The announcement of a summer production of Richard III at Shakespeare’s Globe in London has created wintry discontent for the casting of a non-disabled actor in the lead role.
In May, Michelle Terry, the Globe’s artistic director, will play the role of Shakespeare’s scheming king who describes himself as “deformed, unfinish’d”. In recent years, the character has been played in several major productions by disabled actors, including Mat Fraser for Northern Broadsides and Hull Truck in 2017, Kate Mulvany for Australia’s Bell Shakespeare in the same year and, in 2022, Arthur Hughes for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Such portrayals have “reclaimed” the character, who in real life had scoliosis, as revealed when his skeleton was discovered beneath a Leicester car park in 2012. The part has also continued to be played on stage and screen by non-disabled actors including Benedict Cumberbatch and Ralph Fiennes.
Reacting to the Globe’s summer season announcement, Brittanie Pallett, a professionally trained actor with a disability, posted a thread on X, in which she asked: “Why is an artistic director of any theatre hiring themselves to play the lead when it’s not their casting or lived experience? Before anyone says it doesn’t matter, every time this happens more harm than good is done to disabled communities through misrepresentation.” Pallett said that “in an ideal world I could see an argument for any actor to play a disabled or non-disabled character (I don’t personally agree)” but added that “we are far from that day”. Drama, she continued, “whether we like it or not, is in varying degrees a reflection of our society and our beliefs about the people we share this world with. Most people’s only experience of disabled life is through the stories we tell, so yeah it’s bloody dangerous when we get that wrong.”
The Globe responded to Pallett with a statement, saying: “We recognise the barriers to access in our industry and to our organisation and are working hard to address that. Representation and equity of opportunity, both on stage and off, are hugely important values to the Globe which is why we employ conscious casting and take positive action on every production. We believe the Shakespearean canon is based on a foundation of anti-literalism and therefore all artists should have the right to play all parts in, and the casting across all our work year-round is no different.”
The actor Ben Wilson, who is blind, wrote in a blog about the Globe’s announcement that he “thought the battle for Richard III was starting to be won, but this feels like taking about 10 steps backwards”. He described it as a case of “cripping up”, a term used to describe non-disabled actors who do not have lived experience to match the character they are playing. That criticism was made against the casting of Bradley Cooper (on stage) and Stranger Things’ Charlie Heaton (on screen) as Joseph Merrick in recent versions of The Elephant Man.
The Globe’s statement said its Richard III was at the beginning of a research and development process and would explore the usurping 15th-century king of England’s “abuse of power and pathological narcissism, why some of the characters in the play seem to support his path to tyranny in an age of impunity, and why we the audience seem so endlessly seduced by the charisma of evil”. Further casting for the show, directed by Elle While, has not yet been announced.
The Globe’s summer season has five Shakespeare plays including Antony and Cleopatra, directed by Blanche McIntyre and billed as “a groundbreaking bilingual production using spoken English and British Sign Language”. Cleopatra will be portayed by deaf actor Nadia Nadarajah, who played Celia in As You Like It and Guildenstern in Hamlet for Terry’s opening season at the Globe. Terry has played several roles at the Globe, including Lady Macbeth and Hamlet, since she took over in 2018.
Upon the new season’s launch Terry said that the Globe hoped “to provide an opportunity for all people to engage and participate in stories, told carefully, kindly, boldly, and bravely, with rigour, heart, and beautiful imperfection infused with a life-affirming desire to question what it means to be human and hopefully inspire us all to engage in the conversation”.
