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      Who Can Play the King? Representation Questions Fuel Casting Debates.

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      Should Shakespeare’s Richard III be reserved for disabled actors? Does the character have to be played by a white man? By a man at all? Three recent productions took different tacks.When three of the most prestigious Shakespeare companies in the world staged “Richard III” this summer, each took a different approach to casting its scheming title character in ways that illuminate the fraught debate over which actors should play which roles.At the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, Richard was played by the actor Arthur Hughes, who has radial dysplasia, which means he has a shorter right arm and a missing thumb. The company said it was the first time it had cast a disabled actor to play the character, who describes himself in the opening scene as “deformed.” The production’s director, Gregory Doran, who was until recently the Royal Shakespeare’s artistic director, told The Times of London earlier this year that having actors pretend to be disabled to play “Richard III” would “probably not be acceptable” these days.The Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada, took a different tack: It cast Colm Feore, who is not disabled, to play a Richard who has a deformed spine but who is not a hunchback. And in New York City, the Public Theater’s Free Shakespeare in the Park went in yet another direction, casting Danai Gurira, a Black woman who does not have a disability, as the duke who schemes and kills his way to the throne of England.Their varying approaches came at a moment when an intense rethinking of the cultural norms around identity, representation, diversity, opportunity, imagination and artistic license have led to impassioned debates, and battles, over casting.It has been decades since major theaters have had white actors play Othello in blackface, and, after years of criticism, performances by white actors playing caricatured Asian roles are growing rarer in theater and film, and are being rethought in opera and ballet.Now there are questions about who should play gay characters (Tom Hanks recently told The New York Times Magazine that today he would, rightly, not be cast as a gay attorney dying of AIDS, as he was in his Academy Award-winning role in the 1993 film “Philadelphia”) or transgender characters (Eddie Redmayne said last year that it had been a “mistake” to play a trans character in 2015’s “The Danish Girl”) or characters of different ethnicities and religions. (Bradley Cooper faced criticism this year for using a prosthetic nose to play the Jewish conductor Leonard Bernstein in a forthcoming biopic.)Tom Hanks recently said that today he would, correctly, not be cast as a gay attorney dying of AIDS, as he was in the film “Philadelphia,” which he starred in with Denzel Washington.TriStar PicturesWhile many celebrate the move away from old, sometimes stereotyped portrayals and the new opportunities belatedly being given to actors from a diverse array of backgrounds, others worry that the current insistence on literalism and authenticity can be too constraining. Acting, after all, is the art of pretending to be someone you are not.“The essential nature of art is freedom,” said the Oscar-winning actor F. Murray Abraham, whose many credits include Shylock, the Jewish moneylender of Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice,” though Mr. Abraham is not Jewish. “Once we impose any kind of control over it, it’s no longer free.”And while the recent insistence on more authentic casting promises greater diversity in some respects, it threatens less in others — coming as many women and actors of color are getting more opportunities to play some of the greatest, meatiest roles in the repertory, regardless of whatever race or gender or background the playwrights may have initially envisioned.More About on Deaf CultureUpending Perceptions: The poetic art of Christine Sun Kim, who was born deaf, challenges viewers to reconsider how they hear and perceive the world.‘Coda’: The Oscar-winning film showcases deaf actors and lives. But some deaf viewers found its hearing perspective frustrating. Seeking Representation: Though deafness is gaining visibility onscreen, deaf people who rely on hearing devices say their experiences remain mostly untold. Name Signs: Name signs are the equivalent of a first name in some sign languages. We asked a few people to share the story behind theirs.Sometimes such casting is considered “colorblind,” in which case audiences are asked to look beyond an actor’s race or ethnicity, or other features. But in recent years the trend has been toward “color-conscious” casting, in which an actor’s race, ethnicity or identity becomes part of the production, and a feature of the character being portrayed.The casting of Mr. Hughes in a production by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Britain was hailed as the first time the company had cast a disabled actor in the title role.Ellie Kurttz, via Royal Shakespeare CompanySome of the varied approaches were underscored by this summer’s productions of “Richard III,” and the different directions each theater took when choosing an actor to play Richard.Richard tells the audience in the opening scene that he is:Deformed, unfinish’d, sent before my timeInto this breathing world, scarce half made up,And that so lamely and unfashionableThat dogs bark at me as I halt by themThe remark by Mr. Doran, the director of the Royal Shakespeare Company production, that it would “probably not be acceptable” these days to have actors pretend to be disabled to play Richard caused a stir in theater circles.Not only is Mr. Doran a renowned Shakespearean, but his husband, Antony Sher, who died last year, was one of the most memorable Richards of recent decades, using crutches in an acclaimed 1984 production and writing a book about his portrayal.Mr. Doran, whose production in Stratford-upon-Avon was critically lauded, later clarified his thinking about its casting, explaining that while any actor might be a successful Richard, he believed the role should be reserved for disabled actors until they “have the opportunities across the board now more widely afforded to other actors.”The new staging in Stratford, Ontario, featuring Mr. Feore, listed a “disability consultant” in its credits. His depiction was inspired by the discovery of Richard’s bones nearly a decade ago — the skeleton suggested a form of scoliosis — and rested on the idea that his physique “was less of a medical disability