TY - JOUR
AU - Geraghty, Christine
AB - Abstract This article examines changes in casting practices which have begun to put black, Asian, and minority ethnic actors more regularly on British screens and in more significant parts. In the context of calls for improving BAME involvement at all levels of the film and television industry, I look in particular at how colour-blind casting has begun to have an impact on British cinema. The article looks initially at how calls for the campaign for changes entwine with the British tradition of public service broadcasting and examines the socially conscious criteria for casting introduced by the BBC and the BFI in 2016. I suggest that some of the ambiguous expectations of audiences in relation to colour-blind casting are similar to the potentially contradictory aspirations placed on institutions which receive public funding. In order to examine these issues in some detail, I draw on textual and paratextual analysis to demonstrate how frames of reference for understanding new approaches to casting can be found in recent period adaptations, a British genre strongly associated with whiteness by actors and critics. The examples discussed span the decade: Wuthering Heights (Arnold, 2011), Lady Macbeth (Oldroyd, 2016), and Mary Queen of Scots (Rourke, 2018). The analysis demonstrates that while casting for the public good is becoming more common it nevertheless remains a complicated and controversial strategy. BFI diversity standards, colour-blind casting, diversity, Lady Macbeth (Oldroyd, 2016), Mary Queen of Scots (Rourke, 2018), Wuthering Heights (Arnold, 2011) PUSHING FOR DIVERSITY In 2013, Lenny Henry, best known initially for his work as a stand-up comedian but now respected as a theatre and screen actor, won headlines with a comment on the BAFTA awards. ‘There weren’t any black people at the BAFTAs; there was no black talent’, he said. ‘We need to invest in these programmes, in rainbow casting, in all of the great black writers, producers and directors who make these programmes’ (qtd. in Walker). Since then Henry has joined with other actors to run a sustained campaign on issues of representation in film and television. He has used statistics to demonstrate lack of diversity onscreen and behind the camera. He has criticized the BBC’s automatic recourse to yet more training programmes: ‘The inference seems to be oh, you’re not ready yet’ (qtd. in Graham). He has challenged the regulatory body Ofcom to use its powers to enforce targets and has called for tax breaks to encourage greater diversity on screen. Respect for this work can be gauged by the awards made to him in the same period. He was knighted in the Queen’s 2015 Birthday Honours for services to drama and charity and in 2016 he was made a fellow of the Royal Television Society and received a BAFTA Television: Special Award. Henry was by no means alone in this campaign to improve the employment position of black, Asian, and minority ethnic people in the film and television industry but the force of his words and the respect with which he has been treated are signs that the campaign was being recognized for its moral arguments. This was a matter of justice as well as statistics. Increasing the number of BAME actors on screen can be addressed in two ways. Henry called for a wider range of experiences to be put on screen so that stories of those from different ethnic backgrounds can be told and a wider range of voices heard in British productions; films like Belle (2013) or Yardie (2018) can be seen as examples of putting these kinds of stories on screen. But this article concentrates on a second approach: the argument that more roles should be made available to BAME actors. I look in particular at how colour-blind casting (the practice of opening up roles to any actor regardless of race or ethnicity) has begun to have an impact on British screen drama. In calling for ‘rainbow casting’, Henry was arguing that casting more broadly would be good not only for individual actors but also for British society. In other words, casting could be a matter of public good. Three elements can be seen to provide relatively fertile ground for this plea about casting. The first was national pride. In his 2014 BAFTA lecture, Henry noted a ‘worrying trend. Our most talented BAME actors are increasingly frustrated and they have to go to America to succeed’. He quoted actor David Harewood on feeling ‘frustrated by the lack of opportunities in the UK’ and ‘very disappointed offers are still not coming in’ (Conlan). Comments by established BAME actors were regularly reported in the press and a 2016 article by Andrew Dickson provides a useful summary of actors’ views, citing Archie Punjabi, Idris Elba, and Parminder Nagra as examples of actors who were successfully ‘decamping to America to make their career there’. Those interviewed were weary that the lack of opportunity in the United Kingdom was still an issue: ‘[w]hat we need now is for a change to come. I think the talk is done.’ said David Oyelowo (qtd. in Dickson). Secondly, British film and television is still linked to the ethos of public service broadcasting. This is most evident for the BBC. The current Royal Charter, which defines the terms on which the licence fee depends, requires the BBC to reflect difference and meet the needs of diverse communities (which may be defined by age, class, nation, and region as well as ethnicity) but also to create commonalities by bringing people together for ‘shared experiences’ and helping to ‘contribute to the social cohesion and wellbeing of the United Kingdom’ (BBC Charter). Channel 4 is also a public service broadcaster with a particular remit to reflect a diverse, modern Britain and even the output of the commercial ITV is shaped, in part, by operating in a television ecology with a long history of public service values. This ethos also has an impact on British cinema since many of its most distinctive films get support from BBC Films and Film4 as well as from the British Film Institute, the key body in the field, which is empowered by the government to distribute National Lottery funds in a manner which develops and supports UK filmmakers and audiences. In this context, colour-blind casting can be understood not (just) as a response to commercial pressures, as Kristen Warner argues is the case on US television, but a public service requirement. In 2019, a newspaper editorial commented that public sector funding made it crucial to have more diverse casting in the subsidized theatre and public service television: ‘[i]f public funds are going to be used to put on Shakespeare’s plays, or dramatise 19th-century European novels on TV, it is only fair that a range of actors gets the chance to be in them’. It concluded that ‘[a]s our understanding of identity and inequality becomes more complex’ such casting could permit ‘drama [to] open the minds of audiences, as well as opportunities for actors’ (Editorial). This editorial brought to light a third, rather more hidden, factor: the lead taken by British theatre companies in promoting colour-blind casting. Drawing on the testimony of British actors working in film