When MacDuff Was African
August 21, 2018
FROM the unpublished writings of the late Lawrence Auster:
Before multiculturalism, [non-traditional theater] casting had been practiced in a modest and unobtrusive way for decades. The first Shakespeare play I ever saw on stage was a production of Macbeth at the Young Men’s Hebrew Association in Elizabeth, New Jersey, around 1960. Playing the part of Macduff was a Negro actor with a wonderful deep voice, whose thrilling delivery of the play’s climactic speech,
Despair thy charm,
And let the angel whom thou still has served
Tell thee, Macduff was from his mother’s womb
untimely RIPPED
made a great impression on me. The actor’s race, while certainly introducing an exotic element into the play, was not disruptive in the slightest. I have had the same experience at other performances of classic stage plays by Shakespeare, Shaw and Wilde that have featured black actors playing the parts of Englishmen.
[However,] in matters of cultural identity, numbers are of key importance. Just as a small number of minorities can fit into a society without altering its basic identity, one or two nonwhite actors can fit into a classic Western play without changing the play’s essential character and spirit.
But when, as in the systematic multiracial casting of the 1980s and 1990s, a large number of the parts in both classic and modern dramas are played by black, Hispanic, and Asian actors, the theatrical experience changes in a deeply unsettling manner. The practice of racially diverse casting was carried to an absurd extreme in Kenneth Branagh’s 1997 Hamlet. As portrayed in the film, the Royal Danish court of Claudius and Gertrude was populated with so many blacks, Asians and Middle Easterners that it resembled the multispecies crew of a Star Trek spin-off. The presence on stage or screen of physical and racial types who are so conspicuously different, not only from the written characters they are portraying, but from each other, diverts attention from the substance of the play to the race of the performers, as well as to the aggressive message that is being promulgated about racial diversity and the overturning of “stereotypes.” A person who cares about the Anglo American theatrical tradition becomes aware that that tradition is being deliberately misshapen into something strange and unnatural before his eyes.
Perhaps more definitively than any other contemporary racial practice, nontraditional theater casting demonstrates that people of different races and physical types are not interchangeable. Cultures are not composed only of universal abstract ideas. Cultures are embodied in particular forms. Each cultures has its own aesthetic soul. The aesthetic soul of Anglo American culture cannot be represented by Asians and Meztizos and Arabs and Africans (though an occasional Asian or Meztizo or African can successfully fit in), any more than the aesthetic soul of African or Asian cultures could be represented by white Europeans.
