Ronald Harwood: theatre too political

He shows himself to be narrow minded and ignorant and says absolutely nothing. Why did the Stage bother publishing it?

The Stage are pretty clickbait-y at times. I'm guessing they recognised his potential for feather-ruffling, given the reaction to his comments about female actors earlier this year! ;-)

To be honest, the report is pretty sketchy. So I may be wrong,but I'd guess he might be trying to make the point that theatre these days can be somewhat preachy. Which is a little different from 'just having a message within the story, and letting that message/story unfold'. It can be compounded by actors stating the exact same points in interviews to promote the show, so sometimes in the end you can feel slightly bludgeoned by the 'ishoos'.

I know when I saw Hope, and whatever that play was about teaching that Rob Bryson did at the Old Vic, I did get slightly turned off by what felt like polemic... It didn't put me off theatre for good though!

Rubbish. The overwhelming majority of roles have no specified or implied race at all and so are for anyone.

(It may be that non-whites don't get cast in those roles, but that's a completely different thing. There are no white-by-default roles. There are only people who think that way.)

Perhaps, but I'd venture not quite as many as there are for men!

One of his plays in currently on in the West End. He's also an Oscar winner. I'd hardly call him forgotten.

The problem is with sexism and the inherent lack of inequality is that is means the bar is set very low. As long as there are any decent female roles at all, people will point to them as evidence there is no problem. The problem isn't that there are no great roles for women. The problem is that the situation is still unequal. There are ten times more decent roles for men than for women. Women have to work much harder for less reward. There is relatively speaking plenty of work for male actors even those of only average talent, and that work is relatively consistent throughout their career. At the same time, female actors have to compete much harder for the much smaller number of great female roles, and those roles seriously dry up the older you get.

I've had personal experience within the last year of a well-known director flat out refusing to direct a certain show with a female main character unless they re-wrote one of the male characters to be equal lead. There is still a lot of resistance and outright aggression towards plays with only women, women leads, or plays that have been gender-swapped. Doesn't that show there is still a problem? No one is forcing any of these people to go. There are plenty of plays with no women, or women only playing maids and sex objects. They don't have to go to the minority of plays that are dominated by women.

Really? I mean, I see your point but I disagree: with a few notable exception (eg, Hamlet) I think most of the iconic and/or great roles are female - and this is true for both plays and musicals. I think that the problem is more about quantity than quality. Yes, we have Michelle Terry as Henry V but in the rest of the play there are like three other female roles and like twenty male one. The daughter in Hangmen was absolutely sensational, but there were two women and 7 men on stage. Same about Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and most of the plays ever written tbh. Maybe a woman has the juiciest role, but she's outnumbered by men.

yes - I was talking about genderbent casting

I think the use of the word iconic is really key there; these handful of female roles stand out as iconic, because they are rare and because we still perceive a truly great, multi-layered female protagonist as being unusual.

For example everyone talks about Lady Macbeth and Hedda as being iconic, but those are only two roles. There are zillions of male roles that are comparable, but they aren't perceived as being iconic in the same way because it's the norm for men to play roles like that. And of course there are tons of plays that have no female roles at all, or the only female roles are very small and stereotyped, ie the maid or the whore.

That's what I've always thought regarding politics and theatre.  What bothers me more is getting a lecture regarding charity.  Don't get me wrong I enjoyed Avenue Q, but I object to having a collecting tin rattled at me during the performance and then as I'm leaving.  The three charities at the back of the programme - all completely different organisations - basically had the same aims, cynical me thinks why don't they join as one 'super' charity and thus avoid a ton of overheads.  I am very picky about which charities I give to and that annoyed me far more than any political nonsense.  It was really no better than one of those blasted chuggers accosting you on the street.SaveSave