and television, Dickson ended his article by calling for the ‘[c]olour-blind casting [which] is mainstream in theatre. Actors of various heritages appear in Pinter or Chekhov and no one raises an eyebrow’. Commenting on news that Dev Patel would play the lead in Armando Iannucci’s The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019), journalist Cath Clarke remarked that ‘perhaps we will look back and say it redefined the casting status quo in British film’, contrasting the approach of film and television to theatre where ‘audiences have been happily watching actors who don’t match the ethnicity of their characters for years’. In the United Kingdom, the Royal Shakespeare Company is widely recognized, though not without caveats, as the theatre company which has led the way in this kind of casting. In 2013, its Head of Casting, Hannah Miller, when asked about ‘non-culturally specific casting’, described her practice: ‘I will always assume that I am bringing in the best actors for a particular role regardless of their cultural background or ethnicity, unless I have had a discussion with the director to the contrary’ (qtd. in Rogers and Thorpe, “Interview with the RSC’s Hannah Miller” 489). In 2018, in response to a controversy over the casting of a black actor, RSC’s artistic director, Gregory Doran, and its executive director, Catherine Mallyon, responded in a similar fashion: ‘Our approach to casting is to seek the most exciting individual for each role and in doing so to create a repertoire of the highest quality’ (qtd. in Sidique). Discussion of the implications of this kind of theatrical casting has been more advanced in the United States than the United Kingdom, according to US scholar Ayanna Thompson (“Interview” 59). Thompson defines colour-blind casting as ‘a meritocratic model in which actors are cast without regard to race; the best actor for the best role’ (Passing Strange 76). For her, a key assumption of colour-blind casting rests with the audience: ‘the onus of being blind to race is completely on the audience’ (“Practicing a Theory” 6). UK productions may look ‘more integrated’ than US productions but they are ‘always colorblind . . . ethnicity and their race are never supposed to impact the production; you’re just supposed to ignore it’ (“Interview” 60). The success of such a colour-blind strategy thus depends on the theatre audience understanding the conventions at work. Audience members need to know that they should make a distinction between actor and character and that, in this context and on this stage, ethnic origin and colour of skin are not significant in creating meaning. Thompson uses an RSC production of The Winter’s Tale as an example: ‘the audience was asked not to see or notice blackness. More than an empty signifier, blackness—if noticed at all by the audience—became a false signifier. It did NOT provide any semiotic, performative, or interpretative lenses that enhanced, impacted, or even informed the production’ (“To Notice”). Moreover, the framework which will allow the audience to understand colour-blind casting in this way is not to be found within the specific production text. According to Angela C. Pau, colour-blind casting depends on ‘a happy complicity between director and audience. . . . This accord is founded on shared socio-cultural conditions, familiar theatrical protocols and . . . a common state of mind’ (27). This accord would seem to be more available for regular theatregoers though many publically funded theatres run educational events aimed particularly at young audiences to familiarize them with theatrical protocols. More than anything else, this accord seems to depend on the common notion that audiences need to suspend disbelief in the theatre and that the stage is a magical place where anything can happen. Further comments from the RSC provide evidence of what the audience is meant to do in relation to colour-blind casting. On the one hand, in line with Thompson’s analysis, the audience is meant to accept casting which does not necessarily align with the characters’ ethnicity and to ignore any questions of plausibility that might arise. When asked about possible tension between ‘casting an actor because they are the best for that role’ and the possibility that ‘on stage, the materiality of that casting decision takes on significance’, RSC producer Kevin Fitzmaurice, interviewed along with Miller, responded rather bluntly that: [f]or an audience member, you are in a theatre and you are suspending disbelief anyway. When a young white male actor has a black mother, an audience of a certain generation may have an issue with that because they just can’t get their head into this place. But I think most people do accept it. (qtd. in Rogers and Thorpe, “Interview with the RSC’s Hannah Miller” 489) On the other hand, the audience is not meant to ignore the diversity exemplified by the cast as a whole. Miller stressed that the RSC’s ambition is ‘to try to ensure that the demographic of Britain is reflected’ (qtd. in “Interview with the RSC’s Hannah Miller” 489) and the RSC’s 2018 statement reiterated this: ‘We are proud that this [policy] ensures our casts are also representative of the diversity of the United Kingdom, that the audiences which we serve are able to recognise themselves on stage’ (qtd. in Sidique). In this formulation, it would appear that ‘bringing in the best actors’ will automatically lead to the creation of a diverse cast, with the result that the audience can recognize diversity as a social phenomenon and find an actor with whom they can identify in terms of their own identity. The implication is that this applies particularly to BAME audience members who have been deprived of doing this up until now. The policy of colour-blind casting thus seems to have two aims: to encourage casting practices which remove race and ethnicity as criteria for acting in a role and to put on stage or screen casts which will reflect what is deemed to be the ethnic diversity of contemporary Britain. In terms of reception, these aims can mean that the audience is put in a somewhat contradictory position in terms of BAME actors. On the one hand, audiences are expected not to take ethnicity and skin colour as semiotically significant while, on the other, they are meant to recognize that the cast as a whole represents a society marked by multicultural diversity. Given these dual and not always compatible aims, it is perhaps not surprising that the application of a policy which points in different directions is likely to be rather messy and have outcomes that are not always deemed satisfactory. But if that is the case, the tension at the heart of the policy is similar to that evident in the aspirations for public service broadcasters such as the BBC: that it will make programmes which specifically appeal to segments of its audience on the basis of their difference while also making programmes which unite the nation by emphasizing comonalities. One further factor needs to be brought into this brief account of what are complex debates. ‘Colour-blind’ is itself an uncomfortable term to use when describing casting since both terms—colour and