFS)


I’ll leave the other bits for when I’ve woken up a bit and give other people a chance to comment (ha! As if!)

As an aside, I do hope the German stuff in the original doesn’t sound needlessly antagonistic. I know I’m still teetering on the brink of self-parody with this, and that using it as an example with which to compare British stuff doesn’t actually make the issues I’m having with British stuff just seem like an issue of treachery. The questions I’ve got about our conventions in almost all cases pre-date my infatuation with the continent (go re-read my review of Zerbombt on CultureWars – man, I *really* wasn’t feeling it then – they cast it all wrong!). But I have found it’s made it possible for me to think a bit more outside the box of my British training/thinking/assumptions.

Again, hope my above stuff all makes sense...

Good to be having this conversation, though.

Orion Hunt said...

“There are precisely two explicitly black characters in Shakespeare.”

I’m going to start with this declarative (they’re always dangerous, he says without irony), not to nitpick arbitrarily, but because it’s the only way I’m able to articulate my way into your epic essay. Putting words in your mouth (hopefully the right ones), it seems there are three linked, but entirely incorrect, assumptions based on this statement. Starting with the easy one first:

1) The only two explicitly black characters are Aaron and Othello, both described as Moors.
2) We’re meant to read/see ‘Moor’ as ‘black’.
3) If only two characters are explicitly black, then everyone else must be ‘non-black’.

The reason I’ve laid these out explicitly is because I have the suspicion that there is a fourth assumption implicitly lurking somewhere around your original statement that I think needs investigating: that non-black equals white. Or that non-white equals black.

Quite apart from wondering where Cleopatra and Pericles might fit in the racial binary that’s been set up, and without getting into the discussion of what Shakespeare actually meant by ‘Moor’ (probably Moroccan, possibly Turkish, for my money), I’m interested in how there might be some bigger indicators here about how colour blind casting operates more generally.

I’ve tried for 10 minutes to think of a non-wanky way to write this next bit and can’t, so I apologise in advance. But it seems to me that if colour blind casting operates in terms of “not white equals black” (which an awful lot of it does, I suspect), then there’s always going to be that uncomfortable polar dichotomy between white as a default setting which has no external values or associations attached to it (where white can take on any colour, both literally and figuratively), and black as representative of the other and the associated values of otherness, some or all of which may be signalled to in a production either by design or accident. And crucially, there are no shades of grey in between.

So I think part of this mimetic dilemma might be that when writing/directing/casting, those involved are forced into making choices (perhaps that’s too kind in suggesting there’s no autonomy?) between categories that are declared mutually exclusive, when in fact they aren’t: black/white comes to stand for a spectrum of races and ethnicities; gay/straight, instead of a more nuanced understanding, like a seven point Kinsey scale; even male/female is rigid in the light of possibilities opened up by transvestitism, transexuality, hermaphroditism and androgyny.

This doesn’t really help to answer a question that I’m not even sure you asked. And quite how one changes the system so that that non-white equals more than black and that not male doesn’t have to mean female … well, I have no idea.

The whole subject of mimesis is so deliciously tangled though. Why do we want it? When do we expect it? What value does it offer when in so many productions something fundamental like the dialogue is decidedly unlifelike? Like a dodgy undergrad essay, I feel I’m about to wander into territory here that I’ll soon come to regret deeply, but something about this desire for mimesis seems to resonate with Baudrillard and simulacra, no? I’ve only really thought about this in terms of the race section in your post, and I’m actually quite interested in the sexuality bit (which I think might be something of a misnomer for what’s actually going on). So I might come back with something in a bit once I've thought more about camp. But it’s been a while since I dusted off my French postmodernist hat (I never looked good in a beret), so I might abandon that line of thinking altogether.

Great post though. And a more than fair savaging of Soloski's piece.


Alison Croggon said...

Andrew, so much is raised here of vexing interest. Thanks for this.

I'll confine myself for the moment to the Anglophone/ accent question, because that's where I entered it. In Australia imported English and American plays are played with the appropriate accents or not, depending on the director (the accent coach is a frequent credit in programs). It's a very clear choice that can go any which way. And we also don't have, except in a very crude sense, anything like UK regional accents - the closest is that a rural accent will be more recognisably Strine, and even then not always, and there is Aboriginal English, again generally rural. Most differences would be hard to pick to an outside ear, and for all intents and purposes the accent is treated as universal. Most Ausralians live in cities, and urban Australian is not exaggerated Strine.

