'Take a woman like you, to get through to the man in me' ... Dylan in New York and Blanchett in Cannes. Photographs: Jeff Christensen/AP
The times they are a-changin'. Cate Blanchett, we read from Cannes, is one of a number of actors scheduled to play Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes's forthcoming biopic, writes Michael Billington. If one raises one's eyebrows, it is not at the idea of a woman playing a man. There's a long cinematic tradition of gender-swapping, dating from Garbo happily donning male attire in Queen Christina and Katharine Hepburn masquerading as a boy in Sylvia Scarlett to Hilary Swank in Boys Don't Cry. The only surprise stems from the fact that Blanchett, a statuesque Australian, seems to have little in common physically with the scrawny songster from Duluth.
The whole issue of gender-transformation is a sensitive one. I must come clean and say that I don't share the Guardian's rejection of the term "actress": I think it denotes a valuable historical distinction between male and female performers. But there is little doubt that we live in an age when people refuse to be classified by gender and when actors leap lightly over the sexual barriers. Men - from Mark Rylance as Cleopatra to Ian McKellen as Widow Twankey - clearly love playing women. So why shouldn't women have a comparable freedom to play men?
In the classical theatre, this has yielded striking results. Frances de la Tour and Germany's Angela Winkler have both played Hamlet, which is a role that virtually transcends gender. Fiona Shaw as Richard II suggested that the character's arrested emotional development was more important than his sexuality. And Kathryn Hunter brilliantly used her androgynous stage presence and dry, sandpaper voice to play King Lear. The great Shakespearean roles are now, quite rightly, available to women as well as men.
It is modern drama that poses more difficult questions. The Beckett estate recently tried, ineffectually, to ban an all-female Italian Waiting For Godot; but there seems little reason why Beckett's existential despair should not be embodied by women. Recently, however, I had the unhappy experience of seeing Osborne's Look Back In Anger re-written and transposed into female terms as Lie Back In Anger: for a variety of reasons, it made no sense. And I suspect there are certain roles in the modern canon that are gender-specific: I can't say my soul aches to see the first female Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman or Big Daddy in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof.
I'm happy, however, to keep my options open on Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan. Maybe Todd Haynes thinks that Blanchett has a radical spirit that coincides with Dylan's. Maybe Blanchett can express Dylan's female side. Maybe she can sing. Who knows? What is clear, however, is that gender is now negotiable. Hollywood was virtually constructed on the old Victorian principle, much mocked by Bernard Shaw, of the "manly man" and the "womanly woman." And, even if relics of that attitude remain, today talent matters more than gender. Which is exactly as it should be.
