The Roared-at Boys? Repertory casting and gender politics in the RSC's 2014 Swan season

Abstract

1The Roared-at Boys? Repertory casting and gender politics in the RSC's 2014 Swan season From its initial announcement, the Royal Shakespeare Company's 2014 "Roaring Girls" season began coding the terms of its reception. The company's brochure announced that In 2014, the Swan Theatre plays host to a season that reveals some of the great parts written for, and plays about, women by Shakespeare's contemporaries. Led by RSC Deputy Artistic Director Erica Whyman, and directed by some of British theatre's most exciting female directors, the season promises to introduce audiences to Jacobean classics, from the comic to the thrillingly dark, each with women at the heart of the action ("Summer 14").The reception of the company's new productions of the blackly comic (and Elizabethan rather than Jacobean) domestic tragedy Arden of Faversham, Middleton and Dekker's city comedy The Roaring Girl and Webster's sex tragedy The White Devil was, in the above terms, already loaded. Viewed within Susan Bennett's model, in which "the production company seeks to produce an internal horizon of expectations which will attract audiences through challenging their own already formed expectations/assumptions about a particular play or theatrical style" (113), the RSC established a horizon of expectations based on the alignment of plays "written for" and "about" women, "directed by … exciting female directors" and that place "women at the heart of the action".1 Particularly in contrast to the work of the main house, whose summer season staged plays nominally about "King Henry" and "Two Gentlemen", the Roaring GirlsThe Oxford English Dictionary defines "roaring" thus:Of a person: behaving or living in a rowdy, boisterous, or unruly manner. Now rare (arch. in later use). (3a)

Artist Development and Collective Therapy in the Repertory

“…I have elsewhere argued for the value of Marvin Carlson's model of 'ghosting' for understanding repertory casting processes where the meanings accrued by actors' bodies across multiple roles allow for cumulative as well as independent interpretation. 12 Carlson argues that 'The recycled body of an actor, already a complex bearer of semiotic messages, will almost inevitably in a new role evoke the ghost or ghosts of previous roles', a quality that Hester Lees-Jeffries applies to the RSC Histories Cycle of 2006-8. 13 The coherence of an integrated repertory season and cast -as opposed to Carlson's focus, the legacy of an actor's previous roles -means that audiences 'are now sometimes very definitely meant to remember where they last saw that actor', an expectation Lees-Jeffries associates with early modern repertory practice.…”