Any decent actor here can play accents - and we have a lot of decent actors. Which is why I found THAT FACE in Melbourne puzzling (fwiw, it was played with Australian accents in Sydney and, to the best of my knowledge, in Brisbane - all different productions). It went well in all these towns, so this didn't impede its general success with most of its audiences. But it did create a real dissonance for me, which made me think about other contemporary plays in English - I think it's a different deal crossing English cultures than it is crossing languages. Chekhov will always be done in Australian, or you risk getting wannabe RSC colonial theatre - we've had some very interesting productions of Chekhov and Ibsen that dismantle the play altogether as cultural artefact, but even aside from that a mainstream production will be Australian. Unles, as sometimes happens, Russian actors have been cast. And the default for Shakespeare is Australian - not the cliche twang, but how it's spoken in Australian cities. Etc. David Harrower in Australian sounds fine, it becomes neutral in the imaginative space of the stage. Ditto Howard Barker. But others, because of what the plays are, need to be thought about, as the decision of accents will impact - whatever the decision is - on the meaning of the play. I've never seen Wilde done in Australian, for instance. Colonial judgements play here too - a recent production of Dario Fo's Elizabeth, which featured the astounding but very Australian Julie Forsyth, one of our great comic actors, had a conservative critic in the Spectator longing for Judi Dench and reaching for his smelling salts because of the vulgarity of it all. But that's pretty much outdated now.

.../2 - won't let me post...!

Alison Croggon said...

I haven't seen any Australian plays in the UK, but Bovell's (which I loathed, fwiw) was done here with English accents - not regional ones - because it was partly set in England. Quite wobbly ones on the whole, as I recall. So its being done in regional accents over there is hardly a major shift in meaning. I'm sure Joanna Murray-Smith is done in British accents. But if Daniel Keene were ever done over there, as opposed to Europe, it wouldn't make any difference, and there certainly would be absolutely no point in doing him in Australian; he doesn't write the kind of English that points to particular accents or plays that are set in particular places. Which incidentally means that a lot of cross-racial casting happens in his work, in both Australia and France. Like Harrower, what would be required is an accent that audiences would accept as neutral. Which actually, thinking about it, might be harder in England than it is in Australia, where accent isn't linked to class and region.

Re the race question - you might be interested in this argument, about an Indigenous casting of The Birthday Party. Whatever the pros and cons, it raises some of the difficulties of racial casting and how it isn't colour blind. In this case, the director wanted to read it through race, which was to my mind deeply problematic.

This is a bit longer than I intended! But this topic does sprawl.

Chaydon said...

Dude, I have not read all of this piece yet (though I will), but I did see the bit about Pressure Drop. And I wanted to answer your comment: "one did sort of wonder why Salinger wasn’t dead within seconds and how on earth Goold managed to pull them apart and hold Tony back."

I would say, first, that it is not Tony (David Kennedy) that attacks John (Salinger) it is Barney, Tony's 14 year old son. Tony in fact pulls barney off John. Secondly, when Tony does try to attack John, he is stopped before reaching him by Jack (Michael Gould) a man whom Tony has always deferred to and looked up to. That is why Jack/Michael is able to stop Tony/David despite obviously not having his physical strength. Whether or not you felt it came across in the play (I think it does, but then, of course, I would) I think it makes perfect sense, given the history of their relationship that Tony would defer to Jack in this way - that fact that he does so at such an extreme moment is a sign of how much he respects his friend.

More generally, I am interested in the fact that you seem to have such an issue with the casting - whatever people thought of the show, positive or negative (and I have had lots of conversations with people about it from both perspectives) you are literally the only person who has said anything about the casting other than that it was spot on. I don't say that to big myself up at all, but rather to say that whilst there certainly were flaws in the show and lots of mistakes I made, I don't think the casting was one of them!

(Incidentally, I did not see Our Class, so that whole resonance never occurred to me - though I agree that it is an interesting piece of trivia.)

Brace said...

At that Almeida production of The Homecoming, I bumped into a friend and mentioned that I thought there was enormous value in having Ruth as a black woman. He then said, in a censorious tone, ‘I’m actually a friend of hers, so…’ and pulled a bit of face.
‘That’s nice,’ I said, ‘what do you think of them casting her, a black woman, in this role?’
‘Yes well she’s my friend okay,’ he snapped back ‘and I don’t think it’s a big deal what colour she is or isn’t,’ before walking off, possibly back to his group to explain that he’d just met a massive racist.

Which is a sort of disingenuous reaction akin to Big Suze in Peep Show saying ‘Oh, is he black? I hadn’t noticed’.

I think there’s something in the kernel of Big Suze's comment that also lies in the whole idea of colour-blind casting. That’s if I understand it right: where the choice of actor is based on their suitability for the role in *every* way apart from race/colour. That for me is a symptom of profound racial unease and an over-compensation.

The Homecoming production itself (as covered in the blog) wasn’t colour-blind casting. It knew well what it was doing and it worked, in part because I think Pinter’s stuff taps deep into theatre’s potential for metaphor. A lot of work doesn’t, a lot of new UK writing doesn’t, it tries to do other things. Colour-blind casting also theoretically shouldn’t, by its very nature, engage with this potential for metaphor. If the casting is blind to the colour how can it use it as an asset, as a signifier. The power of the person’s colour is neutered by c-b casting.

