‘Is a Sexuality-Blind Approach to Casting Theatre Roles Always the Right Approach?’

During the fraught process of staging Bloody Difficult Women – my 2022 play about Gina Miller’s Supreme Court cases against the Governments of Theresa May and Boris Johnson – the actor Graham Seed approached me with a new problem: he was playing a gay character but he happened to be heterosexual.

He explained that, in the acting profession, this isn’t really done any more – just as it’s verboten for white actors to ‘black up’ to play characters of colour or for actors who can walk perfectly well to sit in wheelchairs.

After seeing four of the six members of the cast come down with Covid, a flurry of legal letters from the Daily Mail over our temerity to portray its Editor-in-Chief Paul Dacre on stage, and one of our actors forgetting their lines at a preview when the Guardian had come in to review, I decided that this was one additional issue I could do without.

So I sat down, got out a red pen, and hastily rewrote the script, changing the name of his character to Huw, and giving him a wife called Vicki and five children. Handing the pages over, I asked if he could possibly cope with being a married bisexual father and, happily, he could.

This was the spring of 2022 and, while a great many of my friends at the BBC had been telling me about how Huw Edwards was conducting himself, the full story had yet to break – so I thought it legally a good idea not to confide in Seed my inspiration.

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Of course, I agree with the concept of colour-blind casting, and the same goes for able-bodied actors playing disabled characters. But, when it comes to sexuality, I am honestly not so sure.

Sexuality is, for a start, often hard to define. Some people aren’t entirely straight or gay, in the way that no one can ever be not entirely black or white or find themselves only ever intermittently unable to walk or just going through a ‘phase’.

It complicates matters still further that some of the most resolutely masculine and heterosexual men I have ever encountered have had very feminine sides to their characters. I recall an interview with the strongman Geoff Capes and seeing him tenderly talking to one of his many budgerigars. The opposite was true of Harry Andrews – the rugged tough-guy star of war films such as The Hill and The Red Beret – who just happened to be gay and lived with his one-time Ice Cold in Alex co-star Basil Hoskins in the Sussex countryside.

If these gay casting sensibilities had existed in the past, Peter Finch would never have been allowed to play Dr Daniel Hirsh or Oscar Wilde in respectively Sunday Bloody Sunday and The Trials of Wilde. Nor would we have ever got to see John Hurt playing Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant. That would have been to deprive the world of some unforgettable performances and it is legitimate to ask whether gay actors would have acquitted themselves any better – or indeed any more convincingly – in these and so many other roles.

I need hardly add that the natural corollary to all of this would be to confine gay actors to only ever playing gay parts, which, given gay roles still don’t come up all that often, would be to deprive them of a great deal of work and, indeed, their fans of much of a chance to see them.

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This issue has come up once again as I hear there are plans to revive Martin Sherman’s play Bent and, inevitably, the sexuality of the actors who are under consideration for the principal roles of the two men who find love in Nazi Germany is going to be a matter of angst for the casting director.

When the play premiered in 1979 at the Royal Court Theatre in London, the leading roles were admirably played by Ian McKellen and Tom Bell. It was to be more than a decade before McKellen publicly came out and Bell was heterosexual and married, and, looking at the subsequent productions, an exciting mix of gay and straight actors have distinguished themselves in the leading roles.

I have personally no problem at all with that sexuality-blind approach to casting continuing with the next production of Bent.

All in all, it is hard not to think of Laurence Olivier’s advice to Dustin Hoffman when the younger actor announced that he had kept himself awake for three days because that was what his character had had to go through.

“My dear boy”, Olivier famously said to him, “why don’t you just try acting?”

Tim Walker is a playwright. He writes the ‘Mandrake’ column for the monthly Byline Times print edition. He was formerly a political commentator for The New European and the Telegraph