blindness—are problematic in relation to language which is sensitive to the way difference is identified. Other terms—non-traditional casting, diverse casting, integrated casting, casting on merit, Henry’s ‘rainbow casting’—are more frequently used in policy debates about these issues in the United Kingdom. But I use it here precisely because, in its specific reference to erasure, it means something more than the various versions of ‘diversity’. In the United States, African American playwright August Wilson rejected colour-blind casting by arguing that ‘[t]he idea of colorblind casting is the same idea of assimilation that black Americans have been rejecting for the past 380 years. . . . We reject any attempt to blot us out, to reinvent our history and ignore our presence or to maim our spiritual product’. Snehal Desai, artistic director of the Asian theatre company East West Players in Los Angeles, agrees that ‘[t]he thing about colorblind casting is that it denies the person standing in front of you . . . It ignores identity, and for people of color, that further alienates us’ (qtd. in Gelt). Or, as a British actress Tanya Moodie put it, when calling for casting which is colour-conscious rather than colour-blind, ‘I don’t like asking people to be blind. I want them to see that an African woman is playing Gertrude, and then feel what their perspective is giving to the story’ (qtd in Thompson, “I Don’t See Value”). CASTING POLICIES IN THE PUBLICALLY FUNDED SECTOR Despite these doubts and objections, colour-blind casting (whether or not it uses the name) is beginning to happen and is likely to be a feature of more British film and television drama in the future. Such an approach to casting is reinforced by public funding organizations. Both the BBC and BFI now require diversity standards in casting to be met for funding purposes. It is a feature of these standards that they wrap BAME issues into commitments to other underrepresented groups. The BBC Content, Diversity and Inclusion Commissioning Guidelines put an emphasis on ‘our commitment to black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) people, disabled people, those identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT), and on ensuring gender balance’ as well as ‘improv[ing] our geographical portrayal across the UK’ (2) while the BFI Diversity Standards, first published in 2016, relate to ‘disability, gender, race, age and sexual orientation as they pertain to the Equality Act 2010’ and ‘people from lower socio-economic groups’ (6). In both cases, the rather clotted language of policy-speak nevertheless seems to indicate that the auditioning and casting of BAME actors for parts for which they would not normally be considered is being encouraged as one way of fulfilling the diversity criteria. In terms of casting, the BBC Guidelines require production companies to ‘[e]nsure a range of diverse actors are (sic) considered and seen as standard for on screen parts; . . . Promote incidental casting across the diversity spectrum; Consider artists from all backgrounds regardless of gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, socio-economic background and geography for all roles’ (14). One of the BFI’s Standards (A6) refers to ‘Non-specific representation (e.g. casting not intrinsically based on or related to specific under-represented groups)’ which is defined as the inclusion of character(s) possessing one of the protected characteristics [which includes race] . . . where the possession of this characteristic is evident but remains incidental to the wider narrative. This means that the character as written will not engage with specificities of being of a particular race, gender etc., but that the film still provides a level of on screen representation. The choice may also have a secondary effect of shedding a different light on the narrative concerned. (FAQs 5) The final sentence here is interesting in that it appears to state that the social good of casting for ‘one of the protected characteristics’ comes before what might be the aesthetic consequence of changing the presentation of the story. A revised version of the criteria published in 2019 laid down a target of 20% of secondary or minor on-screen individuals belonging to an under-represented ethnic group as a way of meeting this Standard (Diversity Standards Criteria 3). The BFI standards have been adopted by BBC Films and Film4 and so apply to all the major public funders for film in the United Kingdom and, in what might be seen as a nod to Henry’s campaign, in 2019 they became an eligibility requirement for BAFTA Film Awards for Outstanding British Film and for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director, or Producer. This implementation of diversity standards in British television and cinema has been one element in a broader adoption of creative diversity policies in the cultural sector which has not been much welcomed by academic commentators who consider that discrimination is still endemic: ‘diversity policy leaves no room for understandings of discrimination that are rooted in histories of racism, sexism or the reproduction of class inequality. As a consequence both production cultures and representational practices continue to marginalise . . . even as “diversity” and “inclusion” have become industrial and cultural buzzwords’ (Cobb, Nwonka, and Newsinger 5). Looking specifically at policies developed by the BBC and Channel 4, Sarita Malik has argued that particular versions of ‘quality/creativity have been foregrounded over structural inequality’ and that ‘creative diversity demonstrates the depoliticization of race in PSB contexts’ (239). It is certainly true that the language of policy statements often serves to mask the political imperatives, often to do with funding, which impel their production as well as the complex set of behaviours on the ground which the policy is trying to reorder. It should be noted also in terms of the BFI policy that not all Standards need to be met in order to fulfil diversity obligations. Standard A, ‘On Screen Representation, Themes and Narratives’, outlines six areas but only three need to be met to fulfil this Standard. In terms of casting, the idea that colour-blind casting can be a fair practice has been severely challenged not least by actors themselves since presenting for an audition to be judged on merit involves a whole series of previous steps involving background, access, training, and finances; East Asian actor Daniel York, in a challenge to the RSC, scorned the notion of a level playing field: ‘One of the arguments they use in casting is “we just don’t consider colour, we don’t consider race.” You can only do that from a position of privilege having never felt the impact of race’ (qtd. in Rogers and Thorpe, “Interview with Daniel York” 499). Despite all the policies and directives, casting remains a business which relies on personal contacts, previous performances, and experiences of working together. The casting of Dev Patel as David Copperfield has been described as ‘a landmark instance of “colour-blind” casting’ (Clarke) but it does not seem to have come about by ensuring