Graham Wyles is an actor, writer and StageTalk Magazine reviewer based in Bristol. Here he talks about diversity in the theatre and how it has changed and developed over recent years.

DIVERSITY

The way our plays are cast has become the subject of much debate of late; in the process taking on a wider significance to society and finding commentators in both the popular and serious press and indeed, via the internet, worldwide. The discrete spaces in which such decisions are taken are, in a contracting world, now thrown open to general interest and debate. Everybody it seems has an interest in who plays what.

Something in the bones of theatre has made it attractive to and a refuge for the vanguards of diversity since the year dot. Women were acting on the stage before men were impersonating on the stage. (In 1324 the abbot-elect of Tavistock was accused of lavishing gifts on ‘stage players, male and female’ – the property of the abbey! And in good Queen Bess’s time the master of the revels records accounts for the costuming and disguising of men, women and children in sundry tragedies, plays, masques etc.) The diverse shades of sexual orientation have similarly had a long acceptance amongst theatre folk

Unthinking bias is not necessarily the fruit of prejudice, but merely an uncritical sense of ‘us and them’. Yet this is where performance arts in general, but particularly theatre, are able to make a difference by setting a new norm. In one respect theatre is a useful microcosm of society; there is no, ‘us and them’, only one society, Diversity training seems an alien concept in the theatre – for are we not in some sense all liberals here?  The theatre has a long history of agitating for social change. We believe, as did Martin Luther King Jr., that people should be judged on the content of their character, since that and not skin colour or background is the raw material of the actor.

Midway through the last century the sight of a dark skinned man bounding through the French windows of a country house waving a tennis racket would have been met with surprise certainly, shock possibly and no doubt derision in certain reactionary quarters. A little queasiness on the part of some theatre-goers would have given producers a little pause for thought even had there been a sufficiently deep pool of talented ‘ethnic’ actors from which to cast. It would have been a brave director to introduce such a novelty. Times change, plays (thankfully) change and today, given equivalent dramatic circumstances, one would expect a director to cast their net over a pool in which only talent would be the main criterion. How many plays can we think of that have skin colour as a component of the plot? The list is small, but contains those that deal directly with injustice, prejudice and outright racism (and of course jealousy).

Fastidious historical accuracy on the stage is sterile. In film perhaps, the camera can lovingly reveal a detail that unlocks a mood or evokes an epoch, but in the flowing, living bustle of the stage the details we crave are emotional truth, clarity of plot or suggestiveness of theme. An audience will quickly accept the premises of the play: a boy is a woman, a man is a dog, a woman is a prince, running on the spot is running over a distance and so on. Whatever we do to an audience to remind them they are in a theatre their imaginations will (contra-Brecht) stubbornly keep engaging with the story however slight the plot may be.

My own choice for a legend above the entrance to a theatre would be  ‘Metaphors at work’, but I certainly wouldn’t object if any director, duly cognisant of the power of the theatre, decided to greet the expectant playgoers with, ‘What If?’

© Graham Wyles. All rights reserved. No reproduction in part or in whole without prior permission.