Wherefore art thou white?

Shakespeare casting invokes the hatred that proves how right it is

Bolton-born Diane Morgan is better known to her fans, of whom I am one (and cannot help but adopt a Manchester accent whilst writing this), as Philomena Cunk. She takes an off-the-wall position in her deep-dive reporting (as “cultural ambassador”), which is always tinged with a streak of rank ignorance, with which she plagues her highly qualified interviewees, whose prime challenge (aside from answering the question) is doing so without slapping her face.

Lovers of the theatre will enjoy her programme Philomena Cunk on Shakespeare, in which, besides the immortal observation that school was easier in Shakespeare’s time because they didn’t need to study Shakespeare, she questions a number of thespian experts on plays like Romeo and Juliet. First, she sketches out the story:

Soon, Romeo and Juliet are in love, even though they come from two different families. Which is how we know it isn’t set in Norfolk.

You get the flavour. Subsequently, she discusses the plot’s details with an expert scholar, and is surprised to hear Juliet’s age.

She’s thirteen years old?!

• That’s right. Yeah.

I’m not surprised the families are trying to split them up, then. I’d have rang the police.

Image: L’ultimo bacio dato a Giulietta da Romeo by Francesco Hayez (1823—detail).

The town of Bolton has meanwhile had its own problems with thirteen-year-old girls, and I doubt the Capulets and Mountebanks (Cunk gets the families’ names wrong as well) didn’t need to resort to ringing the police—such as there were any in Verona at that time. They just donned their knuckle-dusters and laid into whoever it was had caused their lip to curl on the day in question, whilst projecting their eminent manhoods through their lycra-stretch codpieces. If you were one of them, then ’twas into them that they would, i’sooth, lay.

Regardless of the form in which you view it, as a play or as the musical West Side Story, or indeed any of its multitude of other iterations, the fundamental precept of Romeo and Juliet is that entranced lovers see deep beyond outer appearances, whereby their love forms a union of the souls and disregards the outward, and that those who judge their love see only the appearances and get interminably riled at them.

Friends of mine have just had an application to cohabit refused by the Belgian courts on grounds that boil down to either (i) them not having enough doting photographs of each other on their mobile devices, (ii) their being of different nationalities or (iii) there being a wide numerical difference in their ages. Saying they love each other just doesn’t cut the mustard, clearly, and the Belgian authorities believe they detect some surreptitious plan to, as they put it instrumentalise the law. As if what the court’s decided weren’t instrumentalising the law to an absolute T.

They say Shakespeare is as relevant today as he was 400 years ago. When the Brussels Shakespeare Society’s Steve Challens directed the play in 2017, he framed the story in the modern context of rival drugs gangs. After all, it’s as likely a scenario for such a tale of jealousy and hatred as any, and the final scene of course is laced with potent potions and a fallen clergyman. Inspired, ’f’y’ask me.

There’s a new production, to be directed by Jamie Lloyd, at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London from 11 May to 3 August 2024 and it has already proved controversial for all the reasons that William Shakespeare wrote the play in the first place. The leads will be played by Tom Holland, who is white, and by Francesca Amewudah-Rivers, who will be performing her debut in the West End, and is black. And there are some anonymous trolls on the web who, in their high-dudgeoned superiority, deem that an insult to their intelligentsia.

If Romeo and Juliet is a play that sets cats among pigeons on the crassest of grounds and with the most horrendous of consequences, then the spirit of Shakespeare is as alive now in 2024 as it was in 1597, given how Miss Amewudah-Rivers has been subjected to the most outrageous barrage of online racial abuse as a result of this astonishing achievement in her young career. She needs no coaching in how to evoke the emotion memory that turns a stage depiction into a portrayal, but the 800-signature letter of support in reaction to the filthy slurs directed at her will spur her on, I am certain, to a performance that is worth going well out of one’s way to behold.

In the world of 2024, Romeo and Juliet is a perfect vehicle for highlighting the unfounded racial hatred that besets our own globe. The play is a tragedy of stage and screen, and the play’s message is a tragedy of humankind; how sad it is that the level of the online attack only speaks to the appropriateness of the casting.

Did Shakespeare write nothing but boring gibberish with no relevance to our modern world of Tinder and peri-peri fries, or does it just look, sound and feel that way?

It just looks, sounds and feels that way, Philomena. Break a leg. And I know whose.