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Abstract
This introduction investigates the issues raised by asserting cultural ownership over specific traditions of performance. In particular, it highlights how casting – one of the least analysed areas of theatre practice – might both empower and complicate debates around who should participate in performance. How might authentic casting – of casting actors who ‘look like’ they are from the same geographical region as the performance text or tradition – and colour-blind casting practices come into conflict? The casting controversy surrounding the Royal Shakespeare Company’s (RSC’s) 2012-13 production of The Orphan of Zhao provides an opportunity to tackle these questions.
Notes
1. Cláudia Tatinge Nascimento, Crossing Cultural Borders Through the Actor’s Work (New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), p. 38. Emphasis in the original.
2. Harvey Young, Theatre & Race (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 56.
3. Angelo Pao, No Safe Spaces: Re-casting Race, Ethnicity and Nationality in American Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), p. 2.
4. Ayanna Thompson, ‘Practising a Theory/Theorizing a Practice: An Introduction to Shakespearean Colorblind Casting’, in Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance ed. by Ayanna Thompson (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 1–24 (pp. 6–7).
5. Royal Shakespeare Company, The Orphan of Zhao, dir. by Gregory Doran, the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, November 2012–March 2013.
6. Gregory Doran, ‘In Search of the Orphan’, The RSC Online, 24 July–20 August 2012 <http://www.rsc.org.uk/explore/blogs/in-search-of-the-orphan/> [accessed 29 May 2013; URL no longer active].
7. See: ‘The Orphan of Zhao – Costume Designs’, The RSC Online <http://www.rsc.org.uk/explore/other-writers/the-orphan-of-zhao-costume-designs.aspx> [accessed 16 July 2014].
8. Youssef Kerkour, ‘Chinese Opera’, The RSC Online, 19 September 2012 <http://www.rsc.org.uk/explore/blogs/whispers-from-the-wings/chinese-opera/> [accessed 27 June 2014].
9. The Orphan of Zhao Company, ‘Letter to Malcolm Sinclair’ (President of British Equity), 26 October 2012. Provided to the authors by the RSC.
10. Nascimento, Crossing Cultural Borders, p. 49.
11. Anna Chen, ‘Memo to the RSC: East Asians Can Be More than Just Dogs and Maids’, Guardian, 22 October 2012 <http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/22/royal-shakespeare-company-east-asians> [accessed 23 October 2012].
12. The RSC sent five members of staff to the Opening the Door: East Asians in British Theatre, an Open Space event held by Devoted and Disgruntled at the Young Vic on 13 February 2013 and organised in partnership with Arts Council England, The Society of London Theatre (SOLT)/Theatre Management Association (TMA), The Casting Directors’ Guild (CDG), Equity, The Independent Theatre Council (ITC), and the Young Vic. This event aimed to address issues of under-representation of British East Asians in mainstream theatre.
13. Rustom Bharucha, Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 84.
14. Stuart Hall, ‘The Multicultural Question’, in Un/settled Multiculturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements, ‘Transruptions’, ed. by Barnor Hesse (London: Zed Books, 2000), pp. 209–41 (p. 220).
15. Jami Rogers, ‘The Shakespearean Glass Ceiling: The State of Colorblind Casting in Contemporary British Theatre’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 31.3 (Fall 2013), 405–30 (p. 428).
16. David Lee Jones played the lead in Richard III with the Festival Players, which toured the UK in the summer of 2012. Other British East Asian actors in Shakespeare include Benedict Wong as Laertes in Hamlet (Young Vic, 2011) and Daniel York as Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet (Basingstoke Haymarket, 1994) and as Edgar in King Lear (Yellow Earth Theatre-Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre, 2006).