Platform Papers > Issue 13: Cross-Racial Casting

Cross-Racial Casting:
Changing the Face of Australian Theatre

by Lee Lewis

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Paperback. $13.95 rrp. Publication July 2007

ISBN 978 0 9802802 1 0, Series ISSN 1449-583-X

Mainstream theatre in Australia is very white. Too white. Why are we falling behind the rest of the theatrical world in seeing complex diverse casts onstage in our major theatre companies? When you ask this question of theatre practitioners, an awful discourse of blame begins: agents blame casting directors, drama schools blame ‘the industry’, everyone blames artistic directors. Talking about racism in Australia is difficult in the climate of indignant denial. Our vocabulary and strategies for discussing it publicly have become inadequate.

This essay argues that aggressive cross-racial casting of the classical repertoire is a strategy for subverting the ‘inevitability’ of white-centric theatre. It is an important step in the necessary transformation of mainstream theatre into a profession fully engaged with the perplexities of representing Australia on stage and screen. It offers a practical contribution to the re-imaging of the national identity. Restricting cross-racial casting to marginal roles, as so often seen, is an unwitting management strategy akin to the marginalisation of ethnic groups. Without a comprehensive policy of diverse casting the main-stage theatres and their directors are being silently complicit in realising a future of Whiteness and exclusion.

LEE LEWIS has worked as an actor and director on and off Broadway and in Sydney, and is well-known as a director of tough contemporary theatre. In 2007 she directed Daniel Keene’s The Nightwatchman at the Stables Theatre and Love-Lies-Bleeding by Don De Lillo for the Sydney Theatre Company.

This issue also includes responses to Richard Harris.

Platform Papers invites considered responses to Lee Lewis for publication in the October edition.