Bard wrote for men, says RSC, as it refuses 50:50 gender casting

THE Royal Shakespeare Company will not bow to pressure to enforce 50:50 gender casting, despite featuring an all-female directorial line-up for the first time in its history.

Greg Doran, the RSC artistic director, unveiled a raft of productions for summer 2018 that will have only women at the helm. But he ruled out quotas for female actors on stage, pointing out that “Shakespeare was writing for a group of blokes”.

Polly Findlay is to direct Macbeth as a “contemporary psychological thriller” starring Christopher Eccleston in his RSC debut. And Erica Whyman will direct Romeo and Juliet as a tale of “a generation of young people let down by their parents”.

Fiona Laird, Maria Aberg and Jo Davies complete the line-up. Doran calls the allfemale billing a happy coincidence.

“We didn’t suddenly go, ‘let’s have them all directed by women’,” he said. “We had reached a point where these women directors had been with us and had grown and developed and it just so happens that it’s an entirely female-directed season.”

While Michelle Terry, the artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe, has pledged to bring in gender-blind casting and a 50:50 ratio of men and women on stage, the RSC will not follow.

“In terms of re-gendering roles, we are looking for balance,” Doran said. “Michelle Terry has made a very bold statement about re-gendering so that it’s going to be 50:50 right across the board.

“I don’t want to impose that on directors. That would mean we couldn’t do an allfemale production, for example. I want to keep it much more fluid and organic. I’m not going to say we’re going to go 50:50 because, in a way, Shakespeare was writing for a group of blokes, actually.”

Terry said last month that her first season would provide “equal amounts of work for male or female” actors.

Her predecessor, Emma Rice, set the wheels in motion when she took over in 2016, saying: “If anybody bended gender, it was Shakespeare, so I think it just takes a change of mindset.”