Contemplating this week’s big opening at the National – comedy actress Tamsin Greig taking on the role of Malvolio in Twelfth Night – a strange, melancholy thought struck me. Is this curtains for the male actor? Greig’s landing of this much-loved male comic role, which has been re-gendered to become Malvolia, represents one small step for this androgynous star, one giant leap for womankind.

Although it’s not even the first instance of Twelfth Night being subject to snipping on the sexual and textual front (along the river at the Rose, Bankside, an even more radical experiment took place in 2015), this feels like a watershed moment.

We’ve had a lot of gender-bending and “gender-blind” casting in Shakespeare over the past year or so – a female Cymbeline at the RSC; Henry V played by Michelle Terry at the Open Air; Glenda Jackson’s King Lear at the Old Vic; an all-female trilogy at the Donmar, not to mention some of the innovations at Shakespeare’s Globe.