than a social and cultural one,” the company’s spokeswoman, Ann Swerdfager, said in an email. The critic Karen Fricker wrote in The Toronto Star: “As much as I admired Feore’s performance, it did lead me to wonder if this will be the last able-bodied actor making a star turn as a disabled character on the Stratford stage, given crucial conversations currently happening around deaf and disability performance.”And in New York, Ms. Gurira, who has appeared in “Black Panther” and the television series “The Walking Dead,” tried to explore the underlying reasons for Richard’s behavior. “There is a psychological reason for what he becomes,” she said in an interview. “He’s looking at the rules in front of him, and he feels he’s most capable, but the rules disallow him from manifesting his full capability.”The production’s director, Robert O’Hara, said that they made Richard’s difference key to the interpretation. “Richard’s otherness becomes an entire reason for his behavior,” he said in an interview. “He feels like now he has to play a part people projected onto him.”Ms. Gurira, left, said her approach to Richard aimed to get at the “psychological reason for what he becomes.” She appeared with Daniel J. Watts, right.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe rest of the cast for the production, which ended its run earlier this month, was notably diverse, and included several actors with disabilities in roles that are not usually cast that way. Ali Stroker, a Tony-winning actress who uses a wheelchair, played Lady Anne; Monique Holt, who is Deaf, played Richard’s mother, the two typically communicating onstage via American Sign Language.“I wanted to open up the conversation from ‘Why isn’t Richard being played by a disabled actor?’ to ‘Why isn’t every role considered able to be played by a disabled actor?’” Mr. O’Hara said.Ayanna Thompson, a professor of English at Arizona State University and a Shakespeare scholar in residence at the Public Theater who consulted on its “Richard III,” argued that the growing embrace of color-conscious casting reflected contemporary understandings of how different attributes inflect both actors’ identities and audiences’ perceptions.“All of our bodies carry meaning on stage, whether or not we want to acknowledge that. And that’s going to affect storytelling,” Ms. Thompson said.She pointed to an example from another play: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, friends of Hamlet’s, whom other characters often confuse for each other. “If Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are played by Black actors and the Hamlet family is all-white,” she said, “the inability to distinguish carries a whole set of different meanings.”Many productions upend traditional casting to interrogate classics. Women played every role in a trilogy of acclaimed Shakespeare productions directed by Phyllida Lloyd at Donmar Warehouse in London, seen in New York at St. Ann’s Warehouse. A “Julius Caesar” directed by Mr. Doran reset the scene from ancient Rome to modern Africa. Even Hollywood has reimagined some blockbusters, as with the gender-swapped 2016 “Ghostbusters.”Harriet Walter, with hands outstretched, in a 2013 production of “Julius Caesar,” in which all of the roles were played by women. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut as there is a push for greater casting freedoms in some areas, there is an argument for more literalism in others, especially from actors with certain backgrounds who lack opportunities.Some disabled actors are upset when they see Richard III, one of the juiciest disabled characters in the canon, go to someone else. “We all want a level playing field where everybody can play everybody,” said Mat Fraser, an English actor who is disabled and has played Richard, “but my entire career I’ve not been allowed to play hardly anybody.”In 2016, while accepting an Emmy for his turn as a transgender character in “Transparent,” Jeffrey Tambor said that he hoped to be “the last cisgender male to play a transgender female.” Now, with a “Transparent” stage musical being created in Los Angeles, its creator, Joey Soloway, vowed in an interview: “No trans person should be played by a cis person. Zero tolerance.”The conversation on casting has been evolving in recent years.“It used to be that part of the measurement of greatness was your ability to transform yourself,” said Isaac Butler, the author of “The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act,” a new history of Method acting. “Is versatility still the hallmark of good acting? And how do you approach it if there are certain identity lines you cannot cross? And which are those identity lines?”Gregg Mozgala, left, an actor with cerebral palsy, says he has to bring his “full humanity to every character I play.” He appeared with Jolly Abraham in 2017 in a production of the play “Cost of Living.” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesGregg Mozgala, an actor with cerebral palsy, has played roles that are not traditionally portrayed as disabled, as he did playing two monarchs in “Richard III” in New York, and sometimes plays characters written as having cerebral palsy, as he will this fall in a Broadway production of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Cost of Living.”“I spent years trying to pretend my disability didn’t exist in life and onstage, which is ridiculous, because it does,” Mr. Mozgala said.“Every character I ever play is going to have cerebral palsy — there’s nothing I can do about that,” he added. “I have to bring my full humanity to every character I play.”Some still hold out hope for a day when identity will recede in the conversation.“A hundred years from now, do I hope white actors could play Othello?” said Oskar Eustis, the Public Theater’s artistic director. “Sure, because it would mean racism wasn’t the explosive issue it is now.” More

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      The ‘Most Real Richard III There’s Ever Been’

