A colourblind Copperfield liberates film from literalism

WATCHING Armando Iannucci’s The Personal History Of David Copperfield at the London Film Festival, I was elated.

Not because the film is fantastic — it’s not a patch on his 2017 opus The Death Of Stalin, and suffers from the forced jollity that’s so grating in Dickens. But because it’s an adaptation of a classic in which many roles are cast with a disregard for skin colour. This is exhilarating, and may mark a watershed for cinema that took decades to achieve in theatre.

Our hero is played by Dev Patel, a Londoner born to Indian parents, but David’s family are white actors. Benedict Wong, whose parents emigrated to the UK from Hong Kong, stars as lawyer Mr Wickfield. His daughter Agnes is played by Rosalind Eleazar, whose mother was white British and father Ghanaian.

In this, Iannucci goes further than the recent attempt at non-vanilla casting in TV’s Les Miserables, with David Oyelowo as Javert and Adeel Akhtar as Thenardier. There, the mind could construct a plausible backstory for the characters’ ethnicity, as one could for the fact that James Howson’s Heathcliff in Andrea Arnold’s 2011 Wuthering Heights was mixed race.

Iannucci is saying that in a work of imagination — and this Copperfield is as much the creation of his Italian-Scottish-Oxbridge-London mind as it is of Dickens’s — it doesn’t matter if the mother of Welshman Aneurin Barnard’s Steerforth is played by Nigerian-born Nikki Amuka-Bird. He’s right, it doesn’t.

Which is not to say heritage doesn’t matter; there are situations where it is wrong not to cast according to ethnicity.

The London theatre world, freer than the conservative world of the screen when it comes to race and gender (not to mention sexuality, but that’s another can of worms), suffered a “yellowface” scandal with Howard Barker’s In The Depths Of Dead Love in 2017, which cast solely white actors as Asian characters.

This year there was also controversy surrounding Falsettos, a musical about a Jewish family which cast no Jews.

We are still in a period of rebalancing, where historic prejudices and exclusions must be redressed. We are also reinterpreting classics for our own age.

It’s simple. A white actor blacking up to play Othello would be punching down. A mixed-race woman playing Hamlet — as Cush Jumbo is to do at the Young Vic next year — redraws the role for the modern world. To suggest she can’t play the role is as absurd as saying that non-Danes or non-royals can’t.

Literalism is the enemy of imagination. Shaking off its shackles is liberating. Shakespeare’s Globe’s As You Like It had deaf actor Nadia Nadarajah playing Celia in 2018 — the kind of move dismissed as political correctness gone mad by the gammon crowd. In fact, it was illuminating — her depth of intimacy with other characters was suggested by whether she spoke or signed.

The casting in Iannucci’s Copperfield — I hate the clumsy term “colourblind”, but I am at a loss over what else to call it — is liberating, too. You notice it. You accept it. And then you forget it.