Archive for December 2025
My Beef With Laertes
Posted on: December 20, 2025
Imagine an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice in which a cash-strapped Mr Bennet is resolved to get his five sons married to rich heiresses, to improve the family’s diminishing fortunes. The lively and intelligent second-born, Elliott, takes against arrogant, wealthy Phyllis Williams-Darcy but the undoubted chemistry between them flourishes into love. I don’t like it. Do you?
Gender blind casting can work, more feasibly in Shakespeare than in Arthur Miller, Samuel Beckett or George Bernard Shaw although it depends on the play: ‘Waiting for Godette’ (instead of Estragon, Oestrogen) is easier to envisage than ‘Saint John’ or ‘Woman and Superwoman’.
Just after lockdown, I took one of my grandsons to see ‘The Kids’ Hamlet’ at the National Theatre. Laertes was not only played by a young woman but depicted as Ophelia’s older sister, so the patriarchal nature of Polonius’s household was subverted and Ophelia’s predicament not quite as usual. Some years earlier, I took a different grandson to see ‘Treasure Island’, also at the National. Jim Hawkins, played by a young girl, had been made over into a female character, as had some of the pirates. I can’t remember the gender of Long John Silver. As you would expect, the portrayal didn’t hold a candle to Robert Newton. Did they call Jim called ‘Jim lad’ or ‘Jim lass’? Couldn’t tell you. If the casting was gender blind, neither would have been appropriate.
It is classics of theatre, particularly Shakespeare’s plays, which are most vulnerable to gender switches, and it offends almost nobody when great actresses are cast as Hamlet, Lear, Prospero and Richard II, but in some plays, it would subvert the plot beyond recognition. Could a female general, Othella, ‘put out the light and then put out the light’ of her beloved spouse Desdemonus? Should Romy climb up to the balcony of Julius, whose beauty teaches the torches to shine bright? I have no doubt that such productions are underway. As Shakespeare’s plays were performed in his lifetime by men and involved gender disguises in some of the comedies, there is an appropriate hinterland to, for example, the all male Twelfth Night at the Globe Theatre in 2012. Mark Rylance played Olivia as a woman, so the narrative was not mislaid. The late, lamented Tom Stoppard in his script for ‘Shakespeare in Love’ showed the limitations of performances when women were barred from acting.
I have seen a version of Terence Rattigan’s ‘Separate Tables’ in which ‘The Major’ has been arrested for importuning not young girls in the cinema, but young men. When the play was first written in 1954, the episode which inspired it had to be rendered acceptable to a theatre-going public and the Major’s homosexuality was firmly closeted. ‘The Deep Blue Sea’ would also have been a love story about three men, if the zeitgeist had not demanded a woman protagonist. In my opinion, it works very well as Hester Collyer’s story, but a production in which the main character is a man would also be worth seeing.
As for Lear, one could have a Queen Lear and the daughters still be daughters; there would be no need to switch the genders of Goneril, Regan and Cordelia. Changing them to sons would cause needless complications but worse than this would be casting them as two brothers and a sister, or two sisters and a brother. There would then be issues between the siblings different from those set out by Shakespeare.
This was my beef with the female Laertes. As Shakespeare wrote it, Ophelia is pushed around by all the men, with the notable offenders slugging it out on her grave. Sorry about the spoiler. Perhaps there will be a revision where Ophelia lives, to see off Hamlet, Polonius, Laertes and Claudius. She could then walk off happily into the sunset, hand in hand with Osric.
Not Being Afraid
Posted on: December 9, 2025
On Sunday, I was at the annual LCSCA conference, the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, a flourishing organization conceived, brought to birth and nurtured by Professor David Hirsh of Goldsmith’s, University of London. Professor Hirsh emphasized the urgency of working against an antisemitic ethos which he said is now found ‘at the highest levels of sophisticated thinking…and that’s something which hasn’t been the case since the Holocaust, I think.’
Certainly, when I encounter the opinions of certain academics, journalists, ambassadors , lawyers and politicians, often of international repute and with a significant activist and social media following, and they say that Israel should not exist, should never have existed and that we who are Zionists should be penalized by law as accessories to every imaginable crime, then the world itself seems to me less safe than it ever was in my lifetime, even at the height of the Cold War. Our own warfare and lawfare against these grandees of antisemitism is waged most potently by academics, writers and lawyers.
In writing about the LCSCA conference, my intention is not to record what was said, even by the astute and experienced keynote speaker Dr Dave Rich, but about the subjective experience of an almost permanent anxiety being relieved, in a public space among a large number of trusted people. For me, everyone there was a trusted person.
When one visits a gallery, theatre or nearly any public venue, security staff will search the bags of visitors. This is reassuring but it does not mean that some ballet dancer will not unfurl to scattered applause a Palestinian flag or that a monomaniacal visionary of Palestine Action will not empty a can of green paint over the Wilton Diptych. Although this would not cause physical harm to persons, it would, for me, resemble being in the cafe in ‘Cabaret’ when a lad from the Hitler Youth sings ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me.’ I used to reflect, when watching this unforgettable scene, that tomorrow did not belong to him, but now there is the chill of wondering if perhaps it does.
On any given day, news breaks of anti Jewish activism and exclusion, especially in culture and academia but beyond that, in NGOs, in medicine, even in the hospitality industry. I understand the thrill for the anti Israel activists of being one of so many, drumming and shouting their way through city streets. I therefore appreciate the feeling of safety in public, for example at the AJEX remembrance parade back in November, wearing my father’s war medals among Jewish servicemen and servicewomen of the UK armed forces, ex servicemen and the children and grandchildren of servicemen.
I remember hearing a Shoah survivor recollect how, as a boy in Germany in the 1930s, he thought the Nazi parades looked stirring and exciting, the way parades often are.
As at the AJEX parade, the LCSCA Conference felt safe, not only the physical space but one could imagine a safe future. With so many people dedicated to the continuation of Jewish life here in the UK, the survival of Israel and the safeguarding of enlightenment, it no longer felt that we were on the brink of losing all of these desiderata.
I used to feel a similar security in the synagogue and it is only occasionally diminished when I wonder if there exists on the outer reaches of Progressive Judaism a view that the abrogation of the State of Israel would be a price worth paying for the purchase of tikkun olam, ‘the repair of the world,’ a phrase overladen by constant repetition.
Not being afraid in public spaces depends only in part on the presence of effective security. More than that is the sense of being in well-meaning company where one is out of harm’s way. Not only shall I not be called ‘genocidal maniac’ but the people with me know exactly what it is like, to be called such names but to carry on campaigning.
On completing this post, such as it is, I turn to X where I find that I and other activist women have multiple messages from an individual who counsels us to stop killing innocent people, saying that only then will our troubles cease. I have told her this is on my to do list. Sometimes I can’t help snapping back.
Neviim Tovim, blogs by Gillian Gould Lazarus 