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      The Royal Shakespeare Company has cast a disabled actor to play the “deformed, unfinish’d” king for the first time. The choice has been hailed as a landmark moment.STRATFORD-UPON-AVON, England — A raucous party was underway in one of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s rehearsal rooms this month as the cast of “Richard III” ran through the play’s opening, dancing in a conga line while music blared and balloons bounced off the floor.Off to one side, the future Richard III sneered at the scene. Shakespeare depicted the king as a scheming hunchback who murdered his way to the British throne, and in this imagining of the play, he is personified by the 30-year-old actor Arthur Hughes. In role, Hughes stepped into the middle of the party, veering through the revelers to deliver the play’s famed opening speech: “Now is the winter of our discontent,” he began.As the speech continues, Richard lists the insults he has faced. He is “curtail’d of this fair proportion”; he is “cheated of feature”; he is “deformed, unfinish’d.” As Hughes declaimed each barb, he angrily squeezed a white balloon. Eventually the pressure became too much. The balloon popped.The moment of tension was made even more powerful by Hughes’s own appearance. He has radial dysplasia, meaning he was born with a shorter right arm, his wrist bending into the body and his hand missing a thumb.The first casting by the Royal Shakespeare Company of a disabled actor to play Richard III has been hailed as an advance in British theater. The play opened in Stratford-upon-Avon on Thursday and runs through Oct. 8.“You can see a despot and tyrant,” Hughes said of Richard III, “but also a little boy who hasn’t been loved and someone who’s shunned.”Ellie Kurttz, via Royal Shakespeare CompanyShakespeare used and amplified Richard III’s real-life condition — the king is thought to have had scoliosis or curvature of the spine — to highlight the character’s unsavory nature. (He is described at one point as a “pois’nous bunch-back’d toad.”) According to Gregory Doran, the director of the current adaptation, the casting of Hughes in the role “sends out a big message, just as not casting a disabled actor would have sent out a different message.”Hughes’s casting comes as the frequency of disabled actors earning major roles appears to be growing in British theater. In July, the National Theater will present “All of Us” by Francesca Martinez, an actor and playwright who has cerebral palsy (Martinez said in a telephone interview that the play would feature three disabled actors, including herself). And Liz Carr, who uses a wheelchair, this year won an Olivier Award, Britain’s equivalent of a Tony, for her performance in Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart” at the National.In her Olivier acceptance speech, Carr highlighted some persistent problems. “There’s so many fears of risk of employing disabled actors,” she said, but added the award “proves we can do it, we can project, we can fill a stage.”Jack Thorne, the playwright behind “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” and an activist for disabled people, said in a telephone interview that there was “definitely a willingness” to expand disabled casting in Britain. The National Theater was a leader, he said, as were six regional theaters behind an initiative called Ramps on the Moon that stages productions led by deaf and disabled actors.Yet there was still a dearth of lead roles in London’s commercial heartland, he said. “There aren’t West End shows with disabled leads,” he added. In discussions about diversity, the issue was routinely forgotten, he said. Theaters should bring in targets to increase participation, he said.The National Theater, for instance, has experimented with aspirational quotas for women and people of color, but not for disabled people. Alastair Coomer, the theater’s head of casting, said in a telephone interview that new targets were being discussed and that he “would not be surprised” if that discrepancy was addressed.Hughes in a Royal Shakespeare Company costume storeroom. “Richard III” plays in the company’s repertoire through Oct. 8.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesHughes, eating potato chips in a break from rehearsal, said he hoped his casting as Richard III “sets the mold for how the industry can change.”Growing up in Aylesbury, a town about 40 miles northwest of London, Hughes said that he had experienced few barriers to pursuing acting. As a child, he said, he was so enthusiastic in drama classes that he was given prime roles, such as Puck in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”Hughes said that he had read “Richard III” for the first time while looking for speeches to use when auditioning for drama schools. He instantly identified with the role, he added, since the play’s characters view the future king as “not cut out for big parts” because of his looks. “I was like, ‘Oh, that’s me,’” Hughes said.After drama school, Hughes did not immediately secure an agent — unlike many of his colleagues. “Voices in my head were going, ‘Are you a risk?’” he said, but those doubts lifted after he secured a role in a production by Graeae, a British theater company that casts deaf and disabled actors. Before then, Hughes said, he felt his appearance “was going to hold me back,” but after being surrounded by other disabled actors, he felt empowered. He even started wearing short sleeves to highlight his limb difference, he added.The Royal Shakespeare Company show is Hughes’s most high-profile casting to date. In May, Doran gave an interview to The Times of London that was headlined: “Able-Bodied Actors Cannot Be Richard III.” In a letter of complaint to that newspaper, Doran said that the headline was misleading. His point, he wrote, was that, although anybody could play the role, a disabled actor could “enhance the performance and impact of the production.”Richard III is often portrayed as an almost comedic bad guy, Hughes said, often with a fake “hump and limp.” While not trying to hide the character’s villainy, he hoped to draw attention to his motivations: “You can see a despot and tyrant,” he said, “but also a little boy who hasn’t been loved and someone who’s shunned and outcast and is underestimated.”Mat Fraser, another disabled actor, who played Richard III in a production in Hull in northern England in 2017, said that the king was often played by older performers who could make the king seem a “withered little twig.” But Hughes is young and muscular — better suited to portraying a monarch who died at age 32 on a battlefield, Fraser said. “We’re going to see the most real Richard III there’s ever been,” he added.Hughes said he was already looking beyond his turn as Richard to other Shakespeare roles, and would love to play Hamlet, and Iago from “Othello.”“I’d like to play a role that’s not specified as disabled,” he said. “Obviously, whichever role I play will be disabled by the very nature of me playing it,” he added. “But that’s not the point.”Richard IIIThrough Oct. 8 at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, England; rsc.org.uk. 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      Augmented Reality Theater Takes a Bow. In Your Kitchen.

