Flipping Out about Gender: Cross Gender Casting and Shakespeare
Kelly Housby | MA in English Literature
Cross-gender casting has had a lot of press lately. On the London theatre
scene, Shakespearean classics are being newly interpreted to interrogate our
deepest assumptions about gender, and indirectly, challenging the theatre
business’s perceptions of the place of women in theatre. This year has seen
leading female actors take on iconic Shakespearean roles: Glenda Jackson
has played the eponymous King Lear for the Old Vic, and Dame Harriet Walter
has played Brutus in an all-female Julius Caesar for the Donmar Warehouse.
This month, the Liverpool Everyman Theatre announced plans to stage an all-
female Othello for 2018 1 .
Keywords | Cross gender casting, Shakespeare, Malvolia, gender blind casting
To discuss the opportunities afforded by non-traditional gender casting, we must firstly
differentiate between gender-blind casting and gender flipping. Glenda Jackson did not play
her role as Queen Lear - she played Lear as a male monarch and not as a mother of three
daughters but as a father. This is gender-blind casting, although contrary to what this term
implies, the audience is unlikely to be blind to the fact that a woman is playing a male
character. The reality of the actor’s female body as she speaks Lear’s lines offers audiences
the opportunity to “see” Lear’s masculinity performed, to see afresh the enactment of male
power through the speeches, postures, and gestures that are usually reserved for people with
male bodies. Gender-blind casting makes a familiar role seem unfamiliar, as Elin Diamond
writes, ‘When gender is 'alienated' or foregrounded, the spectator is able to see what s/he
can't see: a sign system as a sign system 2 . Further, gender-blind casting works particularly
well for Shakespearean plays because they were conceived for an all-male cast, and
therefore, were never intended to be overly concerned with mimetic realism in gender
representation.
Whilst gender-blind casting involves actors of one gender portraying characters of
another gender, gender flipping involves taking a character that is written as, or has
traditionally been received as, one gender and changing the role (usually with a change in
pronouns relating to that character) into another gender. Such was the case when Tamsin
Author unknown, “Why Othello will be played by a woman at the Liverpool Everyman”, BBC News,
10 th November 2017, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-41930973
2 Diamond, Elin. Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theatre (London: Routledge, 1997):
47.
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