that a wide range of diverse actors have been seen, as the BBC criteria advises. ‘In all our conversations, we never spoke about another actor to play our lead than Dev’ said producer Kevin Loader. ‘We often have lists for parts, but we never had a list for David Copperfield’ (qtd. in Clarke). For Iannucci casting on merit depended on personal knowledge: ‘[y]ou just want to cast the best person, and I honestly couldn’t think of anyone more appropriate to play David Copperfield than Dev’ (qtd. in Hedges-Stocks). Despite these doubts about policy at the macro-level and the different experiences of actors at the micro-level, there are examples of colour-blind casting in British film and television over the last decade which might seem noticeable to the audience. Changes are taking place at the level of individual films/programmes and it is important to take into account how they are offered to audiences who are not necessarily going to adopt the mantra that ethnicity and race are not supposed to have an impact on the production. To consider this in more detail, I will look at three films to demonstrate how this new approach to casting might be understood. They offer examples of how BAME actors are being cast in stories that are being adapted or retold and how that casting shapes and is shaped by possible interpretations. CASTING IN PERIOD DRAMA ‘I feel very disheartened’ Carmen Monroe told Stephen Bourne in 1996, ‘every time I look at the screen and see something like Pride & Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility that will exclude . . . minority ethnic artists’ (49). Twenty years later, Parminder Nagra had the same feeling. ‘All those British period dramas are really well done’ she told Dickson, ‘but there’s a yearning there: “Can I please just see somebody like me on TV?”’. Attesting to the dominance of period drama in British screen production, Dickson concludes his call for colour-blind casting by asking, ‘[i]s it so difficult to imagine a Jane Austen production with performers of black or Asian heritage?’ It is difficult perhaps because whiteness has been a generic marker of the classic adaptation. Certainly, Rachel Carroll, one of the few British academics to have looked at BAME casting, wrote in 2014 that classic adaptations still presented ‘the British Isles as exclusively populated by white men and women’ and operated as ‘a significant branch of often prestigious cultural production in which the exclusion of non-white people is naturalised’ (27). The BFI, however, refused to make an exception for period dramas and adaptations in its diversity standards. One response in its Frequently Asked Questions leaflet concerned onscreen representation in films with a ‘historical setting’ or ‘based on a traditional narrative’. The answer makes it clear that change is expected: ‘If your film is based on a familiar literary/historical narrative, when we consider your request we will ask: what is the purpose of re-telling this story? We are looking for unfamiliar and perhaps unexpected approaches’. Producers are therefore advised to provide complex representations of characters normally relegated to two-dimensional roles; tell the story from a different perspective that aligns with, or sheds light on, the focus areas of the Standards; revise traditional elements to increase representation and alter frames of reference. (FAQ 6) The phrase ‘alter frames of reference’ is a useful one because it hints that what is at stake here is not just better opportunities for the actors. ‘Frames of reference’ is comparable to Pau’s notion of an accord to describe how theatre audiences understand how they should approach colour-blind productions. Its use here appears to offer some recognition that audiences need a similar accord when presented with the casting of BAME actors in unfamiliar contexts, particularly as the theatrical protocols which encourage the suspension of disbelief do not automatically apply. Instead, I would argue that British screen drama has generally been marked, to varying degrees, by a commitment to realism or, at least, plausibility. Loader suggests this when, in discussing the casting of David Copperfield, he comments that the reason film has lagged behind theatre in diverse casting may be down to the ‘feeling behind it somewhere that photography tells the truth. Film seems a kind of realist medium to lots of people’ (qtd. in Clarke). In terms of classic adaptations, this has tended to mean a claim to value authenticity in period detail, a fidelity, if not always to the book then to ‘the look and feel of the periods in which they are set’ (Hasenfratz and Semenza 346).1 This encourages in the viewer a demand for plausibility which may be reinforced by textual conventions involving genre, characterization, or narrative organization or by contextual framings relating to publicity about and experiences of historical and social formations. My examples are taken from three cinema films which all feature BAME casting but do so in different ways.2 Drawing on comments from the production teams and the press as well as some analysis of the films themselves, I aim to show how this casting is framed so as to help audiences make meanings. From Wuthering Heights in 2011 to Lady Macbeth in 2017 and Mary Queen of Scots in 2018, these films represent comparable but different approaches to colour-blind casting. WUTHERING HEIGHTS (2011) Wuthering Heights is a feature film supported by Channel 4 and the UK Film Council and directed by Andrea Arnold, who was known for her critically well-received accounts of precarious life in contemporary Britain. Arnold and her casting director Gail Stevens used open auditions to find the adult Heathcliff. In publicity interviews, Arnold talked about her reasons for her decision to cast black actors to play Heathcliff, relating her decision both to the book and to a more general sense of Heathcliff’s difference: I went through a bit of a process with it. When I looked at all the references to Heathcliff’s appearance in the book, it was clear to me he wasn’t white. He was definitely different. . . . After a while I realized that he is different from the other characters on multiple levels, including very possibly his race. When Emily’s writing about Heathcliff, she’s really writing about herself or a part of herself, anyways. I started to feel that she felt different and, therefore, wanted to make difference an important theme in the novel. (qtd. in Kemmerle) In her comments, Arnold seems to move to a position in which ‘the difference’ she finds in the novel is less about race and more about Bronte’s own feelings about herself. Describing how she came to cast James Howson, she says that from the beginning she wanted ‘to cast an unknown in the role of Heathcliff because he’s such a raw character. He needed to have an underlying anger . . . using someone who had never acted before would bring a different sort of feeling to the film. We had open casting calls, and James was there’ (qtd. in Kemmerle). We can see that Arnold is, in some ways, operating with colour-blind principles; the actor appeared in the open audition and got the part because he