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      The Immersive Storytelling Studio at the National Theater in London is using technology to bring a miniature musical to viewers’ homes. It’s one of several high-tech British projects pushing dramatic boundaries.LONDON — Standing in front of a golden bandstand, dressed in a white satin gown and pearls, the vocalist Nubiya Brandon sashayed to a gentle beat. Stepping toward the spotlight, she took a lazy turn around the stage, singing a playful calypso number and smiling occasionally at the band behind.The weird thing about this show, called “All Kinds of Limbo,” was that Brandon appeared to be in this reporter’s kitchen. The singer was in fact an eerily realistic holographic avatar on a mobile phone screen; her performance had been recorded and was now being broadcast in augmented reality from the National Theater in London.Via the technology’s strange alchemy, which overlays digital imagery onto whatever a camera phone is pointing at, Brandon seemed to be singing and sashaying on the countertop. After she took a bow, her image evaporated and the bandstand faded into nothingness, leaving only a sink full of washing up behind.The success of digital-only theater productions has been one of the pandemic’s surprise silver linings: Audiences have been willing to try them and theater companies have found fans thousands of miles away. But could immersive technologies provide a more intriguing path forward for drama, one that will endure once Covid-19 (hopefully) subsides? Augmented reality (A.R.) and virtual reality (V.R.) are already changing gaming, music and art; might theater be next?“All Kinds of Limbo’s” director, Toby Coffey, said he hopes so. In 2016, he set up the National Theater’s Immersive Storytelling Studio, which operates as a kind of “start-up” within the company, he said in a recent interview at the studio’s modest space, which was crowded with a jumble of technical equipment. The team’s brief is to see how live theater and new technologies can interact and intersect.Toby Coffey, who founded the National Theater’s Immersive Storytelling Studio in 2016.Suzie Howell for The New York Times“Theater makers are naturally fascinated: They’re used to working in 3-D,” Coffey said. “As soon as you bring a director or stage designer or choreographer into V.R., you see their brains whirring.”The studio’s first production, “Fabulous Wonder.land,” was a V.R. music video featuring a track by the musician Damon Albarn with words by the playwright Moira Buffini. The team has since made 360-degree films of live shows, developed a one-on-one piece in which an audience member interacts with a live actor while wearing a V.R. headset and created a mixed-reality “exhibition” about government welfare cuts.“All Kinds of Limbo” came into being in 2019 after the National Theater had a hit with “Small Island,” a play about postwar Jamaican immigration to Britain. Coffey and his team commissioned Brandon, the vocalist, and the composer Raffy Bushman to create a 10-minute song sequence responding freely to the play’s themes. It was written, performed and motion-captured that year, and was initially presented as a V.R. experience in one of the theater’s event spaces.Brandon performing in a motion capture studio to record “All Kinds of Limbo.”The National TheaterWhen the pandemic shut down British performing venues in March 2020, Coffey accelerated plans to turn “All Kinds of Limbo” into an at-home experience. The retooled version can be watched via A.R. on a mobile device, via a V.R. headset, or on a regular computer. Brandon’s performance stays the same, but, depending on the device used, the experience feels subtly different.To summon some of theater’s shared intimacy, it’s being ticketed and broadcast as live, although the show is recorded. Other people attending virtually are represented by blades of moving white light and, by playing with the settings, you can move around the space and see the action from different angles.It’s a short piece, but “All Kinds of Limbo” does feel like the glimmering of a new art form: somewhere between music video, video game and live cabaret show.Over the last few years, Britain’s theater scene has become a test bed for similar experiments. Last spring, the Royal Shakespeare Company co-produced an immersive digital piece called “Dream” that featured actors performing using motion-capture technology and was watchable via smartphone or computer. Other projects, such as shows by the Almeida theater in London and the company Dreamthinkspeak in Brighton, England, require participants to turn up in person and get equipped with VR headsets.Francesca Panetta, a V.R. producer and artist who was recently appointed as the alternate realities curator at the Sheffield DocFest film festival, said in a video interview that practitioners from audio, gaming, theater, TV and other art forms were collaborating as never before. “Many different people are trying to explore this space and work out what it really is,” she said. “No one is quite sure.”One of the most keenly awaited partnerships is between the immersive theater troupe Punchdrunk, which pioneered live site-specific shows such as “Sleep No More” and “The Masque of the Red Death” in the mid-2000s, and the tech firm Niantic, best-known for the wildly successful A.R. game Pokémon Go.Speaking by phone, Punchdrunk’s co-founder Felix Barrett seemed invigorated by the creative possibilities. “We’re on the cusp of a new form of entertainment,” he said. “It’s a new genre; it just hasn’t been named yet.”Later this year, Niantic and Punchdrunk plan to unveil the first results of their collaboration. Barrett was reluctant to reveal too much, but said that it would offer participants “a citywide adventure” that will feel like an immersive video game happening in the real world. “Our goal is to try and make you the hero of your own living movie,” he said.Ambitious as such projects are, they are also — at least by theater standards — time-consuming and forbiddingly expensive. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s “Dream” wouldn’t have been possible without corporate sponsorship and a hefty grant from a roughly $55-million British government fund promoting digital arts innovation. The latest iteration of “All Kinds of Limbo” relies on a partnership with Microsoft and the livestreaming platform Dice.Production work on “All Kinds of Limbo.” The show can be watched via A.R. on a mobile device, via a V.R. headset, or on a regular computer, through Jan. 30.The National TheaterThere’s also the question of audience. Though theater-led projects such as “Dream” and “All Kinds of Limbo” have gained positive reviews, they have attracted only a tiny fraction of the 12 million viewers who watched a 2020 virtual performance by the rapper Travis Scott in the online game Fortnite. The chances of monetization at scale look slim, at least for now.And the irony is that, while the pandemic may have whetted audience appetites for digital drama, it has had devastating consequences for theater companies themselves. The National Theater’s Immersive Storytelling Studio originally had four staff members; after belt-tightening layoffs in the company, it’s now just Coffey and one full-time co-worker. “Even before the pandemic, we could have been doing 10 times more than we had resource to be able to do,” Coffey said. “We need to work within those restrictions.”What happens next is up for debate. The National Theater is working on redeploying the app and distribution platform used for “All Kinds of Limbo” into something that works for other projects. Panetta said that the metaverse, if it genuinely takes off, offers its own possibilities for live performance. “It’s difficult to see what the pathway is; I suspect it’ll be a mix of many different things,” she added.So how long until we’re watching Ibsen or Shakespeare in augmented reality at our kitchen tables? Coffey laughed, then cautioned that designing successful A.R. performances was still an emerging skill. “But some day it’ll happen, I have no doubt,” he said.All Kinds of LimboStreaming through Jan. 30; allkindsoflimbo.com. More

