Pop-up Globe faces anger for using #MeToo in marketing
Less than a day after announcing its return with its most controversial season yet, Pop-up Globe faces renewed criticism about using all-male casts and anger about referencing the #MeToo campaign in its marketing.
The theatre company — now one of the world’s most successful — is returning to Auckland in November with four plays sharing the common thread of the abuse of power. The Taming of the Shrew and Richard III will be performed by an all-male company; Measure for Measure and Hamlet by a mixed-gender cast.
Announcing the line-up, Pop-up Globe founder and artistic director Dr Miles Gregory said that in the age of Weinstein, #MeToo and #TimesUp, it feels “entirely right” for the company to reflect current conversations in the world through “ambitious and thought-provoking programming”.
The company describes The Taming of the Shrew as Shakespeare’s most proto-feminist play that also features his most misogynistic character and sees the fiercely independent Kate forced to become her husband’s “perfect woman” through starvation and even torture.
But performers, theatre-makers and playwrights say they believe it’s unacceptable to use in marketing campaigns #MeToo and #TimesUp, which are centred on women’s response to rape and sexual harassment. They’re angry the play is being called a feminist endeavour when it’s to be performed by an all-male cast.
Lori Leigh, a senior lecturer at Victoria University’s School of School of English, Film, Theatre and Media Studies, says she’s not surprised at the latest casting decisions but disturbed by the appropriation of the #MeToo and #TimesUp campaigns.
“I’ve read that the decision has been called ‘bizarre’ but it’s more than bizarre, which makes it sound like it’s uncanny or a little bit odd,” she says. “I actually think it’s unethical because these campaigns are about women who have been sexually assaulted and harassed and who have experienced pain and trauma.
“The campaigns are a political response to that and a male artistic director programming half a season with all-male casts appropriating this movement for marketing and other purposes, I think that’s not only misleading, but hurting people.”
Playwright Pip Hall took to Facebook to ask how the #MeToo movement could be used as a marketing strategy.
Hall later told the Herald that what really irks is that Pop-up Globe has programmed the works to “explore the abuse of power”.
“But isn’t it an ‘abuse of power’ to leave women out of the mix? How can we genuinely explore this rich and timely theme and have honest and progressive conversations when the female voice is muted?
“The #MeToo movement is about women taking back the power and shining a light on what is going on. So then to use this as a marketing strategy, while at the same time disempowering women by keeping them from the stage, is unacceptable.”
She says having been in the industry for 25 years she and most other women she knows have had at least one #MeToo experience.
“So for us, the #MeToo movement is our truth. To then use this to sell tickets, while shutting us out, is the very definition of abuse of power.”
But Gregory says he is delighted that a 400-year-old work has excited such debate.
“There’s already a conversation happening that has been initiated by the announcement,” he says. “The programme responds to the moment, excites debate, encourages conversation and stimulates argument.”
He says before judging, people should see Pop-up Globe’s The Taming of the Shrew to decide whether the company has made the right decision and whether it is a feminist interpretation.
He says since Pop-up Globe’s inception — it launched in 2015 and performed its first season in 2016 — the company has had all-male casts, gender-reversed productions and mixed companies.
For its summer 2017/18 season, Pop-up Globe staged Julius Caesar with an all-female cast, the Pembroke Company, but said it wasn’t to address the accusations of gender imbalance but because, thanks to phenomenal support for the theatre company, it could expand its productions.