Reviewing Herbert Beerbohm Tree playing Falstaff in 1896, George Bernard Shaw was not at all impressed. “Mr Tree wants one thing to make him an excellent Falstaff, and that is to get born over again as unlike himself as possible.” He added: “Mr Tree might as well try to play Juliet.”
I think we can safely say that Shaw thought that Tree was badly miscast as Falstaff. But actor-manager Tree only had himself to blame for the casting, just as Sarah Bernhardt did when she decided that she could play the 18-year-old Joan of Arc when she was 70.
Miscast modern actors might rather look to blame the casting director, or the director if they end up in a role in a production looking uncomfortable at best and incompetent and silly at worst. After all, the actor may actually be perfectly decent and might have excelled in another role, or a different production of the same play by a better or more experienced director.
There are famous examples of misconceived performances in misconceived productions, from Peter O’ Toole in Macbeth to Nigel Hawthorne in King Lear. Glenn Close as Blanche Dubois in Trevor Nunn’s revival of Streetcar at the NT in 2002 was generally felt to be a serious mistake in the Herbert Tree manner, but not by our own Michael Billington, who admired Close’s risk-taking.
I’d put Jemma Redgrave’s recent casting as Mrs Cheverley in An Ideal Husband at Chichester in the mistake category, not because she can’t act but because she just wasn’t right for that particular role in that particular revival. It’s often celebrity (think Madonna in Up for Grabs in the West End) casting or star names such as Redgrave’s that come a cropper, because it’s the name rather than the actor who is being cast. Although it’s not always a disaster waiting to happen. Lindsay Lohan emerged pretty unscathed from the West End revival of Speed-the-Plow while it was the much more widely respected Richard Schiff from the West Wing who came a cropper. Martin Freeman faced accusations of being miscast as Richard III at Trafalgar Studios earlier this year from some quarters, and Tom Hiddleston may have scooped an Evening Standard award for his Coriolanus at the Donmar, but not everyone thought he was perfect casting as the patrician warrior.
Casting or miscasting is very much in the eye of the beholder. In 1979, when Nicholas de Jongh described Steven Berkoff as “fatally miscast” in the role of Hamlet, Berkoff retorted: “Since Hamlet touches the complete alphabet of human experience, every actor feels he is born to play it. The bold extrovert will dazzle and play with the word power … The introvert will see every line pointed at him, the outsider, the loner, the watcher … So you cannot be miscast for Hamlet.”
But is that true? Tell us about the shows you’ve sat through and wondered whatever possessed those involved to cast that particular actor in that particular part.
