Able-Bodied Actors Can't Play Richard III?

Given Curmie’s profession, it’s not surprising that he’s written a fair amount about casting decisions—when it is imperative that an actor be of a certain “look” (age, gender, race, etc.) and when it is not.

Curmie, in his own career, has cast many actors who don’t fit the character’s profile, or at least the description of the actor who first played the role… and that’s not even counting the plays by Euripides and Shakespeare, in which Clytemnestra, Rosalind, and Lady Macbeth would all have been originally played by men.  Sometimes, of course, you can’t do a play without having the actors fit a particular demographic: I wouldn’t have attempted “Master Harold”… and the boys or Trojan Barbie without being confident going into auditions that there were enough sufficiently talented and reliable black actors to do the play appropriately.

Sometimes, of course, “non-traditional casting” is done completely as a gimmick—casting a white actor as Martin Luther King, Jr. or a black woman as Anne Boleyn.  One of Curmie’s former students was just cast in an all-female version of Henry V.  Who knows… it might work, although Curmie raises an eyebrow of skepticism.

But much of what we’re seeing lately manifests as contempt for the acting profession: you can’t possibly play such-and-such a role without actually being of the same heritage.  One of the earlier manifestations of this phenomenon was when Chicago’s Porchlight Theatre cast an Italian-American (whom the company thought was Latino when they cast him) as the Dominican-born lead in their production of In the Heights a few years ago.  He looked the part, acted the part, sang and danced the part, but he wasn’t Latino.  There was much howling and gnashing of teeth.  The production and the company made headlines for all the wrong reasons.

Even a reasonably close look at what’s happening of late reveals a sort of affirmative action program: it’s fine for a Jewish actor to play a Christian, a black actor to play a traditionally white character, a gay actor to play a straight role… but, recently, at least, reversing that pattern is guaranteed to produce ululation and rending of garments.  

The real Richard III
was pretty normal-looking

In the latest variation on the theme, the Times of London reports that “The days of able-bodied actors playing Richard III are over just as they are for white ones playing Othello, the outgoing head of the Royal Shakespeare Company has suggested.”  The only good news in this sentence is the word “outgoing.”

Apart from the irony if not hypocrisy—Gregory Doran, the RSC head in question, is the widower of Sir Anthony Sher, an able-bodied actor whose most famous role was Richard III—there are at least two considerations at play here.  One is the old “it’s called acting” response.  

Last night, Curmie and Beloved Spouse watched the Roman Polanski film “Venus in Fur.”  (Yes, I know, Polanski is a creep.  If you want to boycott his films, Gentle Reader, go right ahead.  But he’s also a great director, and Curmie, at least in this case, chooses not to deprive himself of art simply because of antipathy for the artist.)  The female character in the film’s source (the David Ives play) and the source’s source (Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s novel) is 24.  That description of her is cut from the film because the actress, Emmanuelle Seigner, was just short of twice that age. 

What’s interesting, though, is that… wait for it: she’s good at her job.  With the exception of a couple of brief close-up moments when Seigner’s real age is suggested (she could still have passed for 30), Curmie would have bought that she was indeed 24.  An actor’s ability to make the spectator believe in the character’s reality is far more important than any demographic overlap between the character and the actor.

Second, the question must arise: just how similar must the actor be to the description of the character.  We actually learn more about Richard’s disabilities in Henry VI, Part 3 than we do in Richard III.  His arm is “[shrunk] like a withered stump”; he has an “envious mountain on [his] back; his legs are “of unequal size.”  In Richard III, we learn no specifics, only that he is “not shaped for sportive tricks” (Curmie, never having been confused with Adonis, has this line on a t-shirt he must dig out again soon… hoping it still fits), that he is “rudely stamped,” etc.

The real-life Richard was far less impaired, suffering from a relatively mild case of scoliosis.  The rest was simply Shakespeare sucking up to the current monarch, whose throne resulted from her grandfather defeating Richard at Bosworth Field, by conflating Richard’s allegedly deformed ethics with similar warpage of his body.

Curmie knows better than to believe that characters necessarily stay the same from play to play.  He once played Creon in Oedipus the King, and had more than one discussion (perhaps even argument) with the director, who wanted me to play the authoritarian and borderline evil character from Antigone instead of the loyal and unjustly distrusted brother-in-law in the play we were actually performing.  Still, to the extent that the physical portrayal of Richard has become codified and perhaps calcified over time, it’s worth looking at both those descriptions and what the character is required to do.