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      Antony Sher, Actor Acclaimed for His Versatility, Dies at 72

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      In his long career, most of it with the Royal Shakespeare Company, he played everyone from King Lear to Primo Levi to Ringo Starr.Antony Sher, an actor known for his masterly interpretations of Shakespeare’s great characters and for his versatility, died on Thursday at his home in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. He was 72.The cause was cancer, said the Royal Shakespeare Company, with which Mr. Sher had been closely associated for more than four decades. Gregory Doran, the company’s artistic director and Mr. Sher’s husband, had announced in September that he would take compassionate leave to care for Mr. Sher.Mr. Sher was 32 when he first attracted notice as an actor, playing the leading role of a libidinous, manipulative lecturer in a 1981 BBC adaptation of Malcolm Bradbury’s novel “The History Man.” He joined the Royal Shakespeare Company the next year.His breakthrough came in 1984, in the title role of Shakespeare’s “Richard III.” He performed on crutches, which he used as an extension of Richard’s contorted physique and psyche to evoke Shakespeare’s description of the character as “a bottled spider.”In The Times of London, Sheridan Morley described his portrayal as “the only one in our lifetime to have challenged the 40-year memory of Olivier in that role.” Other critics agreed that it was a career-making performance. “In this unabashed attempt at incarnating evil, Mr. Sher is monstrously convincing,” Mel Gussow wrote in The New York Times.In 1985 he won an Olivier Award both for his performance as Richard and for his subsequent role as a drag queen in Harvey Fierstein’s “Torch Song Trilogy.” In his acceptance speech, he said he was happy “to be the first actor to win an award for playing both a king and a queen.”Mr. Sher went on to play numerous great Shakespearean roles, including Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice” (1987), Leontes in “The Winter’s Tale” (1999), Iago in “Othello” (2004), Prospero in “The Tempest” (2008), Falstaff in “Henry IV,” Parts One and Two (2014), and the title roles in “Titus Andronicus” (1994), “Macbeth” (1999) and “King Lear” (2016).“The voice alone is rich, roaring music,” Charles Isherwood wrote in a 2014 New York Times review of “Henry IV,” adding that “Mr. Sher manages to make Shakespeare’s often arcane language sound as familiar as the slang you’d hear on the streets today.”In 1987, when playing Shylock, Mr. Sher noticed “a handsome chap playing Solanio,” he later recalled, “so I asked the director who he was.” It was Mr. Doran, who would become his partner and, in 2015, his husband.After a tense first collaboration, when Mr. Doran directed Mr. Sher in the title role of “Titus Andronicus,” a production they took to Mr. Sher’s native South Africa in 1995, they determined that they wouldn’t discuss work at home. (They went on to work together extensively, but not exclusively.)In addition to Mr. Doran, Mr. Sher’s survivors include two brothers, Joel and Randall.Mr. Sher’s dramatic range was extensive. He won rave reviews for his performances in “Cyrano de Bergerac” and Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” both directed by Mr. Doran. He played Arturo Ui in Brecht’s “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui” and Joseph K in an adaptation of Kafka’s “The Trial,” and he won his second Olivier Award in 1997 for his portrayal of the painter Stanley Spencer in Pam Gem’s “Stanley.” He was awarded a knighthood for services to the theater in 2000.Mr. Sher won his second Olivier Award for his portrayal of the painter Stanley Spencer in Pam Gem’s “Stanley.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMr. Sher was also a prolific writer and an accomplished artist. He published an autobiography, “Beside Myself,” in 2001, as well as four novels, two plays and three theater diaries, illustrated with his sketches and paintings.In many of his books he described his connection to, and ambivalence about, South Africa. “Home. Love. Hate,” he wrote in his autobiography. “A triangle, a difficult equation, it’s always there for me.”In 2004 he wrote and starred in “Primo,” an adaptation of “If This Is a Man,” Primo Levi’s unsparing 1947 account of daily life in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Writing about the 2005 Broadway production, Ben Brantley of The Times said that Mr. Sher “creates a portrait in which brutal memory penetrates the very marrow of one man’s existence.”Mr. Sher in the 2005 Broadway production of “Primo,” based on Primo Levi’s 1947 Holocaust memoir, “If This Is a Man.”Ivan KynclHe frequently spoke of being drawn to playing outsiders and misfits. “I was a white Jewish South African and I didn’t feel like I belonged in the classical British theater,” he said in an interview with The Times before the premiere of John Kani’s “Kunene and the King” in 2019. “I always felt a bit like an interloper.”In what was to be his last role, he played a terminally ill South African actor preparing to play King Lear. In the interview, he said that he had tried to leave his South African identity behind when he moved to Britain, but that he could now celebrate the way his life “had come full circle.”Mr. Sher with John Kani in “Kunene and the King,” written by Mr. Kani, in 2019. In what turned out to be his last role, Mr. Sher played a terminally ill South African actor.Ellie KurttzAntony Sher was born in Cape Town on June 14, 1949, the third of four children of Emmanuel Sher, an importer of animal hides, and Margery (Abramowitz) Sher, who ran the house. “Her role in life was of commander in chief, and that often meant battle conditions,” Mr. Sher wrote of their life in Sea Point, the middle-class white suburb where he grew up.Although his grandparents were Lithuanian Jews who had fled pogroms in Europe, Mr. Sher said he had little sense growing up that they were living amid similarly oppressive conditions for Black people in apartheid South Africa. “My family was typical of white families at the time, almost ignorant about apartheid, which sounds impossible but true,” he said in 2019. “I became politicized much later in England.”Short, slight and bespectacled, Mr. Sher never felt he fit in at the sports-mad boys’ school he attended. Sent by his mother to elocution classes, he was introduced to the plays of John Osborne, Harold Pinter and Arnold Wesker. By 16, he had decided to go to drama school in London.First however, he had to do nine months of national army service, obligatory for all white men in South Africa. Although