Except that actually I think a lot of colour-blind casting is disingenuous about that too. And it's often certain types of roles that can be colour-blind cast. Like, strong warrior males in history dramas, they can be black.

I do think, generally, that it’s essential we create conventions in the stuff we put on stage that help an audience to understand it on the terms it’s meant. So Anderson’s English, as an example I didn’t see, sounds like it had inconsistent conventions, a Danish man is black, everything else is accurate to period, no other casting statements made and therefore… well maybe the mix up is understandable.

I’ve broken my own rule of commenting on something I haven’t seen, so disabuse (and abuse) me if I am unfair on Anderson’s English.

Brace said...

course it's not about him being Danish particularly, it's about him being Hans Christian fucking Anderson, who wasn't black.

Ian Shuttleworth said...

Mm, maybe I protest a little too much, but it seems to me that you're seeking to rationalise a set of affinities and preferences you've recognised in yourself that are by their nature not rational creatures. (I don't mean that yours in particular aren't, I mean that none are.)

Also, I think there's an assumption in your position that these are the conventions and expectations under which much British theatre operates - other theatre doesn't operate under these ones - therefore it doesn't operate under conventions or expectations.

The inaccuracy of this was brought home to me last night when I went with a mutual friend of ours to see a production of Ödipus, Tyrann (Sophocles-Hölderlin-Müller, a creative pedigree that pretty much covers the waterfront) that was visiting the Volksbühne. One of the first things I said afterwards* was that it seemed to me stereotypically German in its presentation. Katharina (for it is she) said she would have called it more Polish, because she was dwelling primarily on the stage imagery, the sparse, poor-cum-holy theatre feel of it. I, on the other hand, was focusing on the performance style, which. was. slow. and. over. articulated. (to the extent that in places the German was too slow for me to follow it, to get a grasp on the flow of the sentences). and. then. at. TIMES BROKE INTO BELLOWING!!! (Note to self: research the influence of the Nevermind album on German stagecraft...)

I'd suggest that, obviously not completely but to a significant extent, this is indicative of the presence of sets of stagecraft values and assumptions that underlie "foreign theatre" as much as those you argue underpin "Anglophone theatre". By all means argue the relative merits of different sets of game rules, but to suggest that only one party in contention is observing any such rules is a fallacy. And I think that the tack you're taking has the effect of implicitly suggesting that.

*Actually the very first thing I said, on seeing director Dimiter Gotscheff at the curtain call, was "So that's where Martin Crimp got his hairstyle from..."

Ian Shuttleworth said...

"I guess in my mind I was drawing a direct equivalence between the main stage of Deutsches Theater and the National Theatre" - Well, then, Women Beware Women, Nation, Death And The King's Horseman, even The Power Of Yes in its way, and the National's greatest success in the last few years, War Horse... To verify how far the NT bucks those conventions, you need go no further than Quentin Letts' reliably condemnatory reviews of its output.

"Lord knows what the British equivalent of the Volksbühne would be" - a building-based Wrestling School? :-) Actually, to an extent, its equivalent was Charles Marowitz at the Open Space, shading into Thelma Holt's Roundhouse regime, in the '60s and '70s. Again, there's an subtext to your position that the difference is indicative of greater maturity or development on one side, and that ain't so either.

Andrew Haydon said...


So many comments; so much I want to come back to; so no time to do so, yet (still in Ipswich at the Pulse Festival - first show in an hour and a half - and already several shows behind in the write-up stakes). What larks...

Matt Beresford said...

Absolutely fascinating Andrew, as ever. I'll make a couple of rambling points:

Your frustration with British mainstream theatre comes through often in your posts here and on the Guardian forums; the safety and over-reliance on realism/naturalism of much of what you critique, runs like a thread through your blog.

I find myself largely in agreement with you for the theatre I want to SEE, but, as someone starting to direct theatre, I also find myself concerned and making compromises about practical issues of audience expectation - crucially, will they spend so much time working out what's going on (what's being 'said', second-guessing my choices, etc) that the whole thing becomes an intellectual exercise and not a piece of 'entertainment' which, although I want to make valuable, informative, educative, powerful (add your own identikit word) theatre, is the primary goal.

As an example - I saw the Regents Park Crucible on Monday night, a play I love and know well. The accent choices were most odd - a mixture of the West Country that's often the norm for the piece, 'standard' American for many of the girls, a bit of RP, American/Irish for Proctor and a mixture of some other stuff.

Now, I'll give the actors the credit that they weren't all just poor on accents (Barbara Houseman was the voice coach) and that these choices were planned. Had it just been the girls with the American accents then I could have accepted it in a non-naturalistic sense, given the play's theme and this director's staging choices with them, but with Proctor as well and occasional lines from Hale and numerous others I was confused.

