Neviim Tovim, blogs by Gillian Gould Lazarus

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, Estrogen) 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 just 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.