fitted it best. But by casting the mixed-raceHowson, in this way, it could be argued that Arnold was actually using race in quite a conventional way to represent anger, rawness and difference. In any case, the casting of Howson as the adult Heathcliff (with Solomon Glave as the child) suggests that racial difference offers a frame for reading the film which will be picked up by viewers. This is endorsed by the film’s presentation of the character. Heathcliff’s ethnicity is communicated verbally through the way others speak to him. Nellie Dean imagines that he owes his good looks to a mother who is ‘an African queen’ and a father who is ‘a Chinese emperor’. The vicious Hindley uses coarser, racist terms which are not from the book: ‘[h]e’s not my brother, he’s a nigger’; the word is picked up by other characters who shout similar insults at him. Ethnicity is also put on display visually in the emphasis on the body. Nakedness reveals the scars of floggings on Heathcliff’s bare back. The young Cathy tugs with curiosity on his black, curly hair, a gesture which rhymes later with the actions of the older Heathcliff who pulls at his own hair in preparation for going into the Linton house. Locked in the darkness of the barn, where he can only glimpse Cathy in the light through gaps in the slats, Heathcliff leans back and his face takes on the passive lineaments of a helpless slave. Association is made between this desperate ‘nigger’ and mud, darkness and fear. ‘I like being dirty’ he defiantly tells Cathy, and film reviewer A.O. Scott, makes the connection that ‘the screen’s first black Heathcliff . . . emphasizes mud, misery and savage, inarticulate feelings’. On several occasions, he scrabbles to ground, chased furiously by barking dogs; at his enforced baptism—at which the biblical reading speaks of cleaning him of ‘filthiness’ - he flees outside when asked the question ‘Do you reject Satan?’; and his final orgasmic consummation with the dead Cathy takes place in the dark mud of the grave. Hila Shachar observes that ‘Heathcliff has become increasingly dominant’ (188) in adaptations of Bronte’s novel. This is taken to exceptional lengths in this version which literally uses Heathcliff’s viewpoint to control the audience’s access to the story. The viewer is positioned with him as he follows Cathy, on foot and on horseback, and as he watches events taking place, their meaning obscured by distance or by the frames of doors and windows through which we are forced to watch. The film tells the story of a child who is brutally degraded and dehumanized, whose own voice is silenced and who, in his rage, treats others as brutally as he is treated. The use of tropes of slavery, dirt, and violence in his representation ‘could inadvertently confirm an impression that the origins of black British subjects must in some way be questionable, if not implicated in transgression or shame’ (Carroll 26). Some critics certainly felt the narrowness of this frame of viewing through the racial dimension. Philip French argued that ‘the movie does little to explore his character other than seeing him as a perpetual outsider’ and felt that in end ‘he’s merely a puzzle, a tornado of resentment whirling destructively across the bleak and intimidating landscape’. For Anthony Quinn, Howson as the older Heathcliff is ‘simply too opaque’. Understanding this Wuthering Heights through the framework of racial difference can lead to different conclusions. US critics Hasenfratz and Semenza thought it worked to communicate between past and present in that ‘the severity of the abuse’ worked effectively to offer modern audiences ‘a crystal-clear analogy for the brutal classism of late eighteenth-century English society’ (376). But the framework also runs the risk of trapping the viewer within a very limited position, the position of a ‘figure on the margins of legitimate society’ (Carroll 26). I would argue that the film’s casting of Heathcliff as black was challenging but its deployment of some of the conventional ways of representing racial difference ran the risk of stereotyping the character rather than rendering him more fully. Given its revisionist ambitions, it is perhaps ironic that Wuthering Heights should win more praise when more conventional frameworks were used. One is that of adaptation since Bronte’s novel has been a popular source of screen adaptation and this new version opened up the possibility of making comparisons with other versions. The most popular source of comparison was MGM’s 1939 version with Laurence Olivier’s suave Heathcliff; Sight & Sound listed a number of versions including Rivette’s Hurlvent (1985) and Yoshishige’s Arashi Ga Oka (1988) to emphasize the distances an adaptation could travel (Jenkin 37). Reviewers could also comment on how the film went back to the book; Jonathan Murray, for instance, in Cinéaste, detailed a comparison between the novel and the film to examine how the association of Heathcliff with animals finds its justification in Bronte’s metaphors. In general, though, applying the framework of adaptation to the film makes a virtue of its difference from the source and from the traditions of period drama. The films uses little dialogue and Heathcliff almost none, an approach which Murray praises in commenting that this version avoids the ‘logorrhoea that scars so many period literary adaptions’ (58). The most consistent metaphor used to frame this adaptation is that of making the story new again by stripping away the layers of adaptation which have accreted round the source. The film’s ‘creative vandalism rips off the layers of fluffy chiffon that have adhered to the tale through the course of numerous stage and screen adaptations’ (Brooks); it is ‘an admirable, frustrating attempt to strip away the novel’s inherited “classic” status’ (Scott). If the film was a success, it was because it ‘succeeds brilliantly in injecting the shock of the new into this well-thumbed English classic’ (Stables). This metaphor of stripping away was pushed even further by Peter Bradshaw who argues that it is not just previous adaptations that are stripped away but also the source itself: Arnold achieves a kind of pre-literary reality effect. Her film is not presented as another layer of interpretation, superimposed on a classic’s frills . . . but an attempt to create something that might have existed before the book. . . a raw semi-articulate series of events, later polished and refined as a literary gemstone. (‘Andrea Arnold’s adaptation’) In this reading, the use of adaptation as the frame of reference allows the casting of Heathcliff as black to be explained as another example of the radical approach the director takes to this much-adapted classic. Bradshaw describes the world portrayed in the film as ‘elemental, almost primaeval . . . Heathcliff is reimagined, not as the vaguely exotic dark-skinned Gypsy, but as simply black’ (ibid). He too is stripped back to elemental essentials and the violence he does to himself and others is set in the context of the brutality of the weather, the cruelty wreaked on animals and birds and the endless keening of the wind. Understanding Wuthering Heights as