A new production of George Bernard Shaw’s 1923 play Saint Joan is running at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow, United Kingdom, between 14 February and 21 March. It is directed by Tony Award-winning theatre director Stewart Laing.
However, it is not that choice in personnel that has raised some eyebrows. Rather, it is the casting of Mandipa Kabana in the titular role of Joan of Arc. Yet again, a historically white role has been chosen to be played by a person of colour.
This is the more ‘offensive’ variety of the dreaded race-swapping trend: Joan of Arc was a real historical figure, as opposed to a fictional character traditionally portrayed as white, as we saw in the recent case of Helen of Troy in Christopher Nolan’s upcoming Odyssey movie.
As for another example, from the British theatre scene this time, in the spring of 2024, the role of Juliet in a West End production of the Shakespearean drama Romeo and Juliet was also played by a black actress named Francesca Amewudah-Rivers.
The real Joan of Arc, also known as Saint Joan or the Maid of Orléans, was a peasant girl in 15th-century France. At age 17, she led French troops that broke the British siege of Orléans during the 100 Years’ War. She believed herself to be guided by divine voices, which today are speculated to be auditory hallucinations caused by mental illness. Evidently, being a peasant girl in rural medieval France, she was white.
Other white historical figures who have been portrayed by actors of colour in recent major Western productions include Cleopatra, Isaac Newton, and Anne Boleyn.
Director Stewart Laing has spoken to the Scottish paper The National about his choice of casting Kabana as Joan of Arc, saying: ‘I think that young people do look at the men in power and they’re shocked at the state of politics, and so they do act to change things’, and therefore, he wanted to pick someone close to the historical figure’s actual age.
He did not feel the same obligation to stay true to the historical figure’s race, however, for reasons he never articulated.
Recently, the British public broadcaster BBC conducted an internal review, which found that ahistorical race-swapping in television series is very unpopular with audiences, including among people of colour.
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