it was a traumatic experience, he wrote in his autobiography that he later came to regard it as “a kind of research trip” for playing Macbeth, Richard III, Cyrano and others.In 1968, Mr. Sher flew to London with his parents and auditioned for both the Central School of Speech and Drama and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. Both turned him down. The Royal Academy’s letter, he recalled, was particularly wounding. “We strongly urge you to seek a different career,” it said.He found a place at the Webber Douglas Academy, where his teachers included Steven Berkoff, then performed with the theater group Gay Sweatshop before landing the role of Ringo Starr in Willy Russell’s Beatles musical “John, Paul, George, Ringo … and Bert,” which transferred to the West End. During the run of the show, Mr. Sher met Jim Hooper, a fellow actor, with whom he would live for the next 18 years.It took Mr. Sher a long time to admit openly that he was gay; he had two relationships with women after drama school and a brief marriage before publicly acknowledging his homosexuality in 1989. Rather disappointingly, he wrote, that revelation “made no impact whatsoever.”He also tried hard, early on, to shed any traces of a South African identity, telling people he was British. “It wasn’t just that I was ashamed of apartheid,” he wrote. “I was also ashamed of coming from a cultural wasteland. How could you become a famous actor if you were a white South African?”After “The History Man,” Mr. Sher appeared in a handful of films, including “Mrs. Brown” and “Shakespeare in Love,” but his career remained firmly anchored in the theater. He overcame a cocaine addiction in the mid-1990s and later remarked that he had been able to use that experience in playing Falstaff.“For an actor,” he said, “nothing is wasted.” More

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      U.K. Theatergoers Cover Up Again, After Months Without Masks

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      Since England’s theaters reopened without restrictions in July, one thing has been as notable as the action onstage: the lack of masks in the audience.Unlike in Broadway theaters, patrons here have not been required to wear face coverings, and many attendees have chosen to ignore preshow announcements encouraging them to mask up.Several visiting theater critics have been left aghast. Laura Collins-Hughes, writing in The New York Times in September, said that at “nearly every production I saw, there were loads — sometimes a majority — of barefaced people in the crowd, which felt reckless and delusional.”Peter Marks, writing in The Washington Post in November, called London’s theaters “consistently shocking these days.” That had nothing to do with the action onstage, he added; it was entirely down to the absence of masks.Now, that image may be about to change. On Saturday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson made masks mandatory in stores and on public transportation in England, responding to the newly discovered Omicron variant of the coronavirus.He did not make them mandatory in theaters, but several venues have now done so voluntarily. On Monday, the Royal Shakespeare Company said face coverings would be required at its theaters in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, unless an attendee is under age 12 or has a medical exemption.“We want to do all we can to ensure that we do not have to cancel performances and disappoint our audiences,” the company’s executive director, Catherine Mallyon, said in a news release.Other theaters quickly followed. On Monday, Andrew Lloyd Webber, the composer and theater impresario, quietly strengthened rules for the six theaters he owns in the West End. His company website was updated to say, “All audience members must wear a face covering throughout their visit, except when eating and drinking, or if they are medically exempt.” Previously, those theaters requested masks, but did not require them.On Tuesday, the National Theater, the Royal Opera House, the English National Opera and the Old Vic also said they would make masks mandatory.The rules might only last a few weeks. The National Theater’s website says the measure will be in place until Dec. 19, “when the next government review of Covid measures is due.”So far, there appears to be little resistance to the changes. Kate Evans, a spokeswoman for the Royal Shakespeare Company, said 45 people had asked for refunds or to exchange their tickets for vouchers to see a future show since the mandate was announced, out of 6,000 who had booked to see its current show, “The Magician’s Elephant.”“The majority of feedback we’ve received around the decision has been very positive,” she said. More

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      Setting the Stage Once Again for Shakespeare, and Live Theater

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      With coronavirus restrictions easing in England, several venues have plans to give classic plays new life.LONDON — Shakespeare is coming back, and I can’t be the only person who has missed him.There are signs of renewed activity at Shakespeare’s Globe, and talk of at least one star-studded production that is, after many delays, scheduled to be performed — can you believe it? — live. This comes after a year of a pandemic that has affected in various ways what has, and hasn’t, been staged, with Shakespeare a particular casualty.Understandably so. Amid a theatrical state of affairs dominated by Zoom and a brief return of live performances of small-scale shows in London that came to an abrupt halt in mid-December, the logistics of Shakespeare have seemed pretty daunting. How do you accommodate a writer whose capacious narratives depend on size, scope and dimension in these strange, socially distanced times? It’s far easier to return to the two-character environs of, say, “Love Letters” or “The Last Five Years,” to name just two titles that could be (and were) easily married to coronavirus rules.A lining of sorts to this bleak cloud came in the form of theatrical archives. With playhouses less inclined to revive Shakespeare, recordings of past productions were made available, giving theater fans a new chance to see or revisit notable performances. Shakespeare’s Globe, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theater were among the venues in Britain that drew upon a sizable back catalog. The Globe reported an increase of nearly 500 percent in its video-on-demand GlobePlayer service.What better chance was there to be reacquainted with the National’s thrilling 2018 production of “Antony and Cleopatra,” which remains among the few productions of this play in my experience with an Antony, in Ralph Fiennes, worthy of his Cleopatra, the sinuous Sophie Okonedo. The R.S.C.’s extensive archive offered up a 2015 “Othello” that, in a first for that company, cast a Black actor, Lucian Msamati, as Iago, opposite Hugh Quarshie as Othello; the result was both riveting and revelatory.The actress Rebecca Hall, right, rehearsing opposite Luisa Omielan for an online presentation of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” directed by Hall’s half sister, Jenny Caron Hall.But it wasn’t until the start of this year that theatermakers appeared to find a way to present Shakespeare afresh, even if the same few titles seemed to be under consideration. (My visions of numerous anxious Hamlets