a radical adaptation was reinforced by another frame of reference, that of authorship. Screen adaptations often involve a struggle over authorship in which the original author is replaced by a new auteur who now writes the text. In this case, Emily Bronte is often acknowledged in the critical response to the film but her novel is seen as a fitting source for Arnold’s unexpected foray into adaptation; Murray talks of a ‘fecund, mutually enabling creative exchange taking place between artists’ (59) and offers comparisons with Arnold’s earlier films. The body of work which Arnold brings to Bronte’s novel provides a frame of reference for other critics and allows them to identify her persistent preoccupations. Stables suggests that Arnold substitutes ‘her signature social realism’ for the gothic framework of the novel, while for Quinn it is ‘[h]er sense of place, no less than in the lowering Glasgow estate of Red Road and the Essex badlands of Fish Tank, [which] is magnificently particular’. Amy Raphael was one of a number of reviewers of Wuthering Heights who called attention to Arnold’s tendency ‘to lean heavily on nature as a symbol of innermost and often unarticulated feelings’ (36) in all her films. This use of authorship as a frame of reference can also allow a different reading of the casting of Heathcliff as black. Sue Thornham denies the association between Heathcliff’s blackness and the racial othering suggested by the mud, dirt, and marginal spaces he lives in. She suggests that on the moor Arnold creates a space which is not organized through the binaries that sustain assertions of racial difference; ‘[i]n Arnold’s cinematic landscape, boundaries between inside and outside, human and non-human, life and death’ are ‘oppressive and arbitrary’. By entangling Heathcliff and Cathy in a ‘teeming, borderless landscape’ of textures and shapes, by engaging the viewer via Heathcliff in the ‘close and intensely tactile nature of its cinematic gaze’, the film mounts a ‘more sustained critique of the process of Othering’ than the depiction of the ‘overt racism in Hindley and the Lintons’ and demands a re-reading of racist tropes which identify Heathcliff as dirty or marginal (224–26). Despite Thornham’s sympathetic but very complex account, the casting of black actors seemed to invoke a framework which rested far more heavily on stereotypes of racial difference than colour-blind casting intends. Appreciation for the film rests on the more conventional frameworks often used to appraise the art film (authorship) and the period drama (adaptation). It would take time for the kaleidoscope to shake up a different way of addressing BAME presence in drama set in the past. LADY MACBETH Lady Macbeth is the first feature film by theatre director William Oldroyd and had support from BBC Films, BFI and Creative England. It has its origins in Nikolai Leskov’s 1865 Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk, a short story which screenwriter Alice Birch had introduced to the director. Set in Northern England in the nineteenth century, it tells the story of Katherine, a young woman who is married into a particularly brutal example of the English employer class and who tries to murder her way out of her situation. There are four black characters in the film. Katherine is served by Anna, a black maid, and she takes as her lover a mixed-race groomsman, Sebastian. In the final section of the film, she is challenged for her inheritance by what turns out to be the child of her husband’s other family, his young son, Teddy, who is brought to the estate by his grandmother, Agnes; both appear to be black/mixed race. At the end, Katherine, pregnant by Sebastian, is alone in the empty house: a survivor, but for what? Unlike Wuthering Heights, Lady Macbeth carried little expectation that the fact of adaptation would help the audience understand the characters and the casting. Indeed a number of critics specifically warn audiences against confusion with the most obvious intertextual connection. Guy Lodge starts his Variety review by telling readers that ‘Shakespeare’s conniving Queen of Scotland is nowhere to be found in it’ and Tim Robey advises that, while the title might suggest differently, the film is no ‘recherché spin on the Scottish play’. So other frames of reference need to be found to explain the black characters. One of these frameworks is Arnold’s Wuthering Heights. A number of critics used her film as a reference and saw, in Lady Macbeth, the same stripping down of the trappings of period drama. Lodge suggests that the film joins the ‘limited pantheon of films to address racial relations in the old British gentry’ which also includes ‘Arnold’s revisionist “Wuthering Heights,”’ and he makes a connection with the style as well: ‘both films share a blunt, angular modernity in their approach to corset drama’. Bradshaw (‘Lady Macbeth’) also referenced Arnold’s film while Pamela Hutchinson described the film as ‘stripped back’ and comments on the contrast between the confined spaces of the house and ‘the wuthering outdoors’ (82). This frame of reference also provided more of an explanation for Sebastian’s appeal since he fitted the Heathcliff paradigm of a dark, passionate lover. Indeed, Bradshaw’s comments that Arnold had shown Heathcliff as being ‘simply black . . . and treated like any farm animal’ has nasty echoes in Robey’s description of Sebastian’s masculinity: ‘singer-turned-actor Jarvis has a dumb mutt’s animal magnetism that’s brutal and essential’. It’s worth noting how this comment, linking the mixed-race man to an animal, easily slides into an explanation relying on racial difference. The comparison with Arnold’s Wuthering Heights thus offered a way of referencing the casting for Sebastian. But a more general explanation for the presence of black characters was provided by Oldroyd when he stressed historical revisionism in interviews. ‘People have said to me: “It wasn’t really like that in that period.” And I say: “How do you know? Really, how do you know?”’ He said that his research had indicated that many well-to-do households of the era would have had black servants and that in the nineteenth century there was a significant population of African-descended Britons in the northeast since the region was more sympathetic to abolitionist causes than cities like Liverpool or Bristol: ‘that area of England was far more diverse than we have been led to believe. A lot of people make assumptions, and those assumptions are usually based on films they’ve seen already’ (qtd. in Rose). In the DVD extras, Oldroyd repeats that his research had revealed a more diverse society than usually shown: ‘[i]f we needed historical justification . . . we had it’. Despite this, when he discusses casting, he emphasizes that it was done in accordance with diversity practices; it was opened up to everybody, ‘regardless of background’ and through that we ‘found the very best actors for our film’. The presence of the first two BAME characters, Anna and Sebastian, can to some extent be explained through Oldroyd’s historical justification for showing a more racially diverse society in Victorian England although