The best revenge is success. So news that Jamie Lloyd’s staging of Romeo & Juliet with Tom Holland has apparently secured a Broadway transfer before it’s even opened in London feels like a victory. Last week the show’s producers were compelled to issue a statement deploring the “barrage of deplorable racist abuse” levelled online at Holland’s co-star Francesca Amewudah-Rivers by mostly American trolls.
It’s disgusting that black artists, and those from other frequently-targeted groups, still have to deal with vile aggression from cowardly keyboard warriors trying vainly to roll back progress. Amewudah-Rivers is a composer and musician as well as an actor who I’ve seen give splendid performances. I hope her successive West End and Broadway debuts as Juliet win her all the awards.
It’s disgusting that black artists still have to deal with vile aggression from cowardly keyboard warriors
The most commonly shared tweet in the onslaught put photos of Amewudah-Rivers and Holland next to a still of Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes in Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film Romeo+Juliet with the comment “they are rewriting history before our very eyes”. The idiocy on every level suggests this was composed as a dumb provocation, possibly by AI.
Black theatre-makers and commentators were quick to point out that Lloyd isn’t making a movie and Shakespeare’s play is fiction, not history. Luhrmann also made Romeo’s wingman Mercutio a black drag queen, played by Harold Perrineau. Characters in many of Shakespeare’s plays have been performed by actors of different ethnicity and gender since the 1800s. In Shakespeare’s day, Juliet would have been played by an adolescent boy. If cast absolutely as written she would be 13 years old; and I think even absolutist traditionalists would baulk at that.
More importantly, theatre is an imaginative space where we willingly allow our perceptions to be challenged. It’s also been the great driver in the narrative arts in addressing the historic airbrushing from our culture of stories that were not those of white, privileged men.
We wouldn’t have Ncuti Gatwa (or have had Jodie Whitaker) as Doctor Who, or Dev Patel as David Copperfield, or Renegade Nell without theatre first breaking narrow casting tropes. The great irony here is that I’ll bet the online racists rarely if ever set foot in a theatre — and never have their eyes or their tiny, bigoted minds opened.