subjecting their best “To be or not to be” to the vagaries of YouTube went unrealized.) Sam Tutty, who won an Olivier Award for the West End production of “Dear Evan Hansen,” widened his range in a newly conceived “Romeo and Juliet” that was streamed online in February. In accordance with pandemic-era requirements, the play was filmed with the actors in isolation for the most part, then joined up in the editing. For all its best intentions, this approach just couldn’t deliver the reactive thrill that comes from performers sharing a scene in real time and space.The Royal Shakespeare Company offered the tech-intensive “Dream,” which filleted the multiple plot strands of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” into a brief if ambitious exercise in interactivity that was arresting to look at but didn’t reveal much about the oft-revived play itself. The result may have suggested new ways of looking at Shakespeare, but it didn’t help us hear him anew.A direct contrast was the rehearsed reading this past Wednesday of the same play, directed by Jenny Caron Hall, whose father, Peter Hall, founded the Royal Shakespeare Company and was Laurence Olivier’s successor running the National Theater. As might be expected from such a lineage, Jenny Hall’s emphasis on her starry reading of the play via Zoom lay very much with the text, which looked to be in safe hands at a rehearsal I eavesdropped on the previous week: It helped, of course, to have doubling as Titania and Hippolyta the supremely accomplished Rebecca Hall, Jenny Hall’s younger half sister, who brought clarity and a welcome playfulness to some of Shakespeare’s most ravishing verse. (Rebecca Hall played Viola in her father’s final production for the National, a mortality-inflected “Twelfth Night,” in 2011.)Jessie Buckley and Josh O’Connor as the young lovers in a coming screen version of “Romeo and Juliet.” Behind them is Lucian Msamati as Friar Laurence.Rob YoungsonLooking ahead, audiences have every reason to anticipate a marriage of sumptuous visuals and textual expertise from a new screen version of “Romeo and Juliet.” For this heavily cut rendering of the play, Simon Godwin, the director of the National’s “Antony and Cleopatra,” is refashioning on film a production that had been intended for the National stage. The change means that the leads, Josh O’Connor and Jessie Buckley, will be joined by a heady lineup that includes Tamsin Greig, Adrian Lester, Deborah Findlay and Msamati — deft Shakespeareans all. (This “Romeo and Juliet” will air on Sky Arts in Britain and PBS in the United States.)As for breathing the same air as the actors, even through a mask, that enticement draws nearer daily. Shakespeare’s Globe has announced a mid-May reopening, albeit with a capacity of up to only 500 in a popular auditorium that can hold as many as 1,700. The coveted standing places that allow the so-called Globe groundlings to jostle one another, and on occasion the actors, will be replaced by seats; a lack of intermissions will further limit unwanted contact. The idea is to return to normal practice, assuming restrictions ease as the summer season continues.Not to be outdone, the West End’s most recent Lear, Ian McKellen, is opening his deliberately age-blind Hamlet in a repertory season that will include “The Cherry Orchard” and is due to start at the Theater Royal Windsor, west of London, on June 21.That’s the very day long earmarked as the end to the social restrictions in England that have been in place to varying degrees since March 2020.Will these productions go ahead, returning actors and spectators alike to the mutual discourse and interplay upon which the theater thrives and that no degree of technical finesse or Zoom-era sophistication can replace? As ever, time will tell. But the London theater seems poised for action, and the readiness, as Shakespeare knew so well, is all. More

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      Review: Living the ‘Dream,’ on Your Laptop or Phone

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      Gorgeous but thin, this half-hour experiment from the Royal Shakespeare Company turns Puck into an avatar and “theatergoers” into fireflies.Do you know of a site where the wild thyme blows? You do now.“Dream,” an interactive experience from the Royal Shakespeare Company, which runs through Saturday and lasts about as long as a power nap, transports its thousands of viewers to a sylvan grove, then to a rehearsal space in Portsmouth, England, for a live Q&A. Tickets are free, though those who prefer a lightly interactive experience can purchase seats for 10 British pounds (about $14) and appear onscreen as fireflies.Inspired by Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” — in the wispiest, most gossamer way imaginable — “Dream” signifies a bounding leap forward for theater technology and a short jog in place for theater itself.A different “Dream” was meant to open in Stratford-upon-Avon about a year ago, as a showcase for Audience of the Future, a consortium of institutions and tech innovators assembled in 2019 and tasked with exploring new ways to make and deliver theater remotely. (Theater on your phone? They saw it first.) The 2020 “Dream” would have played to both a live audience and a remote one, integrating actors, projections and live motion-capture into a verdant whole.Jamie Morgan as Peaseblossom, a character rendered as sticks and flowers.Stuart MartinBut in-person audiences are rare these days, and this remote “Dream,” however gorgeous — and it is gorgeous, enormously gorgeous — feels thinner for it, less a forest of imagination and more a small copse of some really lovingly rendered trees. It begins with Puck (E.M. Williams), that merry wanderer of the night, imagined here as an assemblage of pebbles in the approximate shape of a human body. Why render Puck — nimble, fleet and girdling the earth in the time it takes most of us to load the dishwasher — as a pile of rocks? Dunno. Looks cool.In traveling around the forest, Puck encounters Shakespeare’s other fairies, like Moth (an accumulation of moths), Peaseblossom (sticks and flowers) and Cobweb (an eyeball inside a squirrel’s drey). Apparently, Puck also met Mustardseed (more sticks?). I missed it. And the singer Nick Cave contributed some voice acting! I missed that, too.“Dream,” performed live, is exquisite, denatured and almost entirely contentless. It isn’t quite theater, and it isn’t precisely film, though it could pass for a highbrow “Avatar” short. For stretches, it resembles a meditative video game, but it isn’t that either, mostly because the interactive elements (clicking and dragging fireflies around the landscape) are wholly inconsequential.Those who purchase tickets are represented onscreen as fireflies.Paul MumfordWatching it, I felt inexplicably cranky, like a toddler who has been offered a variety of perfectly nice snacks but doesn’t want any of them. Because maybe what the toddler really wants is to safely see an actual play in an actual theater with an actual audience. And that just isn’t available right now.So I don’t really know what to say about “Dream.” Because it represents an obviously fruitful and seemingly happy collaboration among top-of-their-game actors, directors, designers, composers and technicians, many of whom assumed some physical risk in the making of it. (Among them are Robin McNicholas, credited with direction and narrative development; Pippa Hill, credited with script creation and narrative development; and Esa-Pekka Salonen, the production’s music director and co-composer.) It also signals real progress in the use of live motion-capture (something the Royal Shakespeare Company has already experimented with) and offers a tantalizing glimpse of how that technology might be used when proper in-person theater returns.But this isn’t proper theater. Or even improper theater. It’s a sophisticated demonstration of an emergent technology. Shakespeare is the pretext, not the point. The pentameter, pushed into random virtual mouths, helps us better appreciate the software architecture — which is great if you like software and less great if you like the language itself, or the original play’s plot or characters or keen insights into our big, dumb, desiring hearts. This “Dream” is beautiful. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all wake up now?DreamThrough March 20; dream.online More