no overt mention is made on screen which would help viewers understand how and why the black characters have got to this remote house in the North of England. This absence of explanation is the more striking because, at crucial points, race does take on highly significant meanings as Anna and Sebastian are represented in ways that carry the signifying elements of slavery: Anna is ordered by her angry master to leave his presence on all fours like an animal; Sebastian is brutally kicked and flogged; and most disturbingly, Anna and Sebastian are last seen on screen, in a shot from above, shackled together in a cart and being taken away after Katherine has accused them of murder. So, at points of crisis in the narrative, the historical explanation incorporates references to the racial abuses of Britain’s colonial past. For Hutchinson, this helps to explain Katherine’s actions: she ‘exploits and victimises those below her: non-white, poor, illegitimate’ (84). In fact, Katherine kills those who are white and socially above her as well but Hutchinson’s explanation is trying to put these tropes of racial difference into a historical frame of reference. Neither the framework provided by Wuthering Heights nor the historical referencing offer much explanation, however, when the other black characters appear. It is interesting that, perhaps in the interest of avoiding ‘spoilers’, the appearance and impact of Agnes and her grandson Teddy are mainly ignored by reviewers, but perhaps this reflects the lack of explanation for their arrival at such a late stage in the narrative. Agnes introduces her grandson Teddy to Katherine as the heir to his father’s estate. She states flatly that Alexander visited her daughter regularly and recognized his responsibilities by making her son his ward but she gives no explanation of why Katherine’s husband, whom we have known only for his brutality, behaved well toward this other (black) family. Agnes gives no account of how she herself came to be in the North of England and, unlike Sebastian and Anna she is not subject to racial abuse. Indeed, she behaves as if she were the lady of the house, organizing bedrooms and meals, and showing every sign of taking over. She can by no means be described as a marginal character, but she is entirely enigmatic. So is this an example of genuine colour-blind casting in a British film? Journalist Steve Rose thought it might be: ‘It’s set in Victorian Britain—and has more black characters than all the Austens and Downtons put together. Will Lady Macbeth end period drama’s whitewashing of history?’. Rose acknowledges Oldroyd’s historical justifications but places more stress on his background in theatre and goes into some detail about the use of colour-blind casting in theatre: ‘[o]n today’s British stage, a historical play with a multi-ethnic cast is entirely unremarkable’. Rose argues that the film’s casting was not ‘solely about making a race/class statement, or historical fidelity’ and goes on to quote casting director, Shaheen Baig, who ‘casts colour-blind as a rule,’ on her approach to Lady Macbeth: ‘It was simply about putting the best actors in the best parts’. He concludes with a comment from Oldroyd in which the question of historical accuracy is given less priority than a commitment to less stereotypical casting: ‘I think the genre [historical drama] is being called out for what it is. . . . It’s typecasting actors and it’s typecasting genres. It’s lazy. This is not historical document (sic) we’re talking about: it’s fiction’ (qtd in Rose). That is not the end of it, though. According to Rose, Anna ‘was not cast as a black woman to make a point, but because the actor in question, Naomi Ackie, did such a good reading’. Nevertheless, even though she was not cast for her ethnicity, the scenes of Anna’s extreme humiliation fit a frame of reference which gives an additional significance to the fact that she is played by a black woman. Rosheuvel’s appearance, giving a brilliant performance as Agnes, does not, however, fit the framework of racial difference. Does that make it possible for the audience ‘not to see or notice [her] blackness’? Did her colour ‘NOT provide any semiotic, performative, or interpretative lenses that enhanced, impacted, or even informed the production’? (Thompson, “To Notice”). Or was Rosheuvel’s strength as a black actress incorporated into her characterization of Agnes as a woman who calmly demands that she be taken seriously? MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS Just a year later, another first film by a theatre director was making headlines. Mary Queen of Scots premiered in November 2018 at AFI Fest and opened internationally in January 2019. Josie Rourke, artistic director at London’s Donmar Theatre since 2012, placed Queens Mary and Elizabeth in a dynastic conflict culminating in a head-to-head meeting in which Mary’s fate was sealed. The film was not an adaptation (though Schiller’s play Mary Stuart provided useful cover for this queenly meeting which never happened) but a period drama with the striking landscapes, spectacular settings, and elaborate costumes which are a feature of the genre. But the film was also another step away from the whiteness associated with period drama. Male and female BAME actors appeared as extras and in smaller speaking roles, while Adrian Lester was cast as Lord Randolph, the English Ambassador to the Scottish court, and Gemma Chan took the part of Bess of Hardwick, Elizabeth’s companion. Although national identity is a topic in the film, the apparent ethnicity of these characters is not referred to nor indeed emphasized visually; Lester in particular sometimes gets lost, along with the other bearded men, in the murky gloom of Mary’s castles. Reinforcement for understanding that ethnicity was not a subject for comment was also to be found in the publicity for the film, which drew on Rourke’s theatrical experience and her conscious promotion of the conventions of casting more familiar in the theatre. Rourke is upfront about the issue. She tells interviewers that she discussed casting with the production companies: ‘I was really clear with Working Title and Focus, and they were very supportive, that I was not going to direct an all-white period drama. . . . It’s not a thing that I do in theater and I don’t want to do it in film’ (qtd. in Yamato). Journalist Charlotte Higgins told readers of her interview with the director that ‘the film is startlingly unconventional. For a start, Rourke has imported from British theatre a principle still unfamiliar in cinema: colour-blind casting’. Like Fitzmaurice at the RSC, Rourke stresses that this is something which audiences have to accept and she makes casting into a moral issue by suggesting that ‘people’s reaction to a person of colour in a film is more an index of their prejudices than about having a real issue with authenticity’ (qtd. in Higgins). Further comment by the two actors concerned also sought to explain to audiences what their reaction should be and referred to Rourke’s approach to casting. Lester regularly used an historical explanation along the lines of that given to the middlebrow Mail