Third in a series celebrating the silver linings in a dark year of entertainment.

The face of Martha Henry gazes wisely out from the cover of the 2018 Stratford Festival season brochure.

That Henry is the lone performer featured in this cover photo is not in itself surprising: she is one of Canada’s most revered senior actors and her return to the festival’s stages for the first time since 2014 is sure to be of considerable interest to audiences.

What makes the image remarkable is the role that Henry is to play next summer: Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a part written for a man. Stratford artistic director Antoni Cimolino, who is directing this production, has changed the character’s gender so that she will be the exiled Duchess, not the Duke of Milan.

And this is not the only gender-swapping happening in 2018 Stratford Shakespeares. Scott Wentworth’s production of Julius Caesar features Seana McKenna in the title role and numerous other usually male roles played by women (including Michelle Giroux as Mark Antony). Keira Loughran’s staging of The Comedy of Errors has Beryl Bain and Jessica B. Hill each playing half of a pair of usually male twins, adding several extra wrinkles to this mistaken-identity comedy.

Stratford’s season announcement caps a year of welcome positive disruption in Shakespeare casting in Toronto and GTA theatre, one that’s also seen two versions of King Lear with women in the title role (and another coming up in 2018, starring McKenna) and Why Not Theatre’s game-changing Prince Hamlet.

There’s still a long way to go in terms of diversity (of all kinds) in the casting of classic plays, but we find these moves sufficiently progressive and exciting to be our good-news story for theatre in 2017.

To McKenna, one of Canada’s greatest classical theatre veterans, who has played many great female Shakespearean characters and several male ones, the positives to being cast across gendered lines are clear.

“As a young man in a Shakespearean repertory company, they mature and they play older roles, and then they really age and play great roles,” she says. “What was fabulous about (playing Richard III at Stratford in 2011) was that I was combining my experience with a challenging, large Shakespearean role because usually, as you age as a woman, your roles become smaller or non-existent.”

Cimolino cites another obvious benefit: “We are going to be interested in the dynamic changes in how a play resonates by having this kind of diversity in the casting; we’re going to find there are more flavours, more experience . . . (Seana) may notice things differently from me because I am a male and I don’t see things as she does. Our audiences are owed that.”

Women in male Shakespeare roles is not an entirely new thing, of course. There have been historic female Hamlets (among them Sarah Siddons in the late 1700s and Sarah Bernhardt at the turn of the 20th century) and, in the late 1990s, the Irish actor Fiona Shaw was a memorable Richard II. Julie Taymor directed Helen Mirren as Prospera in a film version of The Tempest in 2010.

But what used to be one-off occurrences are now coming along frequently and with growing momentum, and this is happening not just in Canada but in the country of Shakespeare’s birth. A trilogy of Shakespeare plays (Julius Caesar, Henry IV and The Tempest) directed by Phyllida Lloyd and performed by an all-female ensemble at London’s Donmar Warehouse last winter was named “one of the most important theatrical events of the past 20 years” by the Observer’s critic, Susannah Clapp.

This evolution in the approach to casting Shakespeare — across ability and ethnicity as well as gender — is surely connected to the rise of contemporary feminism, and heightened awareness and action around diversity and inclusion.

It also has to do with the ascendance of artistic leaders from diverse backgrounds such as Why Not Theatre’s Ravi Jain. In his production of Prince Hamlet, Ophelia was an Asian-Canadian male actor (Jeff Ho), her brother Laertes was a Black female (Khadijah Roberts-Abdullah), Horatio was a deaf female actor (Dawn Jani Birley) and the title role was played by a woman, Christine Horne.

Jain says he met some questions when he discussed his concept with white male director colleagues, particularly regarding the casting of a woman as Hamlet. “I was asked, ‘Why a woman, what’s your take, what’s your take?’ . . . I was like, ‘There’s no take.’ . . . I just really wanted to work with specific actors and see them play roles that I thought they would be amazing in regardless of what colour they were, what their abilities were, what gender they were.”

The success of that production — it got great reviews, was nominated for five Dora Awards, won a Toronto Theatre Critics Award (for Birley), features on our list of top 10 2017 productions and will return for a remount or tour — will doubtless go some way to opening minds, but Jain underlines there is still a lot of work to do.

“It’s still an industry where men dominate . . . especially the classics. That world has for so long been dominated by male voices and it’s not over.

“The fact that we’re in a time where these sexual harassment stories are coming out just demonstrates even more the inequity that exists,” he continues. “So does making a woman Hamlet solve that? I don’t know. I don’t think so. But maybe in a couple of years it could, because it might change the power dynamic. It might change the power structure.”

Challenging the traditional conventions of classical theatre was Jain’s way of making Hamlet relevant to today’s political conversations, which he says he now reads into every play he sees, whether or not those connections were intentional. Similarly, they came to mind when he received feedback on Prince Hamlet.

“At the time when I had people tell me they didn’t love Christine’s performance for whatever reason, a part of me was like, ‘Yeah, because you can’t come to grips with your own misogyny actually. There’s a part of you that’s struggling with that.’ And that’s cool, but struggle with that,” he says.

As theatre continues to challenge casting traditions, and as those changes spread into mainstream artistic leadership, the resistance will intensify, he adds. “I’m certain that’s coming.”

Susan Bennett, professor of English at the University of Calgary and a leading Shakespeare scholar, welcomes the insights into Shakespeare’s plays that non-traditional casting can bring but wonders if there’s a danger of this becoming “a kind of commodification.”

“There can be a kind of self-congratulation: you sit through a female Julius Caesar . . . and you add that to your collection of Julius Caesars that you’ve seen,” says Bennett. “So I do worry about that . . . it is sort of responding to the experience economy.”

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Asked whether there are any boundaries when it comes to casting Shakespeare, Cimolino says: “The only crime for a director is not to think; to blithely take something on the surface, through reverence, sentimentality or laziness.”

The rich, challenging questions that arise from cross-gender casting run deep but, on the surface, many can agree it’s about finding the right actor for the right role and continuing to make discoveries in such well-trodden pieces. All the while, it hints at levels of inequality that are intrinsic in the theatre industry, which even we as critics are implicit in.

“Well it’s interesting, because this is the first time in quite a few years I’ve had a conversation with a Toronto newspaper and it’s because I’m playing a male,” McKenna says. “I think it’s wonderful that we’re getting this focus. I just want this focus to continue when we’re back in the skirt.”

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