Gender roles
Guy Keleny (Errors and Omissions, 8 October) made an unfortunate choice of play to illustrate his argument about the need for gender-specific job names: “Actors and actresses are not interchangeable. Unless you are putting on a wildly experimental production, you will need an actor to play Romeo and an actress for Juliet.” That certainly wasn’t the case when Shakespeare wrote the play. A boy who played Juliet at the start of his career might well have found himself beneath the balcony a few years later. Cross-casting of gender roles has never really left the stage – from pantomime to Deborah Warner’s productions with Fiona Shaw – experimental, perhaps, but hardly wildly so.
Richard Crowest
Ashford, Kent
What does Richard Crowest say about Guy Keleny? He criticises him for:
Select one of the following: