Celebration and Enlightenment

A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare, directed by Nicholas Hytner, The Bridge, London, 2019.

THE I saw at Shakespeare’s Globe in London last June was the latest of many recent productions that reach out for racial, gender, and sexual diversity without thinking through the commonsense implications of casting and interpretive choices. Henry was played by an African woman (Sarah Amankwah) —and that was apparently the sole concept. If Amankwah had given a good performance, of course, no one would have thought twice about the casting, but her verse training was markedly poor and she screamed most of Henry’s big speeches. Two years earlier I’d seen a Globe with a male Rosalind, a female Orlando, and a deaf woman as Celia, who communicated with Rosalind in a made-up sign language that no one else—including the audience—could understand. I sat through an otherwise impressive at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake later on that summer in which some female members of the company showed up among the troops; clearly the director, Tim Carroll, thought it was more important to impose a contemporary statement about gender equity than to follow a consistent narrative line, since one of the reasons Joan is put on trial by the church is that she’s a woman dressed in men’s garments. The dual point of these misguided efforts seems to be to turn the audience into better people (which I find presumptuous and condescending) and to showcase the virtuousness of the director. Sometimes it may also produced precisely the opposite result, by barring a female actor from taking it up.