We’re leaving aside here such nagging questions as whether you need to be a murderous English nobleman (or from the fifteenth century) to play the role.  What must the character be able to do, and not do?  If we take our cues only from Richard III, per se, he just needs to have something less than the perfect physique, meaning that you don’t have to have an actual disability to play the role, even in the Wokest of scenaria.  But if we look to the earlier play for guidance, then he’s got a hunchback, a withered arm, and mismatched legs.  

If we’re insisting that the actor be other than able-bodied, we must logically insist that he meet all three of these requirements.  Also, of course, he must be capable of actually going into battle at the end of the play: he needs to be able to ride, to wield a sword with presumably his good arm, and so on.  So: in addition to the famous hunched back, the actor must have exactly one good arm, must be able to walk and ride, must have one leg significantly longer or thicker than the other… doesn’t that narrow the field a bit much?

Of course, it often happens is that the members of the fill-in-the-blank “community” are satisfied when one of their own gets cast.  A couple of years ago, Curmie directed an evening of one-act plays by Asian authors.  We made sure that we weren’t indulging in cultural appropriation: for example, one of the playwrights was famous for writing plays in which there was no family connection between characters, so that when the play was presented outside his native China, any actor of any race could play any role.  Needless to say, Curmie was publicly criticized by a student for not casting more students of color, such as herself, of course.  She’s Latina.  (Side note: two students of color were indeed cast.)

“So… let’s see… hunchback, withered arm, legs that don’t match.  Well, Bill over there lost an eye.  He’s disabled, so he’s fine.  Just don’t cast anyone able-bodied.”

All of this leads to another point, or perhaps just an extension of this one: maybe, maybe, if you’re the RSC you have a reasonable supply of accomplished actors with (how to say this?) appropriate disabilities.  But the rest of us don’t.  Quiara Alegría Hudes, co-author of In the Heights, addressed this issue with respect to that Porchlight production mentioned above.  Even while expressing disappointment in that company for their casting decision, she grounded her commentary in the fact that there are certainly good Latino actors in Chicago. 

But, she says, “I do not hold these views as strongly with educational and non-professional productions. I’m happy for schools and communities who do not have these actors on hand to use In the Heights as an educational experience for participants of all stripes.”  That’s a step.  Of course, she also argues that directors of color should be hired to do “Shakespeare and Molière and Ibsen and Cruz. Not just Cruz.”  But, one suspects, she’d argue that a director named O’Reilly or Kleinschmidt or Lundqvist should not be directing Cruz.  (Sigh.)

It may also be worth mentioning that when Curmie directed the production of “Master Harold”… and the boys mentioned above, he waited to go forward with the choice of play until at least three good black male actors were available to play the two black servant characters, Sam and Willy: you weren’t going to get cast just because you were the right race and gender. 

There are, needless to say, a lot more black actors than actors with the appropriate combination of disabilities to play Richard III “authentically.”  But Curmie would argue that if you’re going to insist that only disabled actors are eligible for casting, there need to be enough of them to not cast some.

But the stupidity of Doran’s position is more problematic than just being terminally woke.  Rather, it draws attention to itself rather than to an actual issue, one which Doran glosses over while ostensibly attempting to make: the fact that there are too few opportunities for disabled actors.  Even characters with disabilities are overwhelmingly played by able-bodied actors.  A quota system isn’t the answer, and making up bogus or misleading statistics (like that 20% of the population is disabled) is more of a problem than a solution.

Sometimes, there’s a real attempt at authenticity: for example, a number of productions, both professional and amateur, of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time have sought out actors on the autism spectrum to play the young central character.  And there are companies which concentrate specifically on providing opportunities for theatre artists with disabilities.  (One of Curmie’s favorite former students worked for such a company for several years.)

But it’s in the everyday roles that progress needs to be made.  Why can’t the boss or the best friend or the mother-in-law or… wait for it… the lead be played by someone on the spectrum or in a wheelchair or with a guide dog?  Sure, some roles will require able-bodied actors, the same way they require an actor of a particular race or gender or age.  But thousands of roles do not.  A good actor is a good actor: let’s make certain the roles go to those who deserve them.

It's easy to understand the frustration of disabled actors who aren’t even given the opportunity to compete for a number of roles they could play, and who simultaneously  aren’t granted priority for characters most like themselves.  Still, preventing actors—able-bodied or otherwise—from playing roles which are in their range is problematic.

It’s a truism of the theatre that the actor’s ability to cry is secondary to his ability to make the audience do so.  Similarly, the actor who can make us believe he suffers as the character does is always preferable to the one who merely does so suffer.  And exclusion is never the path to inclusion.