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      ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ Sprinkled With High-Tech Fairy Dust

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ Sprinkled With High-Tech Fairy DustA new online production from the Royal Shakespeare Company uses motion-capture and video game technology to create a virtual world.E.M. Williams performing in a motion-capture suit as Puck, in rehearsal for “Dream,” which will be performed live and streamed online starting Friday.Credit…Stuart Martin/Royal Shakespeare CompanyMarch 12, 2021, 7:29 a.m. ET“A Midsummer Night’s Dream” may be one of Shakespeare’s most performed plays — but its latest version from the Royal Shakespeare Company will be unlike any seen before. Titled “Dream,” the 50-minute streamed production fuses live performance with motion-capture technology, 3-D graphics, and interactive gaming techniques that let the audience remotely guide Puck through a virtual forest.As live theater sprinkled with some seriously high-tech fairy dust, “Dream” promises to bring “a most rare vision” of the play to our screens, to borrow a line from Shakespeare. It will be available to watch online once a day at various times from Friday through March 20.“It’s part of our ongoing engagement with this brave new world,” said Gregory Doran, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s artistic director. In 2016, the theater’s production of “The Tempest” used live motion-capture technology to create a 3-D digital avatar that was projected above the stage.The difference this time is that everything in the play — the performers and their surroundings — will be rendered virtually.A cast of seven will perform in a specially built studio in Portsmouth, southern England, wearing Lycra motion-capture suits outfitted with sensors. They will be surrounded by a 360-degree camera rig, made up of 47 cameras, with every movement almost instantaneously rendered by digital avatars, which are relayed to viewers via the stream. These magical figures move seamlessly through a computer-generated woodland, and the action is narrated in husky tones by the Australian singer-songwriter Nick Cave as the forest’s voice.For audiences watching at home, the virtual fairies moving through a digital forest will look more like a video game or a CGI blockbuster than your average Royal Shakespeare Company show. But the performances are delivered live and in real time. Every night’s performance will be unique.With its abridged running time and a much-reduced cast of characters, “Dream” is not a full-scale production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”; rather, it is a narrative inspired by it, focusing on Puck and the fairies. But don’t expect any cute digital wings: These are elemental, mysterious forces of nature.Naomi Gibbs, left, and Alex Counsell, right, fine-tune E.M. Williams’s motion-capture sensors.Credit…Stuart Martin/Royal Shakespeare CompanyThe arts collective Marshmallow Laser Feast, which works with virtual, mixed and augmented reality, has created digital avatars for the actors so they look sprung from the natural world. Puck is formed of pebbles and stones, while Titania’s fairies are made up of moth wings, cobwebs, earth or roots. The fairies are shape-shifters that coalesce into recognizable human and animal forms onscreen, and grow or shrink so that they are small enough to “creep into acorn-cups,” as Puck puts it.“It’s a form of puppetry,” said the Royal Shakespeare Company’s director of digital development, Sarah Ellis. “Those avatars come alive when they breathe, and how they breathe is through the live actor.”The software that drives the performance, called Unreal Engine, is used across the video games industry and is behind popular titles like “Gears of War” and “Fortnite.” Since 2013, the company that developed it, Epic Games, has been branching out to create interactive 3-D content with the tool for film and TV, and, increasingly, for live events such as music festivals, museum exhibitions and theater productions.Layering the tech with live performance, and relaying it instantly via a web player to thousands of devices, is an experiment for both Epic Games and the Royal Shakespeare Company. And then there’s the interactive component.Up to 2,000 audience members for each performance can become part of the show, and will be invited to guide Puck through the forest. Onscreen, the chosen spectators will appear as a cloud of tiny fireflies: By using their mouse, trackpad or finger on the screen of a smart device, they will be able to move their firefly around the screen, and Puck will follow their lead through the virtual space.“Without the fireflies — the audience — Puck wouldn’t be going anywhere,” said E.M. Williams, who plays the role. “The audience are very much the fuel, the energy, of the show.”Steve Keeley operating the technical platform in rehearsal.Credit…Stuart Martin/Royal Shakespeare CompanyIn a traditional stage production, the “tech” rehearsals come last, after weeks of work by the actors on character and narrative. For “Dream,” the process began with fittings for the motion-capture suits, so the players could calibrate their movements. Their digital avatars were refected on giant LED screens around the studio to orient the performers within the virtual environment.“It looks so 3-D, like it’s coming out the screen sometimes,” Williams said of the computer-generated forest. “There are times when if I touch it, I expect to feel it. It’s thinning the veil between the technological world and the real world.”The Royal Shakespeare Company has long been seen as a bastion of traditional British theater: reverent toward text and verse, powered by great actors. Did the company anticipate any resistance to its high-tech, experimental approach? Several reviewers said its motion-capture “Tempest” was gimmicky.“There’ll be some criticism, of course,” said Doran, the company’s artistic director. But, he added, he hoped “Dream” could speak to a traditional theater audience, as well as viewers drawn in by the technology.Besides, the genius of Shakespeare means his plays can take whatever new inventions are thrown at them. “It’s the same as an experimental production of any of these plays,” Doran said. “Shakespeare is robust: He’ll still be there.”DreamPresented online by the Royal Shakespeare Company, March 12-20; dream.online.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More