Here through metafandom and noticed one of my favorite topics getting introduced:
These were all with different troupes, so I guess genderbending Shakespeare is socially acceptable.
Indeed. Though as I recall, Fiona Shaw's portrayal of Richard II about ten years ago got a lot of reviews that were decidedly snarky: I suppose it's one thing for a woman to play Prospero and another for a woman to play an English king. Even a less-than-macho one like Richard II...
(Actually I had some quibbles with her performance myself, but they were interpretive -- I thought the dynamic caused by the cross-gendered casting was quite intriguing...Shaw's Richard was quite clearly madly and masochistically in love with Bolingbroke; if it had been a male actor as Richard it would have been intensely homoerotic and as it is I'm not sure it wasn't.)
And while we're on the subject of Richard II, I did a recording of it a while back where we did a lot of non-trad casting, although we didn't genderswap characters -- sort of hard to do in an English history -- just actors. Interestingly, a lot of the cross-casting fell along political lines: the royalist camp was mostly played by women, and the rebels largely by men, which was not intentional but led to some rather neat effects. I think. Of course, listening to the production, it doesn't "read" to me as a production with a woman reading Richard II, because, you know, it's just me...I wonder how it plays for others.
We're working on 1 Henry IV right now, in point of fact, and have a woman [not me this time] playing Falstaff. That ought to be lots of fun. ;) Again, not genderswapping characters, but -- particularly in an audio setting -- the effect is probably close enough...
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branchandroot
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Date: 2005-02-11 07:52 am (UTC)These were all with different troupes, so I guess genderbending Shakespeare is socially acceptable.
Indeed. Though as I recall, Fiona Shaw's portrayal of Richard II about ten years ago got a lot of reviews that were decidedly snarky: I suppose it's one thing for a woman to play Prospero and another for a woman to play an English king. Even a less-than-macho one like Richard II...
(Actually I had some quibbles with her performance myself, but they were interpretive -- I thought the dynamic caused by the cross-gendered casting was quite intriguing...Shaw's Richard was quite clearly madly and masochistically in love with Bolingbroke; if it had been a male actor as Richard it would have been intensely homoerotic and as it is I'm not sure it wasn't.)
And while we're on the subject of Richard II, I did a recording of it a while back where we did a lot of non-trad casting, although we didn't genderswap characters -- sort of hard to do in an English history -- just actors. Interestingly, a lot of the cross-casting fell along political lines: the royalist camp was mostly played by women, and the rebels largely by men, which was not intentional but led to some rather neat effects. I think. Of course, listening to the production, it doesn't "read" to me as a production with a woman reading Richard II, because, you know, it's just me...I wonder how it plays for others.
We're working on 1 Henry IV right now, in point of fact, and have a woman [not me this time] playing Falstaff. That ought to be lots of fun. ;) Again, not genderswapping characters, but -- particularly in an audio setting -- the effect is probably close enough...