‘I felt really depressed – and tired,” says Mat Fraser of the news that Michelle Terry, the artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe, will play Richard III this summer. Recent years have seen increased resistance to “cripping up”: non-disabled actors mimicking impairment on stage. The role of Richard is often now played by disabled actors, including Fraser, who starred in Barrie Rutter’s 2017 production of the play for Northern Broadsides and Hull Truck. “In 1997 I suggested to Equity that ‘crip face’ was like blacking-up, yet it’s been a constant since then – even now, even at the Globe,” says Fraser. “I will be personally boycotting the production if it goes ahead with this casting; I’m done with the pretenders.”
Disappointment at the announcement has been exacerbated by the Globe’s recent work to include more D/deaf and disabled actors. Francesca Mills played Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2023. Deaf actor Nadia Nadarajah, who appeared in As You Like It and Hamlet in 2018, is due to star in a bilingual spoken English and British Sign Language production of Antony and Cleopatra this summer. Robert Softley Gale, artistic director of the disability-led theatre company Birds of Paradise, says that the venue “is doing great stuff in other ways. So this is going to become, you know, ‘the Globe are bad’ – and it’s not that simple. But it’s one step forward, two steps back. Why do that? Why not just do the one step forward?”