on Sunday. ‘Actually it was a more ethnically diverse time than previous movie representations would have had us believe’, he points out. ‘I was very surprised when I read that Elizabeth once issued a decree to say there were too many Moors in the country . . . the characters Gemma and I play were white. But what Josie has said is: there would have been black people in positions of prominence, so let me reflect that’ (qtd. in White). Summing up, journalist Jim White not only reports that Lester ‘requires us to consider him solely for what is delivered on screen or stage’ and, rather surprisingly for the Mail, himself uses the vocabulary of the diverse casting standards as if they should be familiar to cinema-going readers: ‘[i]n short, he insists on proper colour-blind appraisal’. Gemma Chan, in interviews aimed at young women readers, was as uncompromising as Rourke, telling of how she had faced racial typecasting; only with Mary Queen of Scots did she ‘achieve the holy grail: you are cast only because you are right for the role and it’s nothing to do with your race or ethnicity’ (qtd. in Newis-Smith). Directly defining the issue as being about fairness, Chan argues that ‘for the longest time white actors were allowed to play any race on film. You know, if John Wayne could play Genghis Khan, um, I guess it’s OK that I played Bess of Hardwick’ (qtd. in Stahler). With this framework of colour-blind casting established in the publicity, many critics seem to have responded by not commenting on the casting of Lester and Chan. Others refer to a diverse cast sympathetically. Matthew Bond, in an unfavourable review for The Mail on Sunday’s celebrity magazine, merely observes of the casting that this is a ‘good-looking and notably ethnically diverse production’, while Scott suggests that ‘the overall picture of a fractious and diverse 16th-century Britain also serves as a corrective to tidy, traditional views of the past’. Others restrict themselves to comments about performance. Mark Kermode in the Observer comments that Lester is nicely underplayed, while, in The Herald, he is ‘his usual silky self’ (Rowat). But perhaps the lack of interest in these characters is also a consequence of their blandness; their straightforward loyalty to Elizabeth is in marked contrast to the complicated machinations of others in the royal courts. Would it have been more difficult to maintain colour-blind casting as something to be ignored if these BAME actors occupied less virtuous roles? This acceptance of this casting in Mary Queen of Scots is the more surprising because the film did arouse questions about historical inaccuracy. The sneak preview of the trailer in the summer of 2018 got publicity over questions about historical accuracy. Historian Dr Estelle Paranque was widely quoted for her criticism of the film’s misleading portrayal of the relationship between Mary and Elizabeth as well as for making up the meeting between them (BBC News). When the film came out there were headlines about historical inaccuracies and the complaints now extended to cover sexual behaviour, feminist sensibilities, and the compression of the story. But when the tabloid Mirror listed the film’s inaccuracies and omissions, the casting of Lord Randolph and Bess of Hardwick was not among them; instead a sympathetic section, headlined ‘Mary Queen of Scots brings ethnic minority representation to Tudor dramas’, relied extensively on Lester’s explanation that there had been prominent black people in Tudor times (Knight). The DVD extras provided further evidence that colour-blind casting was not to be mentioned in the discussion of the film’s (mis)treatment of history. Rourke’s commentary defends a number of her decisions in terms of historical plausibility but the casting of the two non-white actors is not among them. The casting is deemed to be good for the actors and not a matter on which authenticity has any purchase. It is a further example of how the paratextual commentary provides the frame of reference through which the film’s casting is to be understood by critics and audiences. CONCLUSION The tracing of this trajectory across the decade seems to indicate an increasing confidence about casting BAME actors in period drama and a move away from generic frames of reference which place them as marginal figures. I am not suggesting that the films discussed here were made to fit the BFI/BBC criteria but arguing that both the films and the diversity standards templates arise from a particular situation in which the campaigns by actors, the movement of practitioners between theatre, film and television, the impact of US productions on British actors and the pressure of public subsidy funders all play a part. It would be also be misleading to think that the movement towards more diverse casting practices will continue unproblematically. While casting for the public good is becoming more common, the contradictions still remain. We have seen how some BAME actors object to the erasure of ethnicity in their performance; questions have been raised more generally about casting on merit and casting for authenticity in terms of particular underrepresented groups; despite Oldroyd’s and Rourke’s claims, more nuanced discussion is needed about the justification for colour-blind casting in terms of the contradictions between claims of greater accuracy in the representation of the BAME population and the defence that their films are fiction; and, while better exchanges between film and theatre are welcome, questions of medium specificity in relation to the adoption of casting practices which were developed in the theatre raises questions about realism and representation, taking into account the longstanding claims of realism in British film and television. In addition, while colour-blind casting is justified as being fairer for actors, there is remarkably little discussion about what audiences think and how they respond to different kinds of casting decisions in different genres. Detailed work on the casting process itself would be fascinating but there is also room for textual work and for work on reception to examine the impact of color-blind casting on the experience of viewing. Such work would help to establish how far the recent progress made towards change can be seen as in any way secure. ‘We’re an inclusive nation—it’s time to make some inclusive programmes’, said Henry in his 2013 BAFTA protest (qtd. in Walker). At the end of the decade, that statement seemed rather more hopeful than accurate. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The author thanks particularly Joyce Goggin and those who attended her presentation at the Association of Adaptation Studies in Amsterdam, 2018 for their encouragement. 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TI - Casting for the Public Good: BAME Casting in British Film and Television in the 2010s
JO - Adaptation
DO - 10.1093/adaptation/apaa004
DA - 2020-03-20
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/casting-for-the-public-good-bame-casting-in-british-film-and-ZRZE8DnXa3
SP - 1
EP - 1
VL - Advance Article
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
ER -