Maybe what they did was spend a huge amount of time on what was ‘realistically’ happening with accents at the time in New England and they then played that 'truthfully'. Either way I spent way too much time thinking about all this stuff and not just enjoying (intellectually and emotionally) this wonderful play. It seemed too clever for an audience and neither bold nor clear enough.

So I guess what I'm saying is that making un-conventional choices in otherwise conventional productions (regardless of racial/sexuality issues) is strewn with problems for an audience - especially one that, unlike me, maybe only sees 5/6 plays a year. We can't just make theatre for each other after all.

Personally I believe in making non-realistic choices – I’m working on a Lower Depths which is historically played as hyper-realistic (with the exception of the Dutch Edinburgh production you mention elsewhere) but, for my money isn’t at all what Gorky wanted. Maybe the problem is that too many directors just aren't being brave ENOUGH to make it clear to the audience that we aren't just trying to be as real as possible?

Ian Shuttleworth said...

Matt, I saw The Crucible last night and initially felt the same as you about the accents, until I concluded that they'd decided to try to find a representation of period/region by going, broadly speaking, for a combination of Mummerset plus broad Massachusetts "A"s, and that Pat O'Kane's native Ulster simply kept coming through.

I think you pretty much hit a salient point about audience expectations and not necessarily leaving punters floundering... which is absolutely not to say that, poor loves, they couldn't cope with "strangeness", just that it takes time to tune expectations towards it. It's just the reality of the current landscape here, one of the game rules. (Interestingly, a few months ago I listened to Andrew arguing precisely that kind of stoicism as regards funding for writers...!)

Matt Beresford said...

Ian Shuttleworth said...

I think you pretty much hit a salient point about audience expectations and not necessarily leaving punters floundering... which is absolutely not to say that, poor loves, they couldn't cope with "strangeness", just that it takes time to tune expectations towards it.'s an old 'rule' of directing and acting that audiences will believe until you give them a reason NOT to.

Therefore if you say, for example, "there are no props here but money" (which I used for a 'Timon' last year) they'll accept the logic and go with it, even if they hate it, but, even with something that basic, I'm sure it took every member of my audience some time to process it and think about it.

I agree though - British audiences are entirely capable of accepting that the piece they are watching is asking them to suspend their disbelief more than just on the basic 'dramatic' level, but that the balance between making this really clear and battering them over the head with it like thy're idiots and incapable of subtlety, is one I struggle with.

But then again, if it was easy....;o)

Jana said...

Andrew, a post of this kind is madness! I gave up on the comments twice before finally managing, tonight, to read the 20,000-odd words this discussion takes.

I just wanted to say, your Guardian article on the topic of cross-racial casting was very influential on my own thinking. Earlier this year, I managed to squeeze all my thoughts on the matter into a 1,500 words article for the Australian audience ( Another 1,500 would have strengthened the argument, but not by much.

The gist, if I have understood you correctly, is that of politics, mimesis, story-telling and identification. Some are perceived as more or less specific. Zadie Smith pointed out that Phillip Roth used to be a 'Jewish novelist', but is now just a novelist. We notice what we're sensitive about.

One thing that's perhaps missing from the conversation is habit. One thing I find very peculiar about English speakers is how incredibly attuned they are to accent. I've lived in other countries, and foreigners were never so incessantly questioned about their place of origin, nor were the tiny inflections in their pronunciation picked up with quite the same speed and excitement. I've thought about it a lot, and the only possible answer I have is that it is about monolingualism. Multilingual experience of communication is more attuned to transmitting the message, I think, than to the points of style. But when your life is lived within one language, the nuances grow in importance. Ditto black Hamlet.

But habit is related to bias and prejudice, which is why cross-racial casting is understood politically. I remember some Australian friends commenting animatedly that the boy actor playing the main character in Brasilian film 'Cidade de Deus' was much darker-skinned than the actor who played him as a young man. Brasilians, living in the most genetically mixed country in the world, clearly didn't notice this lack of realism. Truth be told, coming from a completely Caucasian country, neither did I. But Australia has an indigenous population, you see...

Maxwell said...

Nice blog. I just stumbled upon this researching Pucher's Othello and was reminded of Fischer-Lichte's discussion of perceptual multistability in Castellucci, Castorf...exploiting the tension between the phenomenal and the semiotic body of the actor.

parallax casting collapsing the real and the fictional.
can we speak for others?
in what kind of casting can we begin to speak with others?

Anonymous said...

I'm interested in choral acting (on german stages in Stemann, Loesch, Chetouane). Speaking in groups, representing individuals in chorus, the text can liberate itself from the performers in an easy strange way. It reminds me of virtual spaces where identity doesn't depend on the body but